Covid-19 Digital Playbook

With shelter-in-place (SIP) and a likely recession due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, now is the time to double down on digital marketing and sales!

With store closures, many retailers, such as Nike, are reporting Black Friday sales levels and conversion rates! And I've been seeing similar results for my clients.

In fact, in its recent quarterly report, Nike's CEO said it was able to engage its fans via its app and other digital channels while they were quarantined at home, and their free exercise services translated into strong digital sales that helped offset store closures.

Some brands or OEMs who previously had channel conflicts from wholesale/retail partners or their own brick-and-mortar stores suddenly see their direct-to-consumer channel as the only game in town during SIP.

That makes this a critical time to dig into your website and mobile app analytics!

See what part of the site is getting the most traffic, what's selling now that wasn't before, what is the makeup of the customers who are shopping now vs. before, where are users dropping off or hitting UX roadblocks?

For many of my clients, I've seen a spike in mobile web and mobile app traffic especially throughout the day and not just during commute hours. No surprise as people are home due to SIP. Also, historically, lots of office workers shop on their work desktops during the weekdays. It's not uncommon to see high conversions on Mon mornings before lunch as workers tackle their "to do" list after a relaxing weekend. But suddenly they don't have access to those work computers and must go online on their phones. So make sure your site is optimized for mobile, now more than ever!

Re-evaluate all your advertising

Online ad prices, especially banner, native, and video ads, that run on publisher sites are dropping as supply outstrips demand because advertisers have pulled back on spend because of SIP (e.g., travel industry can't really promote bookings), recession fears, and brand safety concerns (i.e., brands don't want their ads to show next to coronavirus content, especially on news sites). However, if you are less brand sensitive or develop a more targeted blacklisting strategy, you can make out like a bandit for your media buys. For example, Facebook CPMs have fallen to their lowest levels in 2 years.

Facebook CPM Falling (Source: Gupta Media)

It's also a good idea to assess the competitive media landscape. You may discover some competitors have pulled back on their paid advertising in search, display, social, video, or mobile apps. Time for you to grab market or mindshare, likely at lower ad prices as mentioned above. For some of my retail clients where Amazon used to compete with them on search, there's been less competition. Not that Amazon doesn't have the money to bid against them, but more likely because Amazon has more than its hands full now from organic traffic with everyone turning to the online retailer during SIP. (More on that below.) So check your Google Auction Insights reports. On the flip side, depending on your industry, you might see quite the opposite competitive pressure and everyone is getting more aggressive to capture as much demand as possible right now. Think about the fiercely competitive online video conferencing space right now where you have Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, and Webex duking it out.

I expect performance media campaigns to see less budget cuts than branding campaigns.

Also, make sure your ad messaging is on target and appropriate for these times. For example, yesterday morning I heard a local radio ad that asked "Taking your kids to school? Listen to us in the car." Really? Schools have been closed for a month during SIP! Someone at the station clearly sleeping behind the wheel.

Take stock of and promote your most relevant product and service features during these times.

By now, as a consumer, every company has probably sent you an email and driving you to their Covid-19 landing pages to explain how they are reacting to the pandemic and SIP. And most importantly, what special services they are offering during these uncertain times.

So, as a brand, what are you going to promote?

If you have interest-free payment plans or "layaway" plans like Afterpay, it's time to promote that. Amazon features it prominently on higher ticket price items (see below). Some auto companies have rolled out 0% interest, 72-month auto loans even!

Amazon's interest-free payment plan

Right now consumers are very concerned about supporting small businesses who risk going under. For smaller businesses who are reaching out to their community for help, now's a good time to setup and promote online gift cards. Square, which is quite popular with small businesses, has even created a Give & Get Local site to make it easy for local merchants to promote their e-gift cards to consumers. I've seen when merchants promote this in email campaigns, consumers are buying them to keep their favorite businesses afloat, hoping to patronize them later when we get through this. Facebook is also offering small businesses grants.

Offer curbside pickup following social distancing best practices? Promote that. Are your shipping and delivery times still unaffected? If you compete with Amazon, you may have an advantage now against the Prime shipping program as Amazon is swamped with traffic and orders, forcing them to prioritize some items over others. I don't blame them. I was about to buy an item that was eligible for Prime shipping. But at checkout, it said it won't ship for 1-2 months! That's crazy. #abandoncart

Amazon delayed shipping warning

Sports retailer Sports Basement has been sending out emails that promote online events to help customers stay fit, such as live workouts with a trainer via video conference and healthy recipes to try at home (side note: there has been a spike in baking and home cooking with SIP). And of course, discounts for shopping online! Similarly, REI has 6 Ways to Mix Up Your At-Home Workday. Both are great examples of brands staying true to their brand positioning while producing relevant, engaging content for their customers.

Sports Basement workout tip

Also, make sure you are monitoring online chatter using social media tools. How are consumers reacting to your company's response? For many brands, they are dealing with significant customer service complains on social media, online chats on their sites, and of course their call centers. But also use this data to see what's trending? How do you weave your brand into the conversation? The key is to be authentic, empathetic, and not too salesy.

Get the word out!

When you've identified relevant content to share with the community, it's time to put the CRM team and tools to work! Leverage that email database you got! For small businesses using Square, Square is offering Square Marketing, its basic CRM program I previously reviewed, for free right now. Yelp is also offering some of its premium marketing services for free for small businesses. Take advantage of these tools! Most are very easy to use without a huge learning curve.

Of course, take it to social media channels. Remember when just a few weeks ago, the government and consumer privacy advocates wanted to take down Facebook and Big Tech? Now, consumers are spending more time than ever on Facebook and almost every single social network has seen engagement shoot through the roof! When you do post, do some #hashtag research to maximize visibility.

