Otis Regrets... or not

Best practices for graphics in emails

This Ace Hardware email has some great offers...

Right now thousands of people are re-installing Microsoft Outlook as they upgrade from XP to Windows 7. And the majority of these folks won’t touch the default settings which don’t load graphics within emails unless the user specifically asks to do so.

... but most recipients will see it in their preview pane like this.

Right now hundreds of marketers are designing emails that ignore this reality, by placing a big beautiful graphic at the top of the message that shows up as a blank spot superimposed with a red X instead of the desired image. Which means that most recipients will never see the graphic, or the message, because there is nothing visually compelling to pull them in. The “before and after” examples from Ace Hardware are proof positive. Inviting graphic and great offers, but most of the people who got this email will never see them. (I’m on a Mac so the red X’s show up as question marks for me, but the problem is the same.)

So what can you do to fix it? Use HTML text creatively at the top of your email instead of relying on graphics to tell the story. The REI newsletter example is isn’t pretty, but there is a lot of REI identity here to pull people in, including the bar of clickable links.

Best: very little of this message is lost, even without graphic.

Better yet is the email from Beasley Direct that has a good ol’ compelling headline to pull people in, and places this to the left of the page so it will have maximum visibility on small screens. This email also includes ALT text—the words “Beasley Direct Marketing” over the graphic—which appear when the graphic doesn’t load. That’s another good practice. Better yet would have been a benefit message or call to action in the ALT tag, such as “request your complimentary landing pages guide”.

Make sure you’re following these simple steps next time an email goes out. Don’t get intimidated by your art director… the design can still look great, you just need a backup scenario when the graphics don’t load. And everybody will be happier with the higher open rate and, hopefully, more clickthroughs.

Google, other marketers spend way out of recession

In an earlier post I talked about the argument for spending more to gain market share when others are cutting back, and cited Bed, Bath & Beyond and New York Life as success stories. Now comes news that Google, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Microsoft have launched major new campaigns into a still-roiling economy. “Everyone is trying to be the first mover,” commented Dean Crutchfield at one of the major tech agencies. “This is a market now where you’ll stand out or die.”

Coincidentally, Google’s Q3 revenue was up 7% year-to-year, in spite of tough economic times. Somebody is spending more on Adwords, that’s for sure. How about your company?

A three finger salute to bad product design

I have been getting cranky lately about products in my daily life that don’t work as well as they should. I’m cranky not just as a consumer, but as a marketer. Because if a product doesn’t work as it should, people are going to bring it back or not purchase again as surely as if you’d made false claims in your advertising. And since life isn’t fair, you may well end up with the blame.

So here are three ineptly designed mass produced products each of which richly deserves a middle finger salute—not just for their design flaws, but because those flaws are so obvious they would have been detected with the slightest hint of usability testing.

1. Glide dental floss tube. Glide is itself a success story of good design: Teflon coated dental floss, so it doesn’t get stuck and break off in your teeth. The idea worked so well that Oprah praised it on her show and stuck a package of Glide under every seat in her studio for the audience to take home.

Now we have an economy size in a tube, at about half the per-yard price and not much more bulk so it’s a no-brainer if you use Glide every day. But guess what: as soon as you start to pull out the floss, the top pulls off and the roll comes unraveled and it’s almost impossible to put back together. I guess they must have several billion of these tubes in stock because they’ve now come up with a Rube Goldberg fix: a disk of clear plastic over the top of the roll inside. The roll no longer comes out, but guess what: neither does the dental floss, making the whole delivery system inoperable. Middle finger salute.

2. Nathan’s mustard plastic bottle. This is my favorite mustard, and it used to come in a sturdy bottle with a tip, anchored with a plastic strap to the rim of the top, that you could use to seal it. Now they’ve got a new design which is designed to self destruct on first use and render the seal inoperable, which I guess means you will want to buy another right away. Not.

Look at the picture and you’ll see it is not at all intuitive how to get the top off. Click on the picture to enlarge it. Oh, there it is, that flat area in front. But it’s hard to get your finger or thumb in and unless you lift it off carefully and perfectly that entire sealing lid is going to break off leaving you with an extra piece covered with wet mustard that is guaranteed to get thrown away. Also, Nathan’s has taken to not putting a label on the bottle and instead just prints on the shrink wrap. Maybe it is rebranded for sale in other countries or maybe they are just hiding from their ancestors. A second middle finger salute.

