Automated Insights – This is the future of Marketing Analytics Edit post

I am glad to see the Google announcement on a new stream of automated insights in the Google Analytics mobile app come live into my mobile!

Relief, enlightenment and excitement are the three words I will give once I saw the automated insights feature in Google Analytics!

Why am I relieved about Automated Insights?

As a person involved with Digital Infrastructure and Online Marketing, I have always been excited by the tools and technologies available in the market. When it comes to thesteps involved, creating dashboards and measuring success comes at a heavy price.

Due to various tools involved and different touch points being used (Web Analytics, Email Marketing data, Social Media data, Marketing Automation data), I feel challenged because of one important thing! You are thrown on your face lots of data! And you as a marketer are expected to derive valuable insights.

One might argue, that there is no easy way, and it has to be done! But, give a pause and think! Why can’t the intelligence be given at your finger tips? Why you need to fell lost and frustrated!

A new stream of automated insights in the Google Analytics mobile app

I am having a great relief that Google has finally opened up this new avenue, automating the insights in Google Analytics. Finally, automated insights have arrived!

Why enlightenment?

As like any other tool, Google Analytics is good at pulling out the data, filtering it and showing them on various dashboards. You can further customise them to suite your needs. But that process is not that easy. Trust me! For a person either starting a journey in digital marketing or running a small team, it is not an easy road to take.

Beyond clicks and visits, demographics and geo data, tech and key landing pages, you cannot easily derive much data, if you have not configured custom dashboards. Nor these most of the times will lead to actionable insights.

A very basic example is if my traffic has increased this month, which part of the online site is most sought or lead to rise of sales, which mediums led to this? Now all these are part of the automated insights! So, you can be enlightened every week with automated insights!

Why I am excited about the future?

Again, I am not talking of those segment of online marketers those who are lucky enough to have those expensive marketing automation tools. I am talking about those huge number of marketers who are small teams or even individuals! Trust me this is an awakening for the individual tools providers!

The social media tools, email marketing tools are all doing nothing but a postman job! They pick your content and push onto a channel! They give data on the individual campaign and older ones on how did the campaign perform. Nothing beyond that!

What if your email marketing tool can automatically tell you to schedule an email based on a segment, based on historic performance! What if your social media tool will tell you which kind of social media messages (text, image, video) work better for which geographies, if pushed at what times! This is very much possible, and it is time you demand your tool providers to start thinking in this direction (and provide them not at a heavy premium, but at a reasonable price).

Because there is no value if the online marketing is not optimised based on insights, and the future for analytics and insights for online marketing lie in automation! So, the future in online marketing is truly for Automated Insights. And this will make the job of people like us easy and turn us to be efficient. That is why I am excited 🙂 !

Sending Segment Emails using Mautic Cloud

Email statistics shown for a segment email delivered on Mautic Cloud

So, if you are wondering how to send segment emails using Mautic Cloud paid version. Then read this post.

What is a segment email in Mautic?

A segment email in Mautic is a one time email marketing affair that can be manually sent to selected contact segments. Once the email has been sent, it cannot be edited, as it is not a campaign that can be repeated. However, it can be sent to new contacts (manually) as new contacts get added to an associated segments, that were used when the mail was sent initially.

Steps to be followed to send segment emails using Mautic Cloud:

Here are the aspects you need to be aware of before sending emails.

1. Get your email template ready and tested before delivering the email
2. Ensure you already know the Email list/ Segment to whihc you will mail
3. Have the external SMTP service settings configured, tested – if you want to send bulk emails using a third party email service like Amazon SES, Mandrill, Sendgrid etc.
4. When you have successfully tested, schedule the email to be sent
5. Monitor your delivery based on the information provided on emails sent, opened, pending
6. Once email is sent, view detailed stats on sent, opened, link clicks
7. If you want to add the people who opened the emails, go to a segment you want to add to and apply the filter based on name of email

Have any questions on email delivery of segment emails in Mautic Cloud? Please comment, I will try to answer your questions.

 

 

Email Subscriber Management – From bad to better

If you wish to unsubscribe to this email, please reply to this email with subject line ‘Unsubscribe’

I come across emails with such a message in the email footer many number of times! And if you are you are one of those working on such email then, you never thought of current value of your email marketing to customers!

Yes, you might be looking at value the customer is deriving and blindly believing that if you have got a customer as a lead, you can auto-on board them and start bombarding them with e-messages.

There are two problems in this approach! First, once the customer on-boarding did not happen by choice. So the quality of your email list speaks to itself as you haven’t asked their mailing preferences based on email lists, segmented them by their interest (especially in case of B2B marketing).

Second, you never thought of maintaining an automated way, the customer can manage the email preferences 0r unsubscribe!