And this goes without saying, but make sure your website can handle increased traffic, especially if you're a retailer and your stores are closed. You might also consider a code freeze like most online retailers normally do Nov-Dec. Don't risk rocking the boat when it's the only sales channel you got right now!

Lock-in long-term behavior changes

Lastly, all this time at home and SIP has forced consumers and businesses to change their behavior, largely favoring online activity, and you should take advantage of making these behaviors long term habits. Just to name a few benefactors -- online video conferencing, online banking/mobile app banking, online grocery delivery, esports, virtual medical professional services like SteadyMD or Talkspace, not to mention multi-channel retailers who have struggled to get in-store shoppers to go online or use their mobile app. Post-SIP, all these industries will benefit from an injection of new users; the key will be to keep as many as they can as paying customers for years to come.

My Covid-19 Digital Playbook:

1. Dig into your web + app analytics data for insights
2. Re-evaluate your media buys and messaging
3. Develop relevant content for Covid-19 behaviors due to SIP and be useful to consumers
4. Be active on social media and email channels
5. Be prepared for how to exploit long-term behavior changes after we get through this to capitalize on your short-term wins

Now I only wish there was a digital solution for haircuts because I need one badly! =( And I don't just mean an AR filter for my video calls or socialpost!

Stay safe and sane out there...

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Google Marketing Live Day 1 Takeaways

Ok, it's late. I just finished watching the Golden State Warriors destroy the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 1 of the NBA Western Conference playoffs. My mind is still racing from attending today's Google Marketing Live 2019 event. And while my fellow GML attendees enjoy a free concert tonight with Katy Perry, here I am writing about my takeaways from today's product announcements for you, my readers. =)

Google's main themes were focused on:

• Be responsible - Gee, I wonder why they led with this? Perhaps because of the consumer backlash around online privacy and the threat from regulators to breakup the online duopoly?
• Be there - Google plans to reach you across its vast ecosystem 
• Be useful - Google spoke a lot about personalization, understanding user intent, and predictive analytics 

To that end, a lot of the new ad products further exploit machine learning and AI to automate things from bidding to optimizing placements to even creative development. Google is also expanding ads across more of its properties, even Google Images. I suspect Pinterest's success has inspired Google to try to monetize its Google Images site. And there was lots of talk about using all it knows about users and users intent to anticipate their needs...while protecting user privacy.

If you're an e-commerce retailer, there were some exciting announcements from Google. Here's a few that caught my eye.

DISCOVERY ADS

As a long time Android and Google user, I never noticed the Discover button on the home page of the Google app or Google.com. But apparently lots of people do as Google claims 800 million people use it monthly! So, naturally, Google is going to try to monetize those eye balls and Discovery Ads aim to do that. Discovery Ads are essentially mobile-first native ads that appear in multiple Google properties with feeds: Google home page feed, Youtube home page feed, and Gmail. (Not sure how Discovery Ads in Gmail will conflict with regular Gmail Ad buys though. And I suspect Discovery Ads reporting won't be too transparent with reporting by placement like with Google Smart Shopping. We're just asked to trust the black box algorithm to automate things for us.)

SHOWCASE SHOPPING ADS EXPANSION

These large, visual ads have been around for a few years and drive user engagement on mobile. I've seen success with these with my retail clients. So when Google announced Showcase Shopping Ads will expand to Google Images, Discover feed, and YouTube feed, lots of people got excited naturally.

MOBILE APP DEEPLINKING FROM ADS

It's frustrating when my mobile ads drive users to my mobile web site, even when my customers have our app downloaded on their phones. So it was huge news when Google announced Search, Shopping and Display campaigns will now link users directly into the mobile app. In its tests, Google saw 2X conversion rate lift. No surprise! Google also announced improved mobile app reporting if you also use Google Analytics for Firebase.

GOOGLE SHOPPING FACELIFT

Google has redesigned the Google Shopping site experience to be more personalized and centered around the customer journey. And it will prominently focus on driving sales for advertisers by encouraging users to either (1) buy directly on an advertiser's e-commerce site, (2) go to a local store, or (3) buy directly on Google leveraging Google Express.

Also, as part of their Shopping Actions Program, this shopping experience will also extend to Google.com, Google Assistant, YouTube, and Google Imagesto  allow users to buy directly from these Google properties!

Alright time to call it a night. Unlike Katy Perry, I am no longer "Wide Awake." If you want to learn more, check out the Google Ads blog.

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YouTube Should Make Channel Owners Moderate All Comments To Serve Ads

Controversy is brewing again between YouTube and major advertisers. In case you haven't heard, YouTube has recently disabled comments on videos with minors due to predatory behavior. That was after major brand advertisers, such as Disney and Nestle, pulled their ad budgets. That tends to get YouTube to act.

And YouTube says they've fast tracked a new tool to identify inappropriate comments automatically.

I don't think this is solved by technology alone.

If a person or company wants to have a YouTube channel, it implies they want to connect with users. And with that should come a serious level of responsibility to monitor what happens on your channel and one can't expect technology to do it for you.

I also feel like the broader user community can't be expected to flag issues for YouTube. That could help be part of a larger solution.

YouTube can't put the burden on advertisers either to flag inappropriate comments because that's not an advertiser's core competency. Advertisers just want to make a media buy and trust their ad will be shown in a brand-safe environment.

Instead, what if YouTube put the responsibility on YouTube channel owners who wish to monetize their channel to actively moderate their comments? If you choose to sign up with YouTube to make your channel eligible for showing ads, YouTube should set all comments to require moderation by the channel owner and not post comments automatically. This would force the channel owner to ensure a brand safe environment. Otherwise, YouTube should not allow a channel to run ads. This has the benefit of aligning incentives for all parties because both Google and the channel owner want to make money from advertisers and advertisers want to invest in online video advertising.

Some owners of popular YouTube channels may balk at this idea, saying they get too many comments or views to moderate them all. If that's true, they must be making lots of money from ads! So guess what? You have to invest some of that money on moderators or community managers to continue to make money and maintain your brand-safe advertising environment!

As they say, it takes money to make money...

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WARNING: Hulu (No Ads)+ Live TV Has Lots of Ads!

I've been using Hulu + Live TV for several months after evaluating all the major OTT live TV streaming providers. I initially signed up for the $39.99/mo plan. Having come off of Dish TV with its ad skipper functionality on its DVR, I grew used to not watching ads on my favorite TV shows. So when I got Hulu + Live TV, I was so excited to discover that for an extra $4/mo more, I would not have to watch ads. Seemed like a great deal to remove this inconvenience and I was surprised they didn't promote this more on their website. According to Hulu's fine print, with the exception of a few shows, there's no ads.

My current plan

If you click on the Learn More link, Hulu even lists the shows that are subject to ads. Since I didn't watch any of them, I didn't think it would impact me.

But I soon discovered all, but 2, of my shows I watch regularly have commercials on playback. I understand when I watch live TV, I have to sit through real-time ad breaks. But I am watching these shows on delay (not live!) from their VOD library, not even from my cloud DVR. These ad breaks vary from 2 minutes to sometimes nearly 4 minutes of unskippable ads. From NFL Prime Time to Madam Secretary to S.W.A.T, I had to actually spend 30 minutes to watch a 30 minute show again! How is this possible with my $4 add-on plan? 

Their list of shows with ads was very short. But where are the shows I watch with ads? Why aren't they listed? Then I found this buried deep in their site. 

If you subscribe to Hulu (No Ads) + Live TV, please note that you will still see ads during live streams, DVR recordings and the additional on-demand content that is offered directly by each network.

The fine print

Apparently, this "network on demand" content from their live TV service is totally different and outside of their "standard" Hulu (No Ads) VOD library for $11.99/mo.

It's so confusing, that Hulu even has a help page dedicated to this question!

Even more confusing, the same show in their VOD library may have ads for newer season episodes, while older seasons will have no ads! All due to their negotiated contracts with ad networks. As a consumer, you can't even tell where that line is drawn until you're cruising along happily binge watching your favorite show without ads, and then BAM! You hit a 2-minute commercial break.

It gets worse. Here's an example of an even more lame user experience. When I watch ESPN and sometimes they don't sell out their ad inventory, they show a placeholder still frame for 30 seconds with an annoying elevator muzak loop. Why would you make a viewer watch dead space on delayed playback (not live TV use case here!) that clearly was not monetized? Just give us 30 seconds of our lives back and cut back to our favorite show earlier, people!

ESPN 30-sec non-commercial commercial break splash screen

Fast forward to present day and the new price hikes announced by Hulu earlier this month. This made me re-evaluate my current plan. While in my account, I looked for the fine print on my "no ads" plan.

I now realize the name of the service offering is very deliberate and subtle. I thought I had subscribed to Hulu + Live TV (No Ads) plan. However, it's actually called Hulu (No Ads) + Live TV plan. So it's technically true that the Hulu's original video on-demand library has almost no ads, but they are not claiming that for the "+ Live TV" portion of the service.

Here's something else I discovered. If you upgrade to their Enhanced Cloud DVR add-on for $9.99/mo (previously $14.99), you can fast forward through ads on your DVR recordings. But that does not apply to content in their VOD library still so watch out! Plus that's a hefty price premium. I honestly would be willing to pay probably an extra $10/mo for no ads across the entire Hulu + Live TV experience if they offered it!

Hulu is also apparently testing a new Pause ad unit with Charmin and Coca-Cola. I hope this works actually because maybe it will then allow Hulu to lower the ad load during my favorite shows.

It all boils down to improving Hulu's marketing and user experience:

1. As a marketer, I can see why Hulu carefully names their service this way. I'm sure they thought about it in the boardroom: Hulu+Live TV (Lots of Commercials) does not sound as alluring as Hulu (No Ads)+Live TV. So is Hulu committing false advertising? You decide.
2. The inconsistent user experience between ads shown with video content from the standard Hulu library vs. network partners is confusing. How is the average consumer supposed to tell the difference in source? Not to mention the fact that they shouldn't. It's ONE Hulu service to me and I don't want to split hairs. So I removed my $4/mo "no ads" add-on. With their newly announced price adjustments, this means my total monthly price only will be $1 higher now ($44.99 vs. $43.99), instead of $7.

I really do miss the ad skip button on my old Dish TV remote...

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Marketing Analytics: Why I Obsess Over Rates

I don't mean interest rates on my savings account, which is still paltry BTW. =)

I see marketing analytics reports all the time from clients that focus on absolute numbers like visits, conversions, clicks, opens. These are good to know, but I find these metrics meaningless in a vacuum. Is 10,000 clicks in a month good? It depends...

Instead I like to focus on relative metrics like calculated rates and ratios.

Rates are great to track metrics over time, to offer context, and to compare to industry benchmarks because rates are normalized. This means you can compare rates over different time periods to see if something is wrong or if something is doing surprisingly well all of a sudden. This also allows a smaller company to compare themselves to a larger company, generally speaking.

