On Average Email Lists Growing Despite the Economy

Interesting new chart from MarketingSherpa shows that most marketers (67% of them) have found their email list growing this year- that’s taking dead and unsubscribed lists into account.

What also makes this interesting is that consumers are still signing up – despite us hearing other reports that say there’s too much email being sent. So the public still have a desire to receive information in this format. We’ve just got to all be more careful about how we use their data.

Everyone’s using Twitter – but not twitter.com!?!

Very interesting stats were recently published by Sysomos showing the top applications that are being used for Twitter.

These are applications used by people to manage their Twitter account – rather like using Outlook or Thunderbird to manage your emails.

The top 20 makes for interesting reading as does the change from June to December. However, for me the most interesting thing is that the number of people actually using Twitter.com to manage their tweets is falling fairly rapidly.

In June 45.7% of Tweets were made using Twitter.com, by December this has falled to 40.5% – a sizeable drop in just 6 months.

Tweetdeck is still the most popular app, but is loosing market share almost as fast as Twitter.com.

Check out the full analysis here

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps are now big business. Apple recently announced that their App Store contains over 100,000 third party applications and that there have been over 2 billion downloads. With the average price of an app being around the 60p mark, this means the Apple App Store has generated around 1.2 billion in revenue in its short existence. Revenue generated is split between both Apple and the app makers, with the app makers receiving a 70% share.

There are apps for virtually everything. Some are utilities, others are designed to entertain or inform.

The following are 5 of the highest grossing apps currently available on the Apple App store:

1. The Guardian

This app enables comprehensive offline browsing of the Guardian website as well as topic based news search and navigation. Users can also access galleries and audio of the latest stories.

2. Tom Tom Sat Nav

This app works in conjunction with the Tom Tom car kit to provide turn-by-turn instructions while you are driving. As with actual Tom Tom units the Tom Tom app features user friendly 2D or 3D driving views as well as spoken word instructions.

3. Jamie’s 20 Minuet Meals

Not content with telling us all what we should be eating, the famous TV chef now has an app too. This intuitive app comes loaded with over 50 recipes, 1000 high res step-by-step photos and over 75 of Jamie video, in which he offers hints and tips on how to create a culinary master piece. Users can browse for recipes by category or keyword and there’s a comprehensive kitchen essentials guide. There’s even a function that helps users determine portion sizes.

4. National Rail Enquiries

This app aims to make train journeys less of a headache and by most accounts it succeeds. Users can access live departure and arrival info for all National Rail stations and there’s even a ‘Next Train Home’ feature that helps users find their nearest station and plan their journey home.

5. Monopoly

The app version of the popular board game enables users to challenge up to 3 friends on the same WIFI network and up 2 friends with Bluetooth multiplayer. For me one of the coolest things about this app is having to shake your device to roll a 3D dice.

Industry analysts expect the app market to be as big as the internet by 2020. By this time there are expected to be well over 10 million apps. The above are just the tip of what looks set to be a very big iceberg.

Domains Audit – Part 2 – Age of Domain

Once you’ve got all your domains together it’s worth checking which domain you should be using.

As well as checking all the usual SEO-based criteria (inbound links, pages indexed etc), it’s also worth looking at the age of the domain as this is a factor the search engines use in assessing the power of your URL.

Webconfs offer a fantastic tool called (quite simply) Domain Age Tool. Just list the domains (without the www. bit) you’re interested in one per line, then click “Submit”. Within a few seconds the site will bring back the ages of the domains for you. (do be patient as sometimes it might take a minute or 2).

Once you have the information you can combine it with the other data to choose your primary domain.

Domains Audit – Part 1

Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s vital to the success of your online venture. So taking a couple of hours every now and again to audit your domain portfolio is time well spent.