Wireless switch on my Gateway laptop. — Wireless switch on my poorly designed Gateway laptop.

3. My Gateway laptop. I could go on for hours about all the things that are wrong with this budget machine that could have been avoid simply by copying a well designed laptop instead of randomly assembling parts. But here’s the thing that is most infuriating and ridiculous: a slider on/off switch on the side near the front which controls the wireless. You’re virtually guaranteed to slide the switch at some point if the laptop is on your lap, or if you simply brush it with your hand. It’s easy to do this without noticing and then you wonder why you can’t get your mail or why that Skype call was dropped. Why in the world do they even need a wireless on/off switch in the first place instead of controlling it from the control panel? Middle finger salute.

That adds up to a three finger salute: Control+Alt+Delete. These companies should get these products out of here along with the designers that created them.

Travelers In-Synch campaign joins Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Mike Sciosa’s decision to take out John Lackey in Inning 7 of tonight’s Angels-Yankees playoff game has to rank among the all time worst decisions. But close behind it is the new In-Synch tagline from sponsor Travelers Insurance. That’s right, not “in sync” but “in synch” even though if you do a Google search for “Travelers in synch” they’ll correct it to “did you mean Travelers in sync”?

I’ve done advertising for Travelers in the past and trust me, they are not adding piercings and tatts to the traditional insurance pitch. This is an ill-advised attempt to slap on something of interest to a younger audience that would logically have little interest in insurance.

The ads, including a cute one with a terrier that ran during the game (he frets for his lost bone which he should have insured with Travelers) are standard stuff but then the bizarre tag line appears. “Travelers. Insurance. In-Synch™.” That’s right, in addition to pandering to 25-34 they are kowtowing to the legal department which is not the way to get the attention of the young and the restless.

Travelers, welcome to the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Why you should try video marketing on your web pages

My client Online Trading Academy is a heavy user of search engine marketing—classified ads on Google or Yahoo that take the reader to a landing page. Their standard landing page was a tabbed mini-site that delivers quick downloads of information and captures the visotor’s contact information for follow-up by the sales team—what you would call a best practice. Then, they experimented with a “long form” single page that had a narrative sort of like a traditional direct mail letter with frequent links to get to a registration page. This beat the tabbed version handily.

Online Trading Academy video landing page. — Online Trading Academy video landing page; click the arrow to play the video.

But now they’ve blown away their “long form” control with this new page that goes back to tabs but has a self-running video.

On its main website which is just completing a redesign, Online Trading Academy is including a video description for almost every course. We try not to recreate the written description but to complement it, for the benefit of avid fans who will both read and watch. But the real benefit is that the video provides an alternate entry point for a post-literate audience that is not entirely comfortable with the written word. And that’s why you should experiment with video marketing if you aren’t using it already.

Internet users love video—even videos without cats in them! Interestingly, one of the most popular posts on this blog remains this one which I wrote last winter at the Consumer Electronics Show. Old news—but it has a video! And not even a hosted one but just a link to the file on YouTube. But now my ISP (Dreamhost, see “green hosting” bug in the sidebar) gives me the ability to play Flash and streaming video direct from this blog, which you bet I will be doing in the future.

And what about video in emails? I have clients who are champing at the bit to do this and have urged them to hold off because of the bandwidth required plus the likelihood of triggering filters (both spam filters and filters at the corporate gateway). Besides, it’s not really necessary. All you need is a still with a “play” arrow superimposed, linked to the actual video on a web page.

How social media floats the Oracle juggernaut

One of my first freelance copywriting clients after I moved to San Francisco was a very smart guy who had been direct response ad manager at Oracle. He based his strategy at his new company on what he had learned and done there, so I learned as well.

Screenshot of Oracle OpenWorld Live feed during the show.