Let's look at how to use rates in common digital marketing reports to reflect the most insights.

Website Analytics

Example 1: Conversion Rates. Every website needs to have a primary goal or "conversion" event that is clearly and cleanly tagged on the website. That can be an e-commerce transaction or lead gen form completion. Everyone always then tracks the number of "conversions" each week or month in absolute terms.

Most, but not all, clients look at conversion rates. Yes! But there are multiple ways to define "conversion rate." Some define it as conversions / site visits. That's not bad and Google Analytics offers this in their standard reporting. The problem with just looking at this "start to finish" conversion rate is it does not help you identify where the leak in the conversion funnel is. Furthermore, this is often a very low number like 0.05% so it's really hard for senior management to fully understand such a metric.

What every marketer should do is also break down the customer journey into smaller bite-size paths. In the illustration below for an online lead gen site, by simply breaking the customer journey in half to calculate a Consideration Rate and a Completion Rate, you now have more actionable insights.

Purchase Funnel Rates

This helps identify where you have leakage in the funnel and how to address it. For example, if form completion rate is low, maybe your form is too long or confusing. Also, this completion rate should be easier to digest because it usually ranges between 5%-50%. So if you have a completion rate of 10%, you can ask yourself does that feel low when 9 out of 10 people bailed. Much easier to comprehend than the 0.05% conversion rate example above.

This form completion rate is also ideal for industry benchmarking because the "scope" of your metric is just a form and form completions. If you used the 0.05% conversion rate, the scope of that metric is all visits to your site for whatever reason and all the pages on your site. So it's really hard to compare apples to apples on such a broad conversion rate. Take retailers who live and die by shopping cart abandonment rate, which is the reverse of completion rate. Industry-wide cart abandonment rates are relatively easy to find and benchmark to your own cart abandonment rates.

Before moving on from this example, I wanted to mention the Consideration Rate. This is worth monitoring because if it's low, it means users are not showing any interest in your product. So you have to ask yourself questions like "Is our CTA not prominent enough?" or "Are people really not interested in our product offering?" The former can be a user experience issue, while the latter is a product or product marketing issue.

Example 2: % of Totals. This is a very simple ratio and calculation, great for providing a frame of reference. Take the classic Top Pages by page views report.

% of Total Pageviews Example

Most clients will quickly grab this data from their web analytics tool that shows pageviews in rank order, but sometimes discard the % that is often in the dashboard. I like to also provide the third column that is % of Total Pageviews because then you can better appreciate how popular a page is relative to other pages on your site. It's usually harder for senior executives to understand if 72K pageviews for the Product Overview page is low or high, but 25% of all pageviews is easy to grasp and to conclude it's very high for one page to garner.

I calculate this % of Total for a lot of site metrics beyond page views, such as % of Total Video Plays and % of Total Downloads. Again, the goal is to show if activity is concentrated among a handful of content or assets or more fragmented and distributed across all of them. If it's more concentrated, figure out what makes them so popular and do more of that!

Example 3. CTR. Clickthrough rates (CTR) are often associated with paid media ads and email links. But I like to calculate CTR for website analysis when analyzing CTA button clicks or on-page analysis to see what users chose to click on when presented with a host of options. Here's an example from a directory search results page. CTR is calculated for each link based on link click / page views. This is also a more visually appealing way to show these stats than a standard table. I also like to develop a similar slide for CTRs on the global navigation menu. One critical tip: usually you must setup custom click tags to calculate the CTRs I've discussed.

CTR Website Example

In terms of benchmarking, CTRs are great because you can compare pre- and post-launch CTRs if you redesign your website.

Email Performance

Most clients already focus on open rates and CTR. 👍 But I still see reports like this occasionally:

Email Report Without Open Rate Example

For most marketers, the opportunity here is for benchmarking rates. Epsilon publishes a great quarterly report that is free that is full of email benchmarks by industry and by types of emails (e.g., editorial/ newsletter, marketing, service)!

Last comment on email metrics. Don't forget to look at CTOR (Click-to-open rate), which is clicks / opens. CTOR is different than CTR, which is clicks / delivered. Monitoring and benchmarking CTOR can help you address issues with the content or CTA within the email body and usually rules out an issue related to the subject line.

Social Media Campaigns

Engagement Rate Example. For social media campaigns, paid or organic, one of the most popular primary KPIs is engagement rate. Most marketers define engagement rate (a.k.a. interaction rate) as (reactions + comments + shares) / posts. But if I'm a marketer, what constitutes a good engagement rate? A social media analytics tool, such as Quintly, is great for answering this question. It not only allows you to compare yourself to other competitors, but it has also created industry averages. In the example below, let's say I'm BMW USA. I can compare not only my Interaction Rate to direct competitors Audi and Mercedes, but Quintly also shows the average Interaction Rate for the Top 10 US Auto manufacturers. Quintly has other useful social media benchmarking tips on a recent blog post so I won't go into any more details here.

Quintly Interaction Rate Example

Paid Media Campaigns

Example 1: SEM & Display. Almost all media managers report out on CTR, CPC, and CPM for paid search and display campaigns. Yay! The suggestion I have here is be sure you ask your media partner or publisher who you are working with for industry benchmarks on these common media metrics. For example, your Google rep will often put together a quarterly report showing you your SEM spend, CTR, etc., relative to other advertisers in your category or industry (see example below). They will usually slice this by brand vs. non-brand and desktop vs. mobile. One caveat with these Google benchmarking reports. It will almost always show you are under-spending and under-performing because you are being compared to a Category Leader Average not the entire Category Average. Google obviously has an incentive to motivate you to spend more 😉

Google SEM Benchmark Example

Similarly, for display campaigns, find out what's the industry CTR from your vendor. If you're running rich media unit ads, find out what's a good engagement rate for user interaction with your unit in your industry.