Customer on-boarding must happen by choice. Else, they own the right to manage the email preference or unsubscribe!

This I believe most of the email marketers are doing! I am myself a victim of those unsolicited emails right from SEO companies to third party data vendors! The only thing you see is ‘If you wish to unsubscribe please reply to this email.’ And I must confess, I have made others too victims of this approach!

What is the Solution?

If you cannot avoid the temptation of on-boarding a client and give him his choice, then at least as a marketer, you need to give the customer and option to set ’email preferences’ and/or give them an option to ‘Unsubscribe’ or ‘Completely Opt-out’

Always use the unsubscribe tag/ field at the bottom of your email!

Many email marketing services have this capability, and it is a pretty easy way to implement it. Just use the tags like {unsubscribe} or {unsubscribelist} that we are implementing in the Elastic Email service using Merge Fields.

Try to maintain a global email unsubscribe list, this makes life easy when you move between different email marketing services

Manage a global email unsubscribe list

Another final aspect is always trying to maintain a global email unsubscribe list. This is specially important, as you tend to move from one system to another system of managing your customer database, or even change your email marketing service provider. This needs to be especially shared with the teams that are involved in managing those lists within the organization. This really helps you to mitigate the email deliverability problems in such cases, and  not annoy people who are not interested in your emails. That means they are neither your lead, nor a prospect specially when targeting them via email communications as a medium for marketing.

Powerful emails – Enable URL tracking

This is a series of posts that I will be writing that I am using to help my team to move towards this process called – powerful mailers.

But before you bounce off from this page, and you are pretty new to all this stuff, understand what are the lost opportunities, when you don’t track your emails.

What are the disadvantages of sending emails, without a mail service and tracking enabled:

1. You never know if that person has received that email. Yes, bulk mails get stuck in the spam/ junk filters. They will be either rejected or will get bounced. They might even land up in the junk folder of your client.
2. Even if the person received the email, did he open/ read? Yes, you can track open, clicks of your emails, but not when sending from outlook, as far as I know. So, you will need some application, service or a plugin that can help you do that. Why are open and click rates important? That’s a very naive question – what is the use in sending 1000 emails when only 50 of them open and 5 of them click. Why not just send mails to those 50 then :).
3. How many of those people clicked on your emails really did what you expect them to do? Wow, you had a great offer email sent to the customer, but did he eventually end-up landing on your page Did he avail this offer? How may customers visited the site from that holiday campaign that I’ve sent? Got it, so you need to have tracking enabled.

How do you enable URL tracking in our emails?

At this point you still might be sending bulk mails using Outlook Mail Merge feature or any other email tool from our PC within your premises. Here there is are the two disadvantages (1&2) still applicable. But will help you to be successful in tracking them on your website.

For this purpose we will use Google URL builder to add tracking links to your emails. 

URL Builder is a pretty straight forward tool, to track user visit activity. To understand the URL builder visit https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Wondering how to use that, go here using google url builder  and get to know more!

Skype for Mac does not open downloaded Images – Here is the solution!

Are you coming across these problems with Skype on your Mac system?

• Unable to open the downloaded Images
• Images in Skype are not clickable
• You cannot browse the folder where the image got downloaded

This is a simple problem, where you might be banging your heads for. Yes, really simple – and the solution lies here:

1. Click on Skype Menu and then go to Preferences
2. Stay under the General Settings tab.
3. Under the Save files in: feature, you see an option – Open “safe” files after receiving.
4. Enable this option, by checking it
5. Close the options
6. Go to Skype Menu and click on Quit Skype
7. Restart the Skype program. You should be good to go!

This option in mac sometime prevents you from viewing the downloaded images and media. You will not be able to preview the image in default image application or will not be able to browse the folder where the image is downloaded using Finder. Enabling this option, quit Skype once and restart the program.

This should work. I have just helped a friend do that, and should be useful for you too!

How to access your Twitter Analytics Data?

Twitter now provides you a the analytics for free. The Tweet Activity Tab as part of the analytics dashboard provides detailed monthly impressions bar graph, followed by details on individual tweets.

This is a good a great move from Twitter, for all those Pro-Twitter users, especially the Twitter for Business users. Previously only being available with limited capabilities (for unknown reasons) – Twitter has joined the bandwagon with Facebook & LinkedIn to provide the analytics to its users.

How to get the Twitter Analytics for your Profile?

Does Twitter Provide Analytics?
From now, the answer will be yes

How to access analytics data on Twitter?
Sing-in to your Twitter account. In a separate Tab or Window in your web browser – Type in https://analytics.twitter.com

Is there a way to access Analytics from my Account or Account Settings?
As of today no! I didn’t find any option being offered by Twitter. As explained above, you need to directly go to the analytics URL.