In a day when most tech marketing was fairly dweeby and feature-centric, Oracle took the advantage by brute force. Every day in the lower right corner of the local edition of the WSJ, there was an ad with a bar chart showing how much faster Oracle was than Sybase, then their major competitor because then Oracle was mainly a database company. And I myself considered applying for an ad manager position that was advertised in Adweek. Most classifieds described the job and the qualifications; Oracle simply ran a huge headline that said PREDATOR and follow-on text to indicate that’s how they wanted you to treat the competition.

During and just after the dotcom era, Oracle discovered an even more effective strategy to beat the competition: buy them. First there was Peoplesoft, then BEA, then Siebel (founded by an ex-Oracle marketing guy), now Sun. Today Oracle is a conglomerate and Sybase, its original competitor, has shrunk to 3% market share in its single market.

I was thinking about this history as I walked through Oracle OpenWorld, actually the first time I have attended in spite of my long Oracle history. It’s the only event I know of the many conventions held each year at Moscone that closes a major street so the party tent can be erected there. The result is gridlock throughout downtown San Francisco—classic smash-face marketing because everybody who is stuck in traffic is thinking about Oracle.

The typical OOW attendee is a database administrator (DBA) in a large organization. A key purpose of the conference is to make this typically mild-mannered individual feel like the most important person in the world by identifying with the Oracle juggernaut. I’m writing this post in an absolutely packed ballroom with thumping music and flashing visuals where the faithful are waiting, not for Roger Daltry or Aerosmith (they’ll be at the Customer Appreciation Event tonight) but for CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote.

With such a loyal fan base, using social media for marketing is an obvious choice and the Oracle folks are doing it well. The best example is OpenWorld Live, a website where you can watch a live feed (often with a couple of guys interviewing passers by about how happy they are to be at OOW) and simultaneously keep up with the tweets rolling by with #OOW09 as the hashtag. At the bottom of the page are buttons to take you to the Oracle conversations on Facebook and LinkedIn and even some code in case you want to embed the video on your own site. All Oracle, all the time, even when your laptop is propped up on your lap in the hotel room.

Commercially, Oracle is pushing a concept called Social CRM. I attended a briefing where Tony Lye, Oracle VP for CRM, talked about the concept of a “Listening Post” which will be incorporated in future releases. His prototype can gather and monitor conversations about Oracle anywhere in cyberspace (Lye though he was the first to do this, which isn’t true) and feed them into a sales and marketing interface such as Salesforce.com where they can be parsed by sales territory or other factor and the sales team can hunt down opportunities or put out fires. You’ll need a big database to do this effectively, and Oracle has one to sell you.

Oracle trade show gets suitcased

Fans of my suitcasing thread will be interested to know that I encountered a live example in the wild at the giant Oracle Open World show…. and even (unintentionally) participated in the hijinks.

I was collecting info for a post on Oracle’s use of social media when a gentleman handed me a flyer advertising a “social media meetup” which sounded like a great opportunity to get together with other social media gurus and talk about how Oracle does it. Little did I know he had a prison uniform under the poncho (it was raining hard) and was involved in an elaborate guerrilla marketing scheme for somebody called ActiveVOS.

Oracle, as mentioned in my other post (coming shortly), has a long reach and an iron grip when it comes to exacting loyalty from its users. ActiveVOS offers a BPM (Business Process Management) solution that can be used with Oracle… or, without! So rather than buying booth space they decided to position a bunch of people in prison uniforms outside the convention area, to make the point that you need to break free of Oracle’s chains by using products like theirs. It got good press, picked up by PC World and IDG.

SO, I asked marketing VP Alex Neihaus at the meetup, this really isn’t about social media at all, is it? Sure it is, he said. He used Twitter and Facebook to get the word out, and indeed I saw tweets advertising the meetup embedded in the stream of happy chirps from Oracle loyalists on the Open World Live site. Alex says this is “authentic” and it is a reality of social media marketing that, for better or for worse, once you buy into it you don’t have a lot of control over who says what.

The link to the ActiveVOS website was oddly missing from the invite to the meetup (maybe they were worried that Larry Ellison would mount a DoS attack?) so here it is.