Most digital advertisers also look at efficiency using Cost Per Acquisition (a.k.a., Cost per Conversion or Cost Per Lead). I also like to look at Click-to-Conversion rates.

Example 2: Video. For video ads, you need to look beyond video starts or plays. For sure, look at video completion rates. Or even better, look at milestones like quartiles. Below is an example of a Video Completion Rate Funnel with quartile milestones. This helps you identify where people are dropping off. For example, in pharmaceutical videos, users often drop off when the super long Important Safety Information (ISI) begins to play so I often place a milestone marker at the ISI start.

Video Completion Rate Funnel Example

For benchmarking purposes, ask your media partner or publisher for average completion rates for your industry. For example, they should be able to tell you the average completion rate for a :30s video is 30% in the financial services industry.

Summary

So there you have it. Now you know why and how I am obsessed about Rates and Ratios for my clients' marketing analytics reporting. All of the above are very simple concepts. You just need to spend a little bit of extra time in developing your measurement and tagging strategy and also on reporting. But in return, you become awesome at storytelling with data!

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Disclosure: I am a strategic advisor to Quintly.

Life Without Ad-supported Products and Services

Got privacy concerns? In a recent study, 63% of U.S. adults (nearly 2 out of 3 people) said they would be unwilling to give a company access to their personal data for targeted advertising in exchange for a free service. Shockingly unbelievable! Despite all the recent consumer and political fallout about consumer privacy and ad targeting, what would life really be like without advertising-supported products and services?

Let's think about that, shall we? Starting with the 800-pound gorilla...

Google Search: You could probably still use this, but without behavioral targeting and tracking, paid search ads may seem less relevant because it'll be like going back in time 10 years when results were largely based on keywords and bids from the auction model. You may think you're mostly interested in organic search results and probably don't care about the paid listings. But don't expect Google to continue investing in indexing organic results if it can't pay its employees! Here are some alternative private search engines to Google.

YouTube: Google paid a lot of money for YouTube ($1.65 billion) and they have spent years trying to monetize it. Only recently, thanks to the growth of mobile and video advertising, does this acquisition appear to be paying off. YouTube has struggled for years to get consumers to pay for a subscription. Without advertising, YouTube would essentially be gone. There is really no alternative to this platform. Even Vevo realized this recently and announced the shut down of its consumer branded sites to focus on its YouTube channels!

Google Maps: This is the most popular mapping and GPS/driving direction service.  Google has tried to sell ads based on location and behavioral targeting. Other online maps also rely on ads. So if you want to avoid ads 100%, you will need to buy a Garmin or a similar device that makes its money from hardware sales, not advertising.

Gmail: You might think Gmail is ok as Google claims it no longer scans emails to serve ads. But it is still scanning emails in the name of personalization. For example, Google knows when your next flight is leaving, and whether or not it has been delayed, based on emails you get from airlines and travel booking sites. Also Gmail has an ad product, although you may never notice the ads if you have your settings set to not display Promotions. But Gmail ads do offer advertisers lots of targeting options. Where do you suppose Google gets those signals from??? Lastly, I feel Gmail is a Trojan horse play for Google to incentivize users to create a login (and stay logged in for checking email constantly) and user profile, which in turn can be used for your login across all Google products in order to track you with more precision across the web and across devices to serve better ads within its ecosystem. If you don't want an ad-based "free" webmail service, you may have to start using your ISP's "free" email address that came with your broadband service (e.g., Comcast, AT&T). The trade-off though is the switching cost is high if you ever want to leave your Internet service provider because you will have to tell all your friends they need to email you at a new email address. That happened to me years ago when I switched from Mindspring to Gmail.

Android Phones: Know that Android-based phone you have from Samsung, LG, or Motorola? While the operating system was free to phone manufacturers, Google uses Android as yet another Trojan horse to get mobile users to use its popular ads-based mobile apps, such as those described above, that are pre-loaded on the phones to protect its dominant advertising position in desktop and mobile devices. One alternative is to get an iPhone.

...And then there's Facebook

Facebook: By now, we all know how Facebook collects tons of data about users without their knowledge in order to provide incredibly powerful targeting capabilities for advertisers. As a digital marketer, I can attest to how precise and effective their ad products are. But as a consumer, you won’t easily find another social network where all your friends are.

Instagram: Thinking about leaving Facebook to Instagram like a teenager? Not so fast, Instagram has largely adopted the same ad platform as Facebook.

WhatsApp: How about WhatsApp? The founders built the app based on privacy concerns and started out charging 99 cents a year. When you have over 1 billion users, that's not a bad revenue model. Unless of course someone (i.e.. Mark Zuckerberg) paid you $22 billion for the company 😉 If you haven't heard, the founders of WhatsApp have fought Facebook executives for a while to keep ads off WhatsApp and are leaving Facebook over this philosophical difference. And it seems ads are coming soon to WhatsApp.

All other social networks, like Snapchat, are also ad-based. So there's no alternative service at scale really. Perhaps this will lead to a renaissance when people will actually call people on the phone again or meet friends face-to-face.

Other popular ad-based services

Yelp: Who doesn't love Yelp for recommendations? The company has ads, but it has limited targeting abilities, mainly based on a user's keyword search and location. So you can decide if that creeps you out. Also, Yelp has been building out other revenue streams targeted at businesses, like request-a-quote, that is not ad-based.