When we audit a client’s domains (or our own) we go through a series of simple checks:

1. Create a full list of the all the domains you think you own / you do own
   You’d be surprised how long this sometimes takes! Especially if they’ve been registered by different people, or via different domain manager systems.
2. Look them all up in the whois directory to check that the correct information is stored there
   Go to DNSStuff (there are many other sites offering the service) and enter the url in the “WHOIS lookup box”
   You should be listed as the registered owner – if you’re not, you need to get that sorted asap because legally you don’t own the domain (for the full horrors of this check out the sex.com story (not as exciting as it sounds))
3. Check that you are only using one domain for each website
   ie www.yourwebsite.co.uk has an A record pointing at the server the website sits on, and everything else (including yourwebsite.co.uk) has a CNAME record pointing to www.yourwebsite.co.uk. Saves confusing Google, and risking being penalised for duplicate content.

It’s often a tedious and frustrating tasks, but the dangers of not being in total control of your domains are potentially huge.

What works in an email? Girth or Length?

If you read any (of the many, many, many) email best practice guidelines which you can find with a quick search on Google, one of the few things these will agree on is that the optimum width for a sales email is around 600-700 pixels.

But that’s exactly what it is, a guideline. In many cases this is correct, but we’re seeing wider and wider emails hitting our inboxes and it opens up some great oppurtunities.

One large, international brand which has been trialing this since before the summer is Abercrombie and Fitch. Needless to say, they haven’t released any results but by the fact I received this one (1074px wide) just the other day (almost 6 months since the start of the trial) surely suggests that this has been a successful trial?

The Future of Payments

The way people are paying for goods and services both on and offline is set to change. The last ten years has seen a massive shift in consumer behaviour with a steep decline in postal orders, cash and cheques. In all retail environments, it is essential to give customers the maximum amount of payment flexibility – the way they pay should be seen as their choice and the more options open to them the better. The main predictions for future payment options are detailed below.

Many businesses will offer their own payment services:
A recent change in regulation has allowed more businesses to expand into payment services. This will mainly effect large organisations and it is expected that many large high street brands will offer their own payment solutions in the future. Carrefour, the hypermarket chain, has recently introduced its own contactless MasterCard to allow customers to pay without the need to sign or enter a pin. This has three main benefits: it speeds up checkout for customers, reduces queue length and provides Carrefour with instant information on purchases to allow them to better tailor marketing messages and offers to each individual consumer.

Want to get posting on YouTube?

Many businesses are getting a lot of work through simple how to guides on YouTube, some making their fortunes. Just look at Lauren Luke who posted a few homemade videos of how to do your make up and now is one of the most viewed people on YouTube, with a book in the Amazon top 400.

It can also be a great way to provide a bit of extra information on how your product works, or how it moves. A very cost effective way to promote yourself – no hosting fees, you can get a good result from a fairly cheap camera.

BUT the editing can be a problem – cutting a pasting the good bits you’ve shot together. So below are a couple of free tools that work really well and can help you get yourself on YouTube.

JayCut is an online tool for editing your videos. So you can cut out the bad bits, and put the good bits together. Totally free and easy to use.

It will also let you share your creations or download them and burn them to DVD.

If you see something on YouTube you’d like to put in your own video, there’s now a tool for downloading from YouTube too. Just down load the YouTube Downloader (catchy name!). It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Happy directing!

Is Twitter in Decline?

Fascinating article from eMarketer recently on the various reports that traffic to Twitter is in decline.

It seems a fair few research companies are reporting declines in traffic to Twitter, but that maybe those reports aren’t as accurate as they should be – with mobile data and information from other platforms missing.

This does rather beg the question of how should ‘online’ traffic now be tracked when it can be interacted with via so many mediums.

Does any of this suggest Twitter’s in decline? Probably not – but to get a real feel for it we’d need to know how many posts are being made each day – a level of interaction rather than a level of users. It’s certainly not yet time to get out of twitter.

What is Adwords Editor?

Adwords Editor is a free tool offered by Google to help manage your PPC accounts much more efficiently. It really is worth taking the time to download and get to grips with Adwords Editor as it can make your PPC efforts 100,000,000,000% more efficient. Here is how: