1. Don’t cram your campaign with heaps of copy.

Aim for writing a few enticing yet succinct sentences about your subject, then push your reader back to your website to learn more.

This way you tick two boxes: not overwhelming your reader with too much copy and also driving traffic back to your site.

2. Put your most important/interesting piece of content at the top of your campaign.

Your recipients probably won’t read all of your newsletter, so don’t bury your best content mid way or towards the end of your campaign.

3. Study reports from your past campaigns.

What was the content most clicked on? How many people opened one campaign compared to another? Use this invaluable knowledge to continue to improve and refine your eNewsletters.

4. Experiment with your subject lines and delivery times using A/B Split Testing.

Research has shown that open rates tend to be higher on a Wednesday morning and campaigns sent on a Friday or over the weekend are more likely to be marked as spam. While this is worth taking into consideration, each market is different.

Mix it up by sending your campaign to one group on a Monday morning if you normally send on a Wednesday. Get creative with your subject lines. Try keeping it focused on the main content as opposed to something generic. Include your company name or omit it. Send the same campaign, but with two different subject lines to your subscribers. Study your reports and find out what has worked best for you.

5. Use Segments to Target Your Campaigns

If you’ve got the information available, tailor your campaigns to a special segment of your subscriber list. Know you have a group of people interested in a particular topic or product? You’re guaranteed to get a better open rate when you talk directly to a consumer’s interests.

Already I hear many clients and colleagues cutting their advertising dollar from the once useful yet still expensive door stop, the Yellow Pages. They realise this is no longer the way customers are finding them. The old word of mouth is still the winner for many businesses however that ‘word’ can now travel on the ‘super highway’ via a myriad of digital channels with or without the supercharge of social media. Even my mum uses the internet to find stuff! So the big driver behind all this is convenience in our modern, time poor lives.

As the world becomes more convenient peoples expectations change. If they have a positive ecommerce, service, information or brand experience online that will become their benchmark to what they will expect from the next business they deal with, your business. If your digital assets don’t communicate your brand, products, services and deliver on your business promise whether it be ‘great prices’ or ‘excellent service’ then it’s time to act or be left behind.

As our lives become more digital and our capabilities and digital tools converge there will be very little that can’t be facilitated by digital technology. This revolution doesn’t stop at your website. It does and will to a greater extent effect how you market your business, how you talk to your customers, how you deliver your goods and services, how you collect and interpret business information, your internal culture, your brand culture, your brand experience. It may expand your business offering or it may send you broke if your no longer relevant or useful.

In any business, strategy is important. However at this point in time I believe that business strategy with a skew toward how you will operate in the digital age is more important than ever. This is about staying relevant, innovating, finding new ways to talk to your customers, finding new customers and working smarter not harder.

This doesn’t just apply to technology based businesses either, this applies to every business. Every business needs customers, needs to communicate, sell, provide service and be found. So start to think about your business, it’s customer touch points, it’s objectives, what it offers now and what it could offer in the future. With the current rate of change a new digital paradigm will upon all businesses well within a decade, depending what you business your in it is already upon us.

If you’re a business manager that’s not technologically inclined and all of this is makes you uncomfortable then you need to talk to someone who can align your business objectives with your digital assets and opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a massive change that happens overnight but rather a staged approach that is prioritised strategically to ensure you are well positioned for tomorrow.

You can read a bit more about what a digital strategy is here.

Apparently a South African company conducted a little experiment – it used a carrier pigeon and Telkom ADSL (South Africa’s largest internet service provider) to send 4GB of data at the same time. Guess which one arrived first? Young Winston, the 11 month old carrier pigeon took home the gold.

Unfortunately for Telkom, only 4% of the 4GB had been transferred in the same amount of time it took Winston to arrive at his destination (just over 2 hours), with data card safely strapped to his leg.

Of course there are the obvious security implications of having pigeons flying around with data, but it raises an interesting point. Memory card storage keeps getting bigger – and there are still Australians out there forced to use archaic dial up internet. The lesson? Maybe pigeons aren’t just ‘rats with wings’ after all.

Check out the full story on the Mashable website.

While we’d love to drop support for IE6 altogether (it would certainly be like Christmas for the developers) – there are two arguments to this contentious issue.