News sites: Most are ad-supported, but many don't make enough money to offset their declining print revenue. Savvy papers with loyal followers, such as WSJ and NY Times, charge a subscription and some have tested micropayments per article. But if you don't like ads, your selection of news sites is quite limited.

Mobile games: Many casual mobile games are still ad-supported. Part of the reason I think that's the case is because ad platforms have made it easy for developers to integrate ad units within their game for monetization. Many don't want to charge a fee for each download, thinking it will negatively impact app adoption. (True!) Some have found success with a freemium model, like Fortnite. But selling virtual goods does require developers to work harder to figure the "hook" to get users to pay and to develop a store in the app to sell these virtual goods.

TV: TV shows are still largely ad-based. TV started that way and some could argue there is a sea change. Netflix has built a very successful subscription model with original content and zero ads. But most video on demand or over the top (OTT) TV streaming services are currently testing a hybrid model that includes a "modest" monthly subscription fee and targeted video ads. Think Hulu, Sling TV, Directv Now, and YouTube TV.

Not all hope is lost

Not to be all doom and gloom if you don't want to use ad-supported products, as there are a few companies that still offer products and services not based on advertising.

Amazon/Amazon Prime: If you're not one of the 100 million people on Amazon Prime, you should be! This paid subscription gets you so many benefits, that I can't even list them all. Go read it here for yourself. That being said, Amazon has been slowly developing a burgeoning advertising business on its site because most people start product searches on Amazon rather than Google. As this becomes a growing revenue source for them, how long before Amazon engages in behavioral targeting for advertising, much like how it has successfully mined customer browsing and purchasing data on its site for its recommendation engine and tested ad-supported, discounted Kindles?

Apple: Apple is the poster child for anti-ad-supported products, even if its legion of app developers depend on ads for monetization. Not a week goes by these days that CEO Tim Cook is not poking a stick at Facebook and its lack of consumer privacy practices. But Apple is a highly-profitable hardware and services company, not an advertising company like Google and Facebook. So product sales and subscriptions will dominate for a long, long time!

Microsoft: Many of us interact with Microsoft via its Windows and Office products. As such, it's primarily a B2B company and makes a ton of money from charging businesses and home users for subscriptions to Office and operating system licenses to computer manufacturers. And their Azure cloud computing business is growing like gangbusters that is also subscription-based. It sells some Xboxes to consumers at retail and also generates subscriptions from online gaming. It does have the Bing search engine and an ad business. But for the vast majority of consumer's interactions with Microsoft products and services, they're not really ad-supported.

Netflix: Unlike the OTT TV streaming services mentioned above, Netflix has scoffed at an advertising revenue model and is focused on subscriptions. If their stock price is any indication, they are doing just fine without ads!

Spotify: Spotify and other music streaming businesses all seem to have landed on a $10/mo subscription model. Some like Pandora still have an ad-supported "free" option. There is also talk of Spotify developing an ad business.


So there you have it. Can you 2/3 of Americans out there really live without these ad-supported services? And how much can your wallet take to keep paying for existing subscription-based services, like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc.? The dollars add up quickly, don't they?!?

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[REVIEW] Is Square Marketing's Simple Email CRM Program Right for your Small Business?

Square Marketing launched about 3 years ago as a simple, turnkey email marketing system for small businesses. I've used it and other email marketing applications and wanted to provide a hands-on review about what I like and don't like about Square Marketing.

First of all, keep in mind Square Marketing is an intentionally simple CRM email marketing program for small businesses who don't have the time or knowledge to deal with relationship marketing. But they know it's important. It's not really for prospecting, but more for customer retention, because it is based on email addresses tied to your customer's credit card that Square may already have in its system, even if a customer has never bought from you. That's one of the beauties of this solution. You've got a lot of customer emails without having to spend time asking for it from each customer and slowing things down at the register.

What I Like About Square Marketing

Square Marketing is easy to setup! I love how they have created the most common templates already for welcoming a new customer, lapsed customer, product promotion, newsletter, and events, to name a few.

The biggest advantage of using Square Marketing is its integration with the Square POS register that seamlessly ties customer profile, campaign, and sales transaction data!

First, you get basic email performance overview metrics, like emails sent (a.k.a. Recipients in Square's language), email opens, and unsubscribes. You don't get bounce rates though.

Square Campaign Overview Report

One metric to be careful about with Square reporting is the notion of an "Attributed" sale or purchase. Square defines "Attributable Sales" as the total sales generated from customers who made an in-store purchase within 14 days of viewing this campaign, or any customers who redeemed a coupon. This is different than the offer redemption rate because it doesn't mean everyone included in this metric actually redeemed an offer. It's meant in some ways to imply that by simply reaching out to customers via email, you reminded them about your business and that might have influenced their decision to repurchase.

The usefulness of attributed sales depends on how frequent customers shop with you and if you use coupons a lot. For a cafe or coffee shop, where customers may routinely come in several times a month, I think Attributable sales is less relevant. But if you are a shoe retailer where a customer may shop less than a handful of times per year, this may mean your emails kept your business top of mind for customers, even if they didn't redeem an offer.

Now let's look at actual Coupon Performance reporting. I love how Square effortlessly tracks actual redemptions in store by just entering a unique promo code from the email a customer got or you can actually look up the customer's name from the Square POS and select the offer available to that customer. The latter is pretty darn convenient if a customer loses or can't find that email at the time of checkout.

Square Coupon Performance Report

As the above shows, you get daily-level coupon redemption by "source", where source refers to email received (blue line above) or receipt (yellow line above). In my experience, I rarely get customer redemptions from receipts. But it's a nice touch from Square, I guess.

