Central Perk

joi, 18 iulie 2013

Tangible good news

Hi, everyone --

If you want tangible evidence of the way that the new health care law is already helping ordinary people, it's worth having a conversation with one of the 8.5 million Americans who received rebates from their insurance companies this summer. Just ask the folks who got checks in the mail.

Because of the Affordable Care Act, insurers are required to spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on medical care, instead of overhead like salaries or advertising. And if an insurance company doesn't meet that standard, it has to provide a rebate to its customers.

It's a really big deal, and we want to make sure everyone understands how it works.

Here's a graphic that breaks things down. Will you share it to help answer questions in your community?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/health-care-rebate

Thanks!
Tara

Tara McGuinness
Senior Communications Advisor
The White House
@HealthCareTara

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Mobile App Marketing, App Retention, and Building Real Customer Relationships

Posted: 17 Jul 2013 07:35 PM PDT

Posted by robiganguly

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Mobile app growth is stunning (and changing your business)

As I shared in a prior post about inbound marketing for mobile, the growth of the app ecosystem is simply extraordinary. A few weeks ago we learned that total app store downloads have eclipsed 100 billion with no signs of slowing down. The tremendous growth in this ecosystem is a testament to something that every marketer needs to understand:

Your customers are all moving to mobile.

Whether it's the mobile web or mobile apps (the chart below tells us it's all mobile apps these days), the evidence that consumers are flocking to their mobile devices is overwhelming. As a marketer, our first task is to find where our audience is and where it's going.

Today, the answer to both questions is increasingly: mobile.

Mobile's unique properties present us with a new set of marketing opportunities â€" new ways to learn about and connect with our potential customers. To name a few:

Because your mobile customers are treating their phones like extensions of themselves (check out this recent Pew Internet study), they have invited us into a more personal and immersive aspect of their lives.
This new dynamic means that we, as marketers, can develop truly deep connections with our customers through digital channels.
The kinds of relationships we have been able to foster in person are now possible through software.

This very personal device has a downside

There are some meaningful challenges to the mobile app channel, however. The market for apps is already extremely crowded. The quality bar continues to rise rapidly and the era of the "get rich quick" apps has long since passed.

Because consumers download so many apps on a regular basis, they're very used to abandoning your software and maybe even deleting it. As a result, the largest problem in the mobile app ecosystem is really app retention. Within 3 months, over 3/4 of your customer base is gone, never to be seen again.

With average pay-per-install prices costing over $1.50, the shape of this retention curve is really disheartening to app marketers. It means that a lot of installs are going wasted and customers aren't really happy (one huge reason why mobile app tracking rules).

In thinking through this problem and working with thousands of app publishers, we've come to realize that there's a simple equation behind each and every business in the mobile app space. We find that it's a helpful way of understanding how to grow and build your business. Understanding the math of the app business helps marketers, product managers and mobile business owners prioritize their investments in order to grow their business.

In today's mobile environment, many marketers are myopically focused on the installation number. While that input is important and a very strong reason to invest in a proper App Store SEO strategy, our equation clarifies that it is but one of three crucial components. App marketers need to be more focused on:

Increasing their mobile app retention in order to maximize LTV
Analyzing and improving their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

So, how do you grow your app's retention?

As the CEO of a mobile app feedback and engagement company, I get to talk to a lot of mobile teams about the problems they face on the retention and monetization side of the business. There are several key ways in which innovators are increasing mobile retention and driving meaningful business results.

Analytics and iteration

Many app publishers are working with analytics packages from Google, Flurry, Kontagent, or New Relic in order to better understand their customers' behavior inside the app. By creating various events to track specific actions taken and watching the breadcrumbs of data left behind from consumer interactions, app publishers are able to get a much better sense of what happens once they've launched their app. Using that data helps identify places of popularity and places of exit. Using analytics to drive iteration on the product is a helpful piece of growing your retention numbers.

Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement is a phrase that's used often these days but that requires more specificity in order to truly be helpful to app marketers. Engaging with your customers helps you make a product that will drive better retention, higher customer satisfaction and inform your product roadmap. In the mobile app world, there are 3 important ways in which you can connect with your customers:

Feedback: Listening to your customers and making it incredibly easy for them to give you feedback is a must-have for every app. There are people who are willing to look for a way to talk with you and tell you what they like, what they'd like improved and what is causing confusion already. These are your most engaged customers. Embracing and empowering them drives their investment in your app and company even higher.
Customer research: Every company with an app has a built-in audience of customers to conduct research with and learn from. Tapping into that audience for specific research (i.e. Did this product feature land as we expected it to? What are the demographics of our audience?) is an important engagement mechanism that often informs the product, marketing, and executive teams at the same time as involving customers in the betterment of the product. These involved customers tend to stick around a lot longer.
Targeted and personalized communications: Because mobile is such a personal experience, the old methods of communicating with customers (email blasts to your list, direct mail to everyone, advertising spend to find your audience) are not nearly as useful. More importantly, in the face of the tactics others are using, they make your brand look a bit clueless. Instead, it's possible to communicate with your mobile customers based upon the actions they take, the groups that they fall into and the questions they ask of you. Using intelligent in-app communications to generate conversations and follow-up in a personalized manner allow your brand to deliver a 1:1 experience for every consumer, which brings them back to your app on a regular basis.

Interested in more specific resources about driving retention?

We've scratched the surface about the retention problem and how to address it, but there's a lot more in the way of resources out there for mobile marketers. Here are a few that are helpful and specific:

Urban Airship's white paper on "good push" can help you understand push notifications and the difference between a well-targeted campaign and spam
OMI's piece on using analytics to boost retention is a helpful overview of setting up studies and using data wisely
The Apptentive guide to increasing mobile app retention was compiled after 100s of customer interviews and walkthroughs of tactics and specific outcomes

Retention's downstream impacts:

In addition to driving up the retention aspect of the app business equation, increased retention actually fuels two significant long-term benefits, illustrating how interconnected each of these components are:

Boosting downloads

When apps increase their retention, their overall audience grows. As a result of the growth in their audience they end up with better app store performance because their larger, happier customer base is more likely to talk about them and share great ratings and reviews in the app store. In addition, the larger, more engaged audience is more likely to spread the word with their friends about the app. A more engaged, larger audience proves to be a significant engine for organic download growth.

Understanding your customers better

In order to drive higher retention, marketers need to understand their customers better and develop better relationships with them. The side effect of the work required in order to get to know customers better is that you understand the language that customers use and the things that customers care about most. Using that understanding to shape your further marketing efforts can yield significant increases in efficacy because you're using customers' language instead of your own. Very few things are as powerful as speaking to someone in their own words.

The deeper goal: meaningful customer relationships

Ultimately, mobile marketers should be focused on developing long-term value for their clients and brands. Through the mobile channel's unparalleled ability to deliver a personal experience and the opportunity to be with a customer everywhere they go, the notion of lifetime value (LTV) has become even more important. As inbound marketers, many of us have felt first-hand the effects of measuring traffic sources and understanding that the most relevant, invested, interested customers are our most profitable customers. We are past the days of trying to acquire every customer possible and have moved on to doing much more value-oriented great marketing, marketing which invites our customers into an ongoing conversation that is more give and take and less broadcast and pray.

When you create meaningful relationships with customers, customers see your company as a more human organization, one capable of listening and learning. Along with this more personal perception comes a more robust public image â€" consumers give your company leeway and understand that you will make mistakes along the way. Developing organizational tolerance for mistakes extends to your customer base: a deeper understanding of the people behind the app helps you keep your base of supporters on board when you make mistakes.

Because of the mobile device's always on, "five minutes of use at a time" paradigm, it's incredibly important to try and become a habit of some sort for your consumers. By putting a personal face and voice to your communications with customers, you're more likely to earn that habitual usage of your app, resulting in outstanding performance.

Finally, a bonus: presenting the case

We know that as marketers many of you struggle to make the case for new initiatives, investments and strategies inside of your organization. Often the question of where to put resources comes down to an analysis of cost/benefit or, put another way, ROI. As we've worked with a number of companies where this has been an important piece of the puzzle, we've created a simple sample equation you can use to highlight the benefits of investing in customer retention and happiness.

In this example, we're making very conservative assumptions about the impacts on installs and retention and not even assuming any impact on ARPU. Many businesses find that their happiest customers spend 1000% or more of the average consumer, so this is a place where a lot of ROI is uncovered over time as well.

Feel free to borrow it for your own purposes, we hope it'll help you grow your business and be more successful.