A Bit of Background

In the digital world, 10 years is practically a lifetime – and that’s coming up to how long it’s been since IE6 was first released in 2001. At this time, IE had an incredible dominance of the market – at one stage, up to 95% of users browsed the web with IE6. Since then, technology has progressed at the speed of light – with IE6 the continual splinter in its side, which retains power, even today, purely because of its number of users.

The For Argument: Innovation is Being Stifled

Designers and developers’ number one argument against IE6 is that it restricts innovation. In almost every way. There are a bunch of features (some technical, some design) which IE6 doesn’t support – so designers and developers need to spend a lot of extra time writing ‘exceptions’ to their system or tone down their creativity to allow for the roadblocks IE6 presents.

The digital industry has put up with IE6 until now. But it has reached a crisis point with the advent of HTML 5 – a lot of which IE6 will not recognise. HTML is part of the core code which shapes the internet – and version 5 includes some pretty exciting new features.

The ‘IE No More’ movement argues that users are really the ones getting the raw end of the deal with IE6 still around. User experiences could be richer, more exciting and more powerful – if not held back by a need for IE6 compliance.

On a more practical note, there are also some fairly serious security issues with using IE6 – your data is simply not as safe as if you were using a more technologically advanced browser.

Furthermore, they propose the only way to force IE6 users to upgrade their browser is to stop supporting it – when a user’s favourite sites cease to look and work the same, they’ll have no choice. It will be to the benefit of the entire web community – industry, designers, developers and users alike.

The Against Argument: Corporate Users Don’t Have a Choice

People don’t use gaming consoles that are nearly 10 years old – I think it would even be difficult to find an appliance in any kitchen which has reached double digits. IE6 users can’t seem to give it up. But for some IE6 users – who ‘The Against’ argument is founded on – don’t have much of a choice.

Fast forward from 2001, when IE6 was released, to today – and even though there have been two subsequent releases of IE, many users out there still haven’t upgraded from IE6. While a significant portion of this statistic are undoubtedly at-home-users, who received IE6 in their Windows XP Operating System and have never realised the need to upgrade – the troublesome portion is corporations. These are the organisations who still use IE6 because of the time and financial costs of updating the browser of every computer in their network. This is why it would be unfortunate to drop IE6 support – because of the employees who have the browser forced upon them.

A new website has even been started to ‘name and shame’ organisations who still use IE6, in an attempt to force them to upgrade. As you’ll see – there are some major players on that list – and some serious numbers of employees who will be affected if IE6 support is dropped.

Finally, Microsoft also refuse to drop support for IE6. While they support users updating their browser, they retain choice of browser remains with the user. And as Microsoft remain committed to supporting Windows XP – they will do the same for IE6.

Where To Now?

It’s unlikely IE6 will be going anywhere anytime soon. This is primarily because Microsoft still support it, and corporations (especially in the current climate) will refuse to fork out the man power and money required to upgrade all their systems.

But for digital agencies and individuals who have already made the decision to stop supporting IE6, this doesn’t mean their IE6 users will not be able to access their websites altogether – they just wouldn’t quite look or behave exactly as they should. Not ideal, but not unusable either.

And our stance on whether we’ll be continuing support for IE6 in our projects? Let’s just say it’s still a hotly contested one in the development studio. Stay tuned…

Regardless of the size of a site, the entire development process follows a very structured cycle – and this cycle ensures the client is always aware of how the finished product will look and behave, and we can make sure the project stays within the agreed scope and estimate.

During the whole project cycle, the site will pretty much pass through the hands of everyone in our office – from the Information Architect to Design Project Manager, Web Developers and Financial Controllers – it’s very much a team effort.

Here’s a small insight into the web development cycle.

Step One – The Site Map

The first step is confirming the site map (which we prepare for clients when we put together our estimate). Once the site map is approved, it forms the scope for the project and any diversions/additions incur additional costs and could compromise the agreed timeline. Once we receive the approved site map, I put together a proposed project timeline, milestones, deadlines for content and approvals, and finally, a proposed launch date.