In this report, you also get the true offer redemptions and net sales, not attributable sales like above.

One thing I like to look at is redemptions-to-open rates (RTOR). I normally look at click-to-open rates (CTOR) from email marketing campaigns, but these simple Square emails don't really have a ton of links so Square doesn't even provide any click reporting. So that's why I created my RTOR metric as a way to benchmark across my campaigns.

Areas for Improvement

There are several things I'd like to see in Square Marketing.

Promotion times: I wish you could run promotions for certain days of the week or time of day. For example, you can't run happy hour promos. Or to run weekend promos, you have to send emails out Friday night and have the campaign expire Sun night. Similarly, for weekday promotions, the workaround is to run campaigns Sunday night until Friday.

Customer drill down from redemption report: I wish I could drill down and see who actually opened an email and/or redeemed the offer from a campaign. In the example above, I'd love to click on the 18 redemptions and see a list of the names of the 18 customers. As an owner of the business or the marketer, you may not always be the one who rang up the person, but you'd like to get to know who is actually using your coupons. I don't know why Square doesn't offer this capability since it has this data and does show you such granularity when you pull up a customer record from the Customer menu. Here is a customer profile record:

Buyer Summary from Customer Profile

The top shows any current coupons this user has. Then it has some very useful RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) stats in the Buyer Summary. More on RFM below.

Below that is the historical timeline of activities of the customer. This is where you can see not only when they purchased and the amount spent, but also when the customer received an email, got a coupon, and actually redeemed it. So, if Square can show this from the Customers menu, why does it not let me go directly to this view from the Square Marketing's Campaign reporting section? I also wish they added Email Open to this timeline.

Customer's historical activity

Limited segmentation within Square: In the Customers interface, you can filter your customer directory and create your own custom segments, which is cool! Here is what you can segment by:

Customer Filters for Segmentation in Square

A big Filter miss I think is including the Monetary value or cumulative amount a customer has spent with your business. I could run campaigns for the big spenders or promos to get little spenders to spend more. Square obviously has this data at the customer level because it's in the Buyer Summary above. Why can't we segment on it?!? This prevents you from employing the most common, yet powerful, segmentation out there - RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary).

To create a workaround for this RFM shortcoming, you can export your entire customer directory as a .CSV file and pull it into Excel. In addition to some personal contact info, you also get these useful transaction data that serve as the basis for creating RFM segments:

RFM metrics exported from Square

In Excel, I calculated Avg Spend and defined some Low, Mid, and High breakpoints for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary. And proceeded to assign my customer list to 1 of these 27 cells (e.g., High Recency, High Frequency, Low Monetary). BTW, to simplify this, you can also use 8 cells (=2x2x2), using Low and High segments.

Then I hit another snag with Square. There is no easy way to import my segmentation back into Square through the front-end interface. I had to manually sort by name and individually locate each user to assign them to the custom group I created in Square. This makes it very difficult to maintain the RFM segmentation on an ongoing basis so I have to "re-score" the customer database myself manually periodically.

Exporting item category purchased: Since I'm on the subject of the .CSV export, I wish I could export what categories or items customers bought as columns in the export file. Then I could run targeted cross-sell campaigns. For example, if you're a shoe retailer and you know a customer always bought athletic shoes from you, you can cross promote casual walking shoes or dress shoes. Because Square Marketing lets you offer discounts by item category, this is a natural desire for cross-sell campaigns.

User-defined Campaign Names: Square automatically assigns a Campaign Name to each campaign based on your subject line. While that may sound convenient, it's actually quite limiting, especially if you use the same subject line again because it will lead to duplicate Campaign Names. Below is how Square lists all your campaigns chronologically. To better organize my campaigns, I wish it allowed me to edit the Campaign Name. For example, instead of "We miss you! Come back and save 15%", I would call that "Lapsed Test 15% offer." Then my other "We miss you! Come back for a special offer" campaign would be called "Lapsed Test Special offer."

List of all campaigns in Square Marketing

Slow email preview: Before you activate and launch an email campaign, Square lets you preview the email by sending you a test email of how it will actually look. Nice feature! But I have noticed a wide variance in how long it takes to receive the test email. Sometimes over 5 minutes. This is annoying because you'd like to get the preview email instantly so you can then activate the campaign while in their campaign editor tool. Instead, I often have to save what I've done and come back later.

Losing offer details while editing coupon:
Another annoying bug I've found is often I would go in to edit a previously saved offer in a saved draft campaign, and Square loses my existing content and I have to start over. So I take a screenshot of it now before I click the "Click To Activate" button to edit the coupon, just in case.

Editing coupon offer

Better image editing features: For my custom uploaded photos, it would be nice to have some common photo editing features, like crop, brightness, contrast, etc.

No A/B testing: Ok, this request may be for advanced users and not who Square Marketing is targeting with this solution. But it would be nice if Square could randomly split an audience and send 2 slightly different emails to 2 subgroups for A/B testing. Instead, I have to manually test different offers, copy, or images serially by pausing one campaign, duplicating it, editing it slightly, and relaunching it.

Brief Word about List Sizes

List size matters and is actually how Square and other email marketing solutions like Constant Contact price their offerings! Your potential email marketing list depends on your business and the percentage of customers who pay with cash vs. credit card. That's because Square (and any solution) can't capture any customer data from cash transactions without some kind of loyalty program link. So if you have a primarily cash-driven business, your list will be smaller and the potential impact of email marketing campaigns will be likely be lower. For example, a hair salon can have over 80% cash customers, while a restaurant could have 20% cash customers. In this case, there is more opportunities for the restaurant.

