Archive for Juli, 2009
The Basics of Visual Communication
I just recently read an article about the basics of visual communication and it struck me that the rules that apply to a good speech or offline presentation also apply to your online presentation.
Your Online Presentation: Structured, Meaningful and Modern
Did you know that you actually only 30% remember of what you see? If you are just hearing something the rate drops down to 20%. Combining the two channels brings you up to about 50%. You can increase that rate even more, if you tell somebody about what you saw and heard. If the subject is about something you can do, you can increase the rate to about 90% if you actually do it.
What does it mean for an online presentation or website?
The main channel through which we perceive information online is the visual channel. Through the concentration to one main channel, our brains natural information filter gets even stronger, bringing the purely visual perception down to probably under 10%, unless we manage to trigger some interest, which can loosen the filter. So the question is: How can we catch the interest of a visitor?
Structure
Things that you say on your page should always be down to the point. As visitors hardly read any information on your page, but use what is called scanning, you will need to be very precise on crisp about what you say. You should also structure your information by using headings and lists, where possible. Emphasise important points by putting them in bold letters. Don’t overdo it though.
On the other hand your main navigation should not have more than 5-6 items and should not be deeper than 3 levels. If you can’t fit all you have to say in this structure you should in any case use a breadcrumb navigation, so that visitors don’t get lost. Additionally you should provide an on page search and a site map.
Meaningful
Make a list of 2-3 keywords for your text and write your content around those keywords, if you feel to wander from your subject/keywords, rethink the structure of your site and add another page. As a rule of thumb, you should never write more than 3-400 words per page, as you will inevitably loose your audiences attention.
Modern
Your design needs to be up-to date, otherwise your page will look old fashioned and visitors will deduce that your content is too. At the moment you will find a lot of pages that use horizontal navigation. The classical header image seems to disappear, instead you will more and more large images or videos in the content itself. Another rather popular feature is the footer site map, which will give you easy access from whatever page your on. Using such a site map also makes it easy to reduce the main navigation to the most important points.
What about search engines?
Search engines have evolved so far, that they now recognise things that are positive for human perception, to be good for search engine ranking too. So when you stick to the above mentioned rules, you will have a good chance of not performing to badly in your SERPs.
What can I do to increase the perception of my audience?
Add other perception channels, unfortunately you are a bit limited on your website with regards to that, but you can in any case add some audio. I don’t mean nice(?!) background music that can probably not even be turned off, I mean audio content. Tell the people about your business, let them sit back, relax and deliver the content actively instead of having your visitor do all the work. You can increase the effect even more by adding some meaningful video. But always remember to offer good quality content, may it be text, audio or video.
eMail Marketing with Mailchimp
I have been looking for a good email marketing Solutions quite some time and about three months ago I discovered Mailchimp.
Have used Mailchimp for two newsletter shots so far. I want to give you an overview about those things that make a real difference for me, when I use Mailchimp:
Testing the Newsletter
Beside being able to send you a preview of the Newsletter, Mailchimp has a featured called Inbox Inspection. It is basically a test lab, where your get screenshots of your newsletter made with about 30 different desktop and web mail clients. Especially when you are sending HTML Newsletters this is an invaluable feature, as some email clients are not very good at rendering html emails
Beside the inbox inspection, the test lab also features a spam filter check in which with desktop, server and gateway spam filters are considered.
Last but not least there is a content assessment, telling you about HTML content, HTML code and Text content issues.
Reports
The next very useful feature are the extensive reports, especially the visual implementation, down to a color-coded worldmap, where you can see in which countries you got the most opens is great. Very helpful is that the bounce, open and click ratios are put in relation to the respective industry averages you are in. You also get to see how often your newsletter was forwarded. Besides you also get the list of people that complained (marking your email as spam), unsubscribed, bounced and opened. There is a visual click map of your newsletter, a list of links with total and unique clicks.
Certainly the best feature in terms of marketing analysis is the full integration into google analytics, through wich you get to know everything about the return of investment of your campaign. it shows the camaign view of achieved goals, can be linked to your ecommerce stats and of course simple contetn related information like, how long did visitors of that campaign stay and how many pages did they visit.
One newly added feature as announced in the MonkeyWench July 2009 Newsletter is the ability of tracking twitter tweets about your email campaigns in Mailchimp. Check out the mailchimp blog for further details.
Costs
Mailchimp is not free, but definitely worth every cent it costs. If you don’t go on a monthly plan, the cheapest will be 3 cent per mail, if you buy up to 2000 credits (sent mails) it drops down to half a cent per mail if you buy a 200.000 credits pack. The monthly costs are calculated by number of subscribers of your lists, so for example up to 500 subscribers will cost you 10$ per month. It is pretty straight forward and easy to calculate, when you are better of with the monthly plan or with the pay-as-you-go plan.
Conclusion
I am very convinced of this service and will continue using it. If I every find something more satisfying I will let you know.
Do you know Mailchimp? What do you think? Let me know!
Marketing for Ferndale Guesthouse and Restaurant
Since summer last year we have been working on the Ferndale Guesthouse & Restaurant Page.
The First Step was to bring the page up to technical standards, at the same time, we gave the page a new look, with the option of switching the design, when the restaurant interior is changed about four times a year. At this time, we built a static page, as we did not expect many changes. The traffic over last year’s season was not bad, with most traffic coming from Achill Tourism. At that stage there were not many search engine referrals.
Over the wintertime, we did a little adwords campaign, which brought a bit of traffic, but not with a very high conversion.
In spring of this year, we started to transform the Website into a blog and began an extensive marketing campaign, including a regular newsletter. All print material was updated to the design of the web page, including flyer’s, business cards, menus and ads in different publications.
We sent the first newsletter for the May Bank Holiday and got a fabulous response. We achieved a 42.8% opening rate, which is about double the industry average for restaurant newsletters. The click-rate was 9.2% which was about 250% above the industry average. With the second newsletter send out for the Achill Marathon, we were able to increase the click rate even further. The newsletter was designed to give a good mixture of story, information (activities, recipes, wine recommendations) and offers, which proved very successful.
At the same time we started to build a recipe database, with the possibility of downloading the recipes as pdf. So far different recipes have been downloaded over 220 times in six weeks. Through the newsletter, the new content to the web page and the regular publication of blog articles we were able to increase the number or visitors to the web page by over 50% compared to summer of last year. Of course the conversion rate as suffered a bit, as people looking for recipes will not implicitly come to dine or stay, so at the moment we are working at the exposure.
Lately we have made some usability improvements through simplifying and renaming the contact & enquiry form, as we found out that people seemed to use the contact form less and ring instead. People using the Contact & Enquiry Form now have the possibility of ticking a box for a callback service.
After finding out that the search term “achill hotel” is searched after about 4.5 times more often then “achill guest house”, we registered the domain achill-hotel.com and set-up an specially keyword-optimised landing page, to get some of that traffic too.
If you have any questions regarding the optimisation of your own business page, please feel free to contact us.
Back on Track
After some time I haven’t have time to write anything I am slowly getting back into my old routine. Nearly the whole month of June I was away in Germany teaching at the german Army. But now, as the summer seems to relax my todo list, I have time to use my google reader again…
So in a few days, I will be writing some more stuff in this Blog again.