Step Two – The Wireframe

Once the site map is approved, we move onto the wire-framing stage. This is where our Information Architect creates a ‘blueprint’ for the site, taking into consideration site objectives and conversion optimisation techniques. We start a home page layout, as the rest of the site will follow a similar template (very important for usability). This stage is not indicative of design at all, it’s just a blueprint which will lay out the different areas of the page and the different functionalities.

Step Three – The Design

Next is web design, where we take your brand into the digital realm! We’ll design the home page first, and make sure you’re happy with the visual concept before applying the design to some of the internal pages.

Step Four – The Planning

While the wire-framing and design are in progress, the developers will do the technical planning for the website and set up the Symphony CMS (content management system). I’m also in touch quite early on to discuss a few technical bits such as domain name logins and hosting information (if you don’t host your website with us) and most importantly – website content and images (as this is the number one reason the launch of a website is delayed). I’ll give you a deadline as to when we’ll need remaining content by in order to confirm the agreed launch date. 

Step Five – The Build

Once the design is approved, it’s all about web development – actually building the site. Once development is nearly complete I can begin integrating content into the site, and also start cross browser and quality testing (which is basically making sure everything works and looks as it is meant to, and you have received everything we promised in the site map).

Step Six – The Review

Once content integration and testing are complete, I’ll send you the development url, where you can view the site. Here is when you advise me of any copy/basic amends you would like to make before we launch the site. During this time, we’ll be doing the search engine optimisation for the site. 

Step Seven – The Launch

Finally, we launch the site! Once the site is live, we produce the training videos, so you can manage the site yourselves through the CMS system.

Step Eight – The Evaluation

The work doesn’t stop once the website is live. As we install Google Analytics on all our sites, we give you the tools to evaluate your website with reports available on traffic, unique visitors, goal conversions (which tracks completion of your key site objectives, such as purchases or application form submission). At this stage we can also help drive traffic to your site via various internet marketing strategies such as Adword campaigns (or Pay Per Click advertising.)

Seems so simple doesn’t it?! Of course there is much more to it – but I wouldn’t want to bore you with CSS exception rules and use cases (maybe next blog). Hopefully you’ll feel a little more knowledgeable about the development cycle the first time (or the next time) you consider commissioning a website.

How people, their communities, organisations and society at large communicate and connect is undergoing a renaissance – a communication revolution. I don’t think people have communicated this much before in history and it is addictive for those who do, as they express themselves via their messages to the cyber community with a sense of global connectedness. For so long people have felt disconnected from their community and society. Now any digital medium has the capacity to be interactive and highly social.

So without getting too philosophical my point is this: social media taps into core human needs and behaviours – it’s not a fad, but rather a extension and automation of our primal desire to communicate and interact with our fellow man. So what does this mean for your brand?

Well, it means a lot, some good news and some ‘difficult’ news. Some of you may have noticed organisations/media scrambling to adapt to this new communication platform. Bravo for the progressive ones that have. Social media is just another nail in the coffin of traditional communication channels which is all part of the digital revolution. As the focused message of broadcast becomes a diluted and narrowcast message, so too comes the weakening of traditional media worth and power.

So many businesses are confused how to handle this communication revolution. Some have seen it as a soap box from which to try and sell, others have engaged specialist suppliers to maintain their social networks, some have thorough understanding and use it well, and others are just hoping it goes away.

If you are looking at maintaining it in-house this is my advice. Whether you are a very large or very small brand you need to boil down what it means to be in business and why people will want to deal with you. We all know how much easier it is to make a sale if your customer believes in your abilities, if they trust you, know you, if you’re recommended or if they just like you. So how does social media play into this?

If you open a Twitter account and start tweeting “buy from us, we are the best and cheapest” or “our widget is the best widget in the market”, then stop now. You have the wrong idea. You are now part of a community – so you need to communicate in a natural and beneficial way that also is an expression of your brand personality.