Summary

Overall, Square Marketing did a solid job with a K.I.S.S. email marketing solution for small businesses. And despite all the items on my wish list above, if you're not a hard core marketer like me, but wish you could do something with customer emails, this may be right for you, depending on how large your reachable target list is!

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Taylor Swift's UPS partnership to promote new Reputation album - WHY!?!?

Spotted a huge picture of Taylor Swift yesterday in the street. Thought it was one of those moving billboard trucks until I realized it was a UPS truck!

First of all, I think it's interesting that UPS is pimping out ad space on its trucks, like a public transit bus. I didn't even realize they had an interest in building out an ad business. Perhaps the fight with FedEx has them looking to expand to other revenue streams. It's not a bad idea for UPS to monetize that huge boring brown space across their fleet of trucks.

Some might say the UPS partnership is a good offline marketing vehicle. It's 100% share of voice. And people don't go to record stores (R.I.P. Tower Records!) anymore and even the Best Buys and Targets of the world aren't really selling many physical albums these days to warrant in-store promotions as users are digitally streaming or downloading music.

But if you're TAYLOR SWIFT, why do you even need to spend money to advertise your new album? She's world famous with reporters, radio DJs, bloggers, and her fans hanging on her every word and ready to buy her latest music!

She's recently released 2 singles, Look What You Made Me Do and Ready For It, from the new Reputation album weeks apart and both are getting lots of air play!

Not only that, but social media was supposed to be the great equalizer for artists to build direct connections to fans. And it certainly has been for Taylor. She has a huge social media fan base:

YouTube (Taylor Swift) - 1.7 MM subscribers
YouTube (Taylor Swift VEVO) - 24 MM subscribers
Twitter - 86 MM followers
Instagram - 103 MM followers

All she has to do is post on her own social media channels and call it a day.


In fact, Tay Tay is already doing it. Her YouTube channel is totally promoting her new album's drop date of Nov 10th:

It's also on the comments of her Look What You Made Me Do video on TaylorSwiftVEVO:

Her other profiles are all promoting it too. In fact, it's a great example of integrated marketing as all the channels have the same Reputation album cover photo and call to action to get her album on Nov 10th. You may recall she caused an Internet frenzy when all her social accounts went dark last month to prep and coordinate all this stuff.

Taylor has always been a very respectable, smart business woman. But I just don't get why she did this UPS deal...

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New Advertising Frontier: NFL Overlay Ads on Football Field

I was watching the 49ers vs. Chargers game last night. The Niners crushed the Chargers from the beginning so to me the more interesting thing from the game was the overlay ads that the NFL was superimposing on to the field. I remember how cool it was back in the late 1990s when the first down line was superimposed on TV broadcasts.

But someone finally thought of a way to monetize this technology further by allowing advertisers to display their logos on to a big green field. What a great way to counter the DVR ad-skipping movement!

Below is just one of the ads, from Ford, that aired last night. Throughout the game, there were also ads from Mazda, Go Pro, and Barracuda Networks. Barracuda actually had an interesting placement where their logo was shown when the Niners were in the red zone and a big red rectangle marked the 20-yard border around the logo.

While this is a smart way to increase ad revenue for the NFL, I'm a bit mixed on it as a spectator because it looks tacky at times and gets us one step closer to the NASCAR ad-cluttered world in professional sports.

What do you think?

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Why Don't Commuter Ferries Run Billboard Ads?

The other day I was riding on a Blue & Gold ferry boat across the bay in San Francisco. And I realized something - Why don't the ferry companies sell advertising on billboards in the boats? Sure, there are lots of windows that look out on the beautiful bay. But there's also wall space for ads.

It seems like a perfect vehicle to market to commuters who ride it back and forth. That's a captive audience stuck on a boat for 30-45 minutes until the next stop. 

It's no different than the ads one finds on buses (e.g., SF Muni) and the subway (e.g., BART). It would certainly generate revenue for them. Maybe the answer is they don't need it? On their website, they seem proud of this fact:

Operates the Tiburon ferry, the only unsubsidized commuter ferry service on the Bay.

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Is This a Bad Media Placement?

Following my last post on DJ's as ultimate community managers, it appears I may be on a music-themed blogging streak here (unintentionally).

Today I was on the subway and ad in the commuter train caught my eye:

Normally, it's the QR code that I notice...due to my inner digital marketer. But QR codes in ads have become quite common in the Bay Area.

And it wasn't because it had Willow Smith featured...or at least I think that's Willow. What do I know? I'm an old dude!

Nor was I questioning why Disney made this app? It's actually been downloaded a ton and has some cool features. 

But, it was more because I was questioning the media planner who thought this was a great placement for the ad.

Sure I've seen ads that encourage commuters to download mobile apps, such as eBay.

And I think eBay had the right target audience and placement. Commuters could download the app, search, and bid on an auction item while they're waiting for their train.

But to whom is this Radio Disney app ad targeted?

If the ad is targeted for tweens or younger, then are they riding the subway and commuting to and from work? And do they even have smartphones? The chart below is recent comScore data that shows those aged 13-17 make up less than 10% of smartphone users.



Or perhaps the ads are targeted toward parents who have kids that like Radio Disney already. Then the logic would have to be that parents who see this ad will be compelled to download it so they have yet another app for their kids to play with when mommy or daddy is busy and needs the kids to entertain themselves. That may not be so far fetched, but if I were a kid, wouldn't I just click on Angry Birds instead to kill time on my parent's smartphone?

So I'm not convinced if this is a good media placement...do you?

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