Apple and the environment

This week Apple announced that it was resigning from the National Chamber of Commerce because of the CofC’s position on reducing carbon emissions, as PG&E had done earlier. (The Chamber has since said it supports the concept of reducing emissions–just not any current legislation.) Apple also has a website where you can review its measures to reduce environmental impact. This is a good thing if you want to leave your children a world to live in and believe for-profit corporations need to do some of the heavy lifting instead of leaving it to the government.

I gotta say, though, that the packaging of the MacBook I bought this summer (last of the old white edition, now replaced by aluminum) was among the difficult to dispose I have ever encountered. The box had tricky plastic inserts and a wad of foam padding glued to the lid which was impossible to remove in order to break down for the blue bin. This represents a step back from a recent period where all Apple goods came in plain brown boxes. Hopefully a temporary slip. I took a picture to document my frustration but seem to have recycled it. Easy to do on iPhone, not so much in real life.

Tethering and visual voicemail: iPhone 3.1 woes and fixes

Like a drug dealer passing out free candy at a schoolyard (my longtime friend Phil Henderson claims this is how they get you hooked), AT&T enabled a prototype of its tethering on the iPhone this past June. It wasn’t publicly released; you had to go to a special website to install it. But once you did the effect was amazing and liberating: you could now use your iPhone as a modem to connect your computer to the Internet, just by clicking “enable tethering” in your settings and connecting via Bluetooth or a USB cable.

AT&T undoubtedly plans to make this service official, and charge for it at some point. Assuming they don’t get too greedy, tethering trial users will gladly open their wallets. But the trial tethering went away with finality in iPhone 3.1, the latest software release.

If you religiously respond to Apple’s “an update for your iPhone is available” alerts you are already out of luck. Release 3.1 includes a firmware update that now verifies the iPhone each time you connect to the network (like Microsoft’s Genuine Windows “service”) so if you try to reinitiate tethering it will be immediately disabled. Since this is firmware, the “restore from backup” will not fix it.

If you want to try tethering and you haven’t updated, you might try Googling “enable tethering iPhone 3.0” or some such… just remember you are going to have to pay for it eventually. If you are already on 3.1 you are out of luck.

But if you had previously enabled tethering and now are at 3.1, you are feeling pretty unpopular right now! How do I know? Because you haven’t gotten any new voicemails in days! Well, actually you have but they are hidden. No alerts in the iPhone visual menu when they arrive, and no way to access them and listen to them.

If you have this problem, you might want to Google “restore visual voicemail iPhone 3.1” or some such. For me, what worked was going to Settings>General>Profile, clicking that, then clicking “remove” for the file that is there. (Some have reported the path as Settings>General>Network>Profile; I can’t go back and verify it because once you do this and sync your phone, the “Profile” choice disappears.)

Voila, all your voicemails are back instantly. Including, if you are like me, some action items that are seriously past due. Go ahead and take care of them, you can thank me later.

U-Pick Tomato Day at Mariquita Farm

Yesterday I drove from San Francisco to Hollister for the last Tomato U-Pick of the season at Mariquita Farm. It’s run by a couple who decided they’d rather sell direct from the fields than pay rent at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.

If there is anything better than standing in the autumn sun and plucking a warm ripe tomato off the vine and popping it in your mouth, I would like to know about it. I had planned to pick 10 pounds of San Marzanos for sauce and 5 pounds of Early Girls mixed with a few heirlooms. But my emotions got the best of me and I ended up with 25 pounds of Marzanos and 30 plus pounds of everything else.

The tomatoes, other than the Marzanos, were so ripe that many of them got squished and overripe on the long drive back (punctuated with a stop for Bun Pho Hue in San Jose) and they ended up in the sauce. I made a classic red sauce, which I wanted for comparison to the “red sauce places” I’m encountering in my new home in Saratoga. I adapted a recipe from Marcella Hazan which goes like this:

Classic Red Tomato Sauce for pasta or pizza

10 pounds San Marzano tomatoes

1 ½ cup each finely chopped onion, celery and carrot

Extra Virgin Olive Oil (mild, not overly “grassy” in taste)

Salt and sugar

San Marzano red sauce following Marcella Hazan recipe

Dump the tomatoes into a sink or very large bowl full of water. Take them out slicing each in half lengthwise and cutