Next time you write an email subject line, think twice about the words you’re using.
Loading your message with words such as “confirm,” “join,” “press,” or “invite” is not a good idea if you want a response, says data from Baydin, the makers of email plugin Boomerang.
Baydin recently extracted data from five million emails its users handled — either using the company’s “email game” or scheduled for later via Boomerang. It found that some subject-line words, such as “apply” and “opportunity,” got more responses than words from the aforementioned list.
Its data also suggests the best time to send emails is before work. Users who scheduled messages to read later, using Boomerang, most often wanted to deal with them around 6 a.m.
Already sending emails packed with “opportunity” at 6 a.m. and not getting a response? You’re in good company.
Baydin’s average email game player deleted about half of the 147 messages he or she received each day. Ninety minutes of the two hours he or she spent on email each day went to just 12 messages.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, chezzzers
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Even if you haven’t ever visited popular visual bookmarking site Pinterest, you might recognize its design elements — which have been popping up everywhere since the startup burst onto the mainstream scene in 2011.
The site doesn’t use traditional web building blocks.
“It’s almost like a window-shopping mode,” says Khoi Vinh, the former design director for NYTimes.com.
“It puts the ball back in the user’s court,” muses Andrew Beck, a web designer at Blue Fountain Media.
“It flattens the information hierarchy,” describes Jeff Croft, a web designer and co-founder of ebook lending site Lendle.
Pinterest puts web content into sticky-note sized blocks users can organize onto pinboards that fill the entire browser screen. The majority of each block is filled by a photo, and the ability to “like,” “repin” or comment at the bottom make it look like its own mini web page.
Though the hot Palo Alto startup is staying mum about its user numbers, one study found it drives more traffic to websites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.
SEE ALSO: 7 Tips for Planning a Wedding on Pinterest | Pinterest Becomes Top Traffic Driver for Retailers [INFOGRAPHIC]
As it has gained in popularity, so too has its unusual design.
Quora launched a new feature in December that incorporates a topic “boards.” In January, social video startup Chill.com redesigned the site to contain “bricks” of videos shared by the people who you follow, complete with social activity from other Chill users. And several content visualization projects such as Scrolldit, which launched in December, took on the Pinterest block-by-block content feel.
Pinterest didn’t invent the basic design structure, but it did help make it cool.
Most designers cite a layout plugin called jQuery Masonry while describing the look of Pinterest’s site. Launched in February of 2009 by designer David DeSandro, it makes it easy for web designers to create a vertical layout like that of Pinterest.
It also broke the system of organizing information online based on reverse chronology, as favored by Twitter and Facebook. Reverse chronology is a tired, overly-used system; as Vinh says, “I almost thought it was the default way to organize information on the web.”
Though many sites experimented with the jQuery Masonry layout, it didn’t immediately catch on with sites that were offering a service.
“The sites I saw before Pinterest that used this design were pretty much tech demos of how you could do this,” Croft says.
SEE ALSO: 15 of the Most Popular Pictures on Pinterest
Pinterest, as far as the designers Mashable spoke with could remember, was the first site to take the idea to mainstream success. It showed how the design could solve certain challenges eloquently and how the traditional reverse chronology layout could be broken without scaring users away. In fact, it was attracting them in invitation-only droves.
Consequently, the design caught on. Croft says that five clients in the last six months have mentioned Pinterest when discussing what they want their website designs to look like.
“At a pure level, there’s an advantage if you ave set of information that benefits from people accessing it in a non-linear fashion,” Vinh says of the layout. “For most people, they saw it on Pinterest and want to be almost as cool as Pinterest.”
A Quora “board.”
Chill.com after its December redesign.
1. Hands
Pinterest via Edris Kim.
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More About: design, pinterest, trending
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By now, you may have already checked to see what kind of person Google thinks you are (if you’re a female Mashable reporter, Google apparently assumes you’re a middle-aged man). Google’s new, unified privacy policy can show you that, as well as how much we pay for the free services that provide Google with that data.
Yes, Google+ and Gmail are all free, but we pay for those services in a currency of personal information. Privacy firm Reputation.com says your personal info could be worth anywhere from $50 to $5,000 per year to market researchers and advertisers.
Google says it doesn’t and won’t give advertisers your information; it uses your info to target what it estimates to be more relevant ads that it has already sold.
SEE ALSO: Google’s Privacy Update: What You Need to Know
Social networks, similarly, rely on users’ private information to make money too. “Their entire market cap is related to how much data is being collected and used,” Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, told SmartMoney.
In a young adult romance novel released Tuesday, a character named J.J. must decide to pursue one of three love interests. She picks up the phone and calls … well, that depends. In books from startup ebook publisher Coliloquy, readers can make choices that affect the way the rest of the story is told.
Depending on how the author has written the book, they can also reread scenes from a different character’s point of view, vote on an outcome or unlock new content as they read. Coliloquy, which is launching with four young adult fiction titles, uses the same technology that enables crossword Kindle apps to turn the idea of a book on its head — thereby giving readers an active role in the story.
“With the printing press, books were designed to not be customizable,” explains Colioquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford. “Now ereaders give us a way to reinvent different forms of narrative and storytelling.”
So far the applications of Coliloquy’s platform have been more subtle than a “choose your own adventure” story. In one of the startup’s novels, readers make small choices that don’t impact the overall storyline but unlock clues to a mystery. Another allows readers to spend more time getting to know the character they like best.