What is Twitter Analytics Offering?

As on date, Twitter Analytics is coming as a separate dashboard kind of an interface that contains three tabs – Tweet Activity, Followers and Twitter Cards.

In this post let us see in brief what the dashboard tab for Tweet Activity contains. This tab provides you a complete picture of your recent activity on Twitter with a bar graph with monthly summary of Tweet Activity,

• Your Twitter post impressions (number of times users saw a tweet), followed by
• Analytics for your latest Tweets – listed with data on Impressions, Engagements (all the clicks for the tweet and the elements) and Engagement rate
• Additional data on – Engagements, Link Clicks, ReTweets, Favourites, Replies is also shown in the dashboard in the right side

Can I export the Twitter Analytics Data?

Yes! Twitter encourages the users to export and download the Tweet activity report a .CSV file, that you can open with any spreadsheet or database program. However, there are no filtering options at this time, before you export and the export option is pretty much limited to the Tweet Activity only.

But the report is pretty comprehensive, with the following fields being captured, apart from many other related to promoted tweets:

Tweet id | Tweet permalink |  Tweet text time | impressions | engagements | engagement rate | retweets | replies | favorites | user profile clicks | url clicks | hashtag clicks | detail expands | permalink clicks | embedded media clicks | app opens | app install attempts | follows | email tweet 

LinkedIn Introduces – Who’s viewed your profile

An email landed up in my inbox from LinkedIn with subject line  “Harsha Vardhan, you’re one of the first to get the new Who’s Viewed Your Profile.”

I was glad that this feature landed up for free users also, which till now was a Pro feature in LinkedIn.

An email from LinkedIn inviting to use the feature – Who’s Viewed Your Profile

This feature can be accessed through the Menu item as shown in this image below

The feature is right under the profile Menu, below the Edit Profile option

Features

The key features of this new service are:

• To check out who’s viewing you
• See the impact of your LinkedIn profile, and track your progress
• It also provides custom tips on companies and people to follow, groups to get involved in

Who’s Viewed Your Profile – Viewer Data is shown for the last 90 days

This feature is definitely a good add-on for serious LinkedIn users, to understand how their profile is being searched and the impact of profile in the online space. However, the Custom Tips seems to be a move from LinkedIn to keep its users engaged, share content, help people who are dormant for sometime to connect to new people, and to keep their network growing (because LinkedIn is all about network). On the other side the user is asked to update the location details so that LinkedIn can provide more relevant and location specific jobs. Let us see how impactful this feature would be in the coming days.

A Link to Privacy

There is another catch that LinkedIn has placed, which is related to the Privacy Controls available in LinkedIn under – Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile.

You need to set the privacy mode to Your Name and Headline (which is a Recommended setting). There is a clear note from LinkedIn stating

When you switch back to showing your full name, your history won’t be restored. We only show you who viewed your profile when you browse under your full name. To see all your views, be sure to always browse as yourself.

So before you take advantage of this new feature, ensure to change the profile settings. Else, your viewer history gets erased whenever you switch to browsing anonymously.

Facebook Pages Admin- See Who’s Posting as .. to be rolled out from 20 Feb, 2014

Starting on 20 February, the names of admins will show next to their posts and comments. This will be visible to anyone with an admin role on your Page.

This note is visible just under your admin panel in the Facebook Pages that you manage. The below image shows a message shown for a page I manage for Geospatial Media and Communications.

Who’s posting as admin in your Facebook pages?

While it is not know why Facebook is rolling out this feature, my best guess is that it will help the admins, managers to know who is posting what on the Facebook pages.

According to the Facebook Help section post If multiple people help manage my Page, how can I see who posted something?, it seems that the following features would be rolled out on posts or comments created on or after February 20, 2014.

• Page post – name of the person who posted will be listed below the name of your Page next to Posted by
• Page comment – name of the person who commented will be listed below the comment next to Commented on by

Getting worried, if ever one will see this information? Please don’t be, as per Facebook, only people who help manage your Page can see this information.

Learning with GutsGo

I made this decession finally – wanted to understand a bit more about the concepts of Digital marketing. Having to knock my heads out every time to understand concepts such as:

• What are all the online / digital marketing tactics that I need?
• How does online PPC Ads Work?
• How to effectively use Analytics ?
• And many more ..

Was trying to know about the courses that are there in India – and then I stumbled on GutsGo GOMP!

Why I choose this course?

• Independent of your travels, you can attend the classes online
• The only other similar program from NIIT, being taught by the same tutor was a little on a higher side
• GOMP tried to show the promise of Alumni connections, a netwroking group, and a personal  touch