Finally, please let me know in the comments if you have other tips for making the case for customer engagement and retention or if you've employed other tactics that I haven't mentioned.

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5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click

Posted: 17 Jul 2013 05:01 AM PDT

Posted by Nathan_Safran

A Conductor study finds that the more explicit a headline is as to the reader takeaway, the more the headline resonates.

The new digital economy has created a wealth of new opportunity for modern marketers across search, social networks, and digital channels. Digital marketing has brought with it the opportunity to create leads, drive engagement, and drive sales at costs far less than traditional offline channels.

In some ways, though, online marketing has been victimized by its own success. Viral media site Upworthy's co-founder Peter Koechley describes it this way:

"When we look at the media landscape, we see there being more of a demand problem than a supply problem â€" how do you get people to care about important stuff amidst the avalanche of content we all face each day?"

With the growth of online marketing, both the channels and volumes of content competing for our readers' attention has exploded, making it increasingly challenging to stand out. Consider the following statistics:

Explosion in content competing for readers' attention: A Day in the Internet shows that 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, and 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Each day also brings 400 million tweets.
80% of readers never make it past the headline: According to some sources, on average, eight out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only two out of 10 will read the rest.
Traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline: According to Koechley, tests show that traffic to content at Upworthy can vary by as much as 500% simply because of the headline. "The headline is our one chance to reach people who have a million other things that they're thinking about, and who didn't wake up in the morning wanting to care about feminism or climate change, or the policy details of the election," he said.

Measuring which headlines resonate with readers

Given how significant a headline can be to click-through rate in both search and social online channels, here at Conductor we decided to test different headline types to determine those that resonate most with readers. Although it would be interesting to measure this by analyzing actual click traffic (and we know that there can be a difference between how respondents say they will click and how they actually do), it can be difficult to precisely test by getting multiple headlines for the same article in front of readers. Taking the survey approach also gave us the ability to gather demographic data about respondents to determine if headline preferences differed across specific groups.

To start, we analyzed a large sample set of headlines across multiple online publications and social networks to determine if there are general ways in which headlines are written. We determined there to be five high-level headline types:

Normal (Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
Question (What are Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful?)
How to (How to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
Number (30 Ways To Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
Reader-Addressing (Ways You Need to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)

Using actual headlines from multiple content sources including BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and the Conductor blog as starting points, we showed respondents headlines written in each style for three different articles and asked them to select the headline that resonated most.

BuzzFeed is onto something with its headline choices

Before we dig into the findings, I want to draw your attention to content aggregator BuzzFeed and its quirky CEO, Jonah Peretti. A recent New York Magazine profile of Peretti describes how he began a study of what makes content resonate after accidentally creating a viral sensation as a graduate student at MIT (and later as part of the team that created the Huffington Post). "I've spent over a decade thinking about how ideas spread," he says.

Close analysis of the front page of buzzfeed.com shows a number of things. First, what in the world is a boozy milkshake, and how could there be 26 different ways to make one? Second, and more to the point, they use â€˜number' headlines a lot. In fact, at the time of this writing, every other headline on the front page is in number format:

Turning now to our findings: As you have probably guessed by now, "number" headlines resonated most by far â€" a full 15% more than the second place "reader-addressing." (More on what we think this means in a bit.)

Looking at headline preferences across gender groups, we can see that females were even more predisposed to "number" headlines than males. Interestingly, across all the questions we asked, this was the only one in which we saw any significant difference among demographic groups:

Superlatives: Either hit me with it or understate it

Next, we tested respondent tolerance for superlatives in a headline. We showed them several different headlines that had between 0 and 4 superlatives in the headline and asked them to pick their favorite:

The 27 Ways to Train a Dog (0 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways to Train a Dog (1 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Dog (2 superlatives)
The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (3 superlatives)
The 27 Best and Smartest Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (4 superlatives)

The data shows more than half of respondents (51%) like the understated approach, preferring to click headlines with 0-1 superlatives. Interestingly, tolerance for superlatives tailed off until the headline packed with 4 superlatives, which had a full quarter of respondents stating they preferred it. These findings suggest readers prefer an understated approach or that the author shoot for the stars and tell the reader in strong terms why their content is worth reading, but the middle ground is to be avoided.

One out of five respondents don't seem to mind if you YELL AT THEM

Next we surveyed respondents about their headline capitalization preferences. Several headlines with distinct capitalization styles were shown to respondents and they were asked to select the one that resonated the most with them:

The 5 steps to prepare for the impending zombie apocalypse (lower case)
THE 5 STEPS TO PREPARE FOR THE IMPENDING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (capitals)
The 5 Steps to Prepare for the Impending Zombie Apocalypse (sentence case)
No preference

The data showed that respondents strongly preferred sentence case, but, surprisingly, 1 out of 5 respondents preferred the more authoritative capital letters. As described above, there was little difference in responses across demographic groups. While we don't recommend that content creators suddenly start writing their headlines in all capitals, it was interesting to see that a significant segment preferred that style. Otherwise, the group overwhelmingly preferred traditional sentence case.

Write headlines that leave no ambiguity

Although a follow-up study that thoroughly examines why certain headline types resonate over others would add greater insight for marketers and content creators, we can offer a hypothesis about what the research findings say about how to craft headlines.

As we started out saying, there has never been more content vying for reader attention â€" more channels, more content, more publishers all competing for our time and mind share. This means the modern internet user is forced to be more discerning about the headlines they click on, and is hyper-cognizant of where they are investing their time.

The commonality among the top three resonating headline types vs. the bottom two is that the more the headline type resonated, the more explicit the headline was as to what the reader was going to get out of reading the article.

Put another way, humans don't like uncertainty. A headline like "30 Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful" removes any ambiguity about what the article is going to do for me. It tells me exactly what I will and will not get from it: It is going to give me a specific number of ways to make drinking tea more enjoyable. This may be a reason why BuzzFeed has found such success with readers using these headline types.

Likewise, the second most popular headline type, reader-addressing, is also very explicit and direct about what I will get out of the article (Ways You Need to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful).

Contrast that with the least popular headline type, the question (What are Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful?), which, perhaps given the phrasing, leaves in place a certain amount of ambiguity for the reader.

Conclusion: three essential tips when crafting your headlines

While we are not saying it makes sense for every publisher to try and become the next BuzzFeed, and we don't think the data suggests a directive to publishers to write every headline in "number format," we do think it serves as a reminder to publishers of the following guidelines:

Don't forget the headline!
Too many content creators invest a great deal of time and energy creating awesome content, but then tack a "meh" headline on as an afterthought. Remember â€" 80% of readers never make it past the headline, so spend the extra bit of time to create a great one that grabs the reader's attention.
Be as explicit as possible about what your content will and will not do
There are a bazillion pieces of content clamoring for your audience's attention. Our data suggests that the clearer you can make your headline as to what the content will and will not do, the more that headline will resonate with your audience.
Don't forget to craft "headlines" in search, too
The search results are no less of a "headline click decision" for your audience than other online channels. Make sure you are putting your best foot forward when enticing readers to click on your website in the search results by following rich snippet best practices, and by leveraging schema.org to include visual markup (shown to increase CTR in many cases). (This is a great resource for more information on implementing schema.org markup.)

At the end of the day â€" if nothing else â€" this research should remind us that headlines are at least as important as the content itself in capturing reader attention in both search and social. Content creators, be sure to give headlines proper attention before publishing content.

Seth's Blog : More people are doing marketing badly...

More people are doing marketing badly...

than any other profession I can imagine. What an opportunity...

If we were building bridges this badly, the safety of our nation would be in doubt. The local sub shop makes a fine sub, but has a dumb name, a typo in their sign, no attention paid to customer service and on and on. Same for the big hospital down the street and the politician you wish would get a clue.

There are three reasons for this:

1. Everyone is a marketer, so there's a lot more of it being done.

2. Most people who do marketing are actually good at doing something else (like making subs) and they're merely making this up as they go along.

2. There's no standards manual, not easy way to check your work. Without a rule book, it's hard to follow the rules. (For the innovators and creators out there, this is great news, of course.)

The cure? Noticing. Notice what is working in the real world and try to figure out why. Apply it to your work. Repeat.

Learn to see, to discern the difference between good and bad, between useful and merely comfortable.

And after you learn, speak up. Noticing doesn't work if you don't care and if you don't take action.

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Your Weekly Inspiration from Pinterest

Trending on Pinterest...

Is Comic-Con 2013. The international convention returns to San Diego this week which means tons of pins about comic book art, costumes and blockbuster movies, such as the sequels for Captain America and The Hunger Games.