The possibilities for flexible text seem limitless. Rutherford says she imagines, for instance, a legal thriller in which the reader witnesses a scene that disappears from the text before he or she must provide an eyewitness account from memory.
If you want bells and whistles on your books, you don’t have to look very far. A startup called Booktrack is adding soundtracks to classic children’s novels while Kobo’s social reading app puts conversations right into book pages. But what Coliloquy is doing differs in that it expands the author’s storytelling ability rather than adding something flashy on top of their work without their involvement. As a writer and book lover, it’s one of the only ebook “innovations” that hasn’t somewhat offended me.
“Not every story is going to be told this way,” Rutherford says, “but there are lots of stories that can only be told this way. If we discover one gem that way…it’s something that we’re very passionate about.”
More About: coliloquy, ebooks, trending
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Jamie Beckland is a Digital and Social Media Strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.
Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.
The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else.
Marketers created that buy-in by bucketing people into generations. When you lump 78 million people into one group called “Baby Boomers,” it’s much easier to sell them stuff, especially when consumers accepted their generational classification.
But now, that entire system has broken down. The year that someone was born will not tell you how likely he is to buy your product.
Fragmentation is now the norm because the pace of change is accelerating. Generations have been getting smaller because there are fewer unifying characteristics of young people today than ever before:
With the recent rise of the social web, people self-select into groups so small, so fragmented, and so temporal, that no overarching top-down approach could be successful at driving marketing performance.
Marketers have responded by adding more demographic information to the mix, but even that is a losing battle. I worked with one client who was introducing a technology product, and had identified a target market of “connected consumers.” Connected consumers were 34-55, had a household income over $120k, and read technology publications regularly. This target market represented 14 million consumers.
They were targeting 14 million consumers to sell 50,000 units — that means they were hoping for 3.5 sales for every 1,000 people with whom they connected through their marketing.
What if, instead, you could get 500 sales from every 1,000 people you marketed to?
It’s possible through psychographic profiling. Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle. Amazon.com has long been a leader in this space, through innovations like “recommended products” and “users like me also bought.” Its algorithms have learned to predict its users, and what they are interested in. And now, there are a number of tools that any business can use to leverage psychographics.
Here’s how a psychographic profile might look different from a traditional marketing profile target for a childcare provider:
Psychographics provide much more useful information about users. There are multiple data sources making this possible today. Social profile data, behavioral data and customer lifecycle data can now finally be leveraged to contact people who are ready to buy.
Social Profile Data
Profile data from social networks consist of all the fields users grant permission for brands to use on their behalf. Most things that users track on social networks can be leveraged to create a closer relationship with a customer. Fields like relationship status, alma mater, interests and occupation can all be managed through social profile data management tools.
Social profile data is the critical cornerstone of psychographic insights. The level of nuance and insight provided by social data, when compared to standard demographics, is the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel or a butter knife. Previously unimaginable questions are now routine:
Are customers who kayak more likely to buy water shoes than those who canoe?Who is more likely to spend over $100 on an order: Seattle Seahawks fans or Seattle Mariners fans?Are your customers more likely to purchase when they move across the state or across the country?
In addition, companies such as GraphEffect are measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates. This type of qualitative analysis can move users into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with your brand.
Behavioral Data
Retargeting advertising messages is gaining popularity among marketers, but its very success has jeopardized its effectiveness. Ads that follow users around the web have been implemented — usually poorly. Every ad network quickly incorporated the ability to place cookies in users’ browsers, and display specific ads to them any time they visit a site that’s part of their networks.
The next generation of ad targeting will focus more on telling the customer a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers. That means ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a customer moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event.
Site content and product recommendations will also be informed by clickstream analysis. Companies such as RichRelevance, Certona, Baynote and Monetate all offer the ability to personalize information to specific visitors based on their behavior. Leveraging those alongside a payload of social profile data can turbocharge those services from the first moment a new user visits a site.
Customer Lifecycle Data
Social profile data can also be used to predict customer lifecycle. Imagine knowing not only if a customer has children, but the exact ages of those children. In addition, key indicator purchases, like buying diapers for the first time, indicate a customer entering a new lifecycle. Other key indicators, like shipping address changes, first purchases of furniture, or first purchases of substantially higher-value goods can all indicate the start of a new customer mentality and behavior pattern.
These patterns are predictable, so you know the future behavior of high school seniors by looking at the current behavior of college freshmen. By using demographics alone, all high school graduates would be marketed to identically. Using psychographics, we know who is likely to be interested in specific product or content recommendations at a specific time — such as when they actually start their first day of college.
This vision is starting to gain traction among serious marketers. At the 2009 Internet Strategy Forum, Xerox’s VP of Interactive Marketing, Duane Schulz, said that a 1% clickthrough rate was a huge failure — even though it is 10 times the industry average. In his mind, a successful campaign would never waste 99% of its impressions. Using psychographic data, you don’t have to waste any impressions.
We have seen a similar upheaval in marketing before. In the 1960s, marketers who embraced the power of television, broad-based insights into psychology and demographic data created world-class brands and billions of dollars in value. At that time, if you didn’t advertise on TV, you lost. Today’s new tools offer a similar choice: Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, porcorex
More About: advertising, business, data, demographics, MARKETING, social media, trending
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