Some tips:

1. Post on topics which are of interest to your market and provide an opportunity to show you know your stuff without the hard sell.
2. Engage with other people in your network on topics of interest. Two way conversation is always more interesting than one way.
3. Put some brand personality into your posts to express what kind of business you are.
4. Give away pearls of wisdom to your network which communicates your expertise and generosity. Asking questions can be a good way to ignite conversation too.
5. Let key people within your organisation, who know your brand, post to your network. The input will be richer, more varied and more representative of your true brand culture (I believe the return here is greater than the risk).
6. Track your social network activity through RSS feeds or one of the many applications that aggregate the information so you can stay across what is happening in your network daily.
7. Update regularly to keep your presence and your last post fresh (at least weekly).
8. Only follow others who are related to your business and industry or who may be a customer (you can usually tell from their location or recent updates).
9. Share interesting or entertaining information with your network. It doesn’t always have to be ‘business’, these posts reflect your brand personality by showing what you find interesting or funny.
10. Spend some time on set up and becoming familiar with those who make up your network to see if there are people you want to connect with directly.

The good news here is that although there is an investment of time and content, you can develop a direct conversation with your market at a very low cost. From a marketing perspective this is immensely powerful as you can engage, entertain, educate and assist your network as if you where face to face with them, whether you have a hundred or a hundred thousand people listening.

If you haven’t yet, try it out (or at least secure your brand as your username!).

The technology is here for your brand to have an open and ongoing conversation each day with it’s market at almost no cost. What more do you want?

After I wrote this blog I found this video, good illustration of the importance of being able to have a conversation with your market through social media.

I’ve already mentioned that the presence of Internet Explorer makes our jobs infinitely more difficult than they need to be, for all the exception rules which need to be written and additional hours of testing which need to be done to make sure our sites cater for the beast of a browser (which is still the most widely used by internet users).

But the point of this blog is basically to rant about Microsoft Outlook specifically. Yesterday, we discovered via a protest led by Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project that Microsoft will be continuing to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML email campaigns in Outlook 2010.

This is a problem because Outlook does not adhere to the international standard for email clients — so we have to use a development style that is practically archaic and create very simple designs so email campaigns don’t arrive as a jumbled mess for Outlook users (which is a pretty significant percentage of users out there).

In the face of the prospect of dealing with the many associated issues Outlook brings to email marketing and web design for potentially another five years (at least) Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project decided they’ve finally had a gutful. So they kicked off the protest fixoutlook.org using Twitter. When I first received the email yesterday, there were 200 followers. Now, there are about 20,000 – and increasing. Pretty impressive.

However, despite the overwhelming support from the digital community for the initiative, Microsoft are not going to change their ways. While they couldn’t ignore the thousands of responses to the issue in such a short amount of time – Outlook 2010 will not change.

William Kennedy, VP of Microsoft Office’s Communication and Forms Team, confirmed this via the Microsoft website yesterday, defending Outlook’s email authoring capabilities and the fact you can create HTML-like messages without the use of a third party system. This is all well and good if everyone in the world used Outlook. But they don’t. Therefore, for the rest of the non-Outlook using world, designers and developers are forced to conform to a separate set of rules to fit in with the Outlook way of displaying emails.

But the battle is not over. Check out Fix Outlook’s response to William Kennedy, and the huge amounts of press the campaign has been receiving on the Email Standards Project website. You can also find out more by visiting the Fix Outlook site, or follow @fixoutlook on Twitter.

Rant over.

While the sheer numbers of Twitter users should make you sit up and take note, the most important aspect is what Twitterers are actually saying – and how much of it. Millions of conversations are happening, right now, all over the world. And many of these conversations revolve around brands.

An interesting thing happened yesterday which really blew me away, and reinforced the collective power of the Twitter community. A bit of background into the issue: when we are building HTML email templates, we are forced to use a development style which is seriously ancient to cater for Microsoft Outlook. This is because Microsoft Outlook has not conformed to the international standard for email clients, therefore it has some serious limitations which we need to account for, because it is still one of the most popular email clients going around. It certainly doesn’t make our job any easier.

Microsoft recently announced they were going to continue their existing practice, instead of getting with the times for Outlook 2010. Naturally, the digital community was not impressed by this, and led by Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project, started a Twitter campaign called ‘Fix Outlook’ to protest. When I first received the email at 2pm yesterday, there were about 200 followers. Now, as I write this blog, there are nearly 20,000 followers. That’s a lot of negative energy out there directed at Microsoft. That’s pretty impossible to ignore (which is effectively what Microsoft is going to do, but that’s another story). But there have been plenty of other stories as well, of brands generating positive buzz through conversations with their audience.

The point I’m getting to here is that while your brand might not be on the same level as Microsoft, chances are there probably either have been, or will be conversations on Twitter about your brand in the future. The first thing you need to do is secure a Twitter account for your brand as soon as possible, even if you don’t use it yet. It’s actually probably better if you don’t start posting straight away – spend some time getting a feel for it first. Do some research. Do some networking. Check out this blog by Michael Britto on ‘10 Best Twitter Practices for Brands’ it’s a must read.

Don’t let your brand get left behind – Twitter is here to stay. Jump on the Twitter Train today.

Of course, this is an age old problem. It is a topic many designers try not to think about and when they see it, they know it is best to ignore — they have enough sleepless nights. Given the current economic climate we are seeing nervous marketers and brand custodians performing the most terrible acts. I cannot even call it DIY Graphic Design because it is not design. It is DIY damage. It is completely understandable that costs must be cut, it’s the reality of business at this time, and it is accepted that marketing budgets may be slashed, and hey why not? Since they are the very thing that bring your company business over your competitors in the first place. I am not sure if it is ignorance or arrogance that leads a marketing manager or any business employee given the chance, to express their creative flair in such an absurd way. Does this mentality also allow them to sort out the office plumbing or auto repairs on the boss’ Rangie when things go a little sideways? It must become a consideration that an enormous amount of time and financial investment has been made over time for most companies as they build their brand. They become visually established, and when they see the effects they feel strong and cherish their brand. The moment sales dip, they turn their back forgetting their one true love of 5 minutes before. Out comes the drill.

I am confident, that deep down we all know that taking on your own graphic design is the perfect example of cutting your nose to spite your face. Really, this blog is simply a plea to those out there who have or are considering home dentistry. Please, call us first. We will talk you down, and help you and your brand to safer ground and rehabilitate if necessary. It doesn’t have to cost the earth and we promise you wont lose any teeth.

I always struggle as to where to start explaining, because there are so many different parts to the role of Digital Project Manager. I’m definitely not a developer, but can talk the talk, even though I can’t walk to walk. That said, it probably helps we have a great team of developers who are great at ‘translating’ for me. Or maybe I just know the right questions to ask. Either way, we seem to understand each other.

Here’s the five main aspects of my job:

Project Management

This is probably the biggest component of my role. I keep our clients happy by getting their projects completed on time and to budget. This involves managing the developers’ time everyday, and asking lots of very annoying questions like: ‘How long will this take?’ and ‘Are you done yet?’ or ‘When will this be finished?’. I liaise with clients about the status of their project and organise the things which we need them to do in order to get their digital project completed such as content, logos or getting domain name access.

Testing

I make sure your digital project works. This involves doing lots of testing, making sure that the end product looks the same as the design and it works the way we said it would it the site map. This is a time consuming part of my job, due to two words: Internet Explorer. If you’d like to do your part for the web community right now and you’re an Internet Explorer user, please download Firefox or Safari right now. Having one less IE user on the interweb makes my job a million times easier (and that’s no exaggeration).

Content Integration

One part of my job I always think will be really quick – and it never is. Once I’ve got the content from the client (which is the hardest part by far) I then use Symphony CMS to integrate it and make sure it’s laid out and formatted correctly.

Search Engine Optimisation

We’ve got a pretty good track record with search results, and to keep up our reputation, I write all the search engine optimisation rules for our websites. This involves setting up the ‘rule’ in Symphony (via a very clever SEO Manager module we created) and using keyword research to create custom title tags, meta data and keywords for each page of our clients’ sites, driving more traffic their way through high ranking search engine results.

Training

Using a CMS is usually pretty foreign to most people, so I create custom screen cast training videos. But as clients get the hang of using the CMS, I’m always on the phone or over email helping out as they get more familiar with the system.

The Rest…

Then there’s the seemingly millions of other little bits and pieces I do everyday – keeping up with new technology, dreaming and writing blogs for the R&B site, copywriting, maintaining the R&B site, meeting with clients, putting together estimates for new work, setting up email accounts, managing hosting, registering domain names and problem solving with the developers about how we can continue to push the boundaries of web development.

All in a day’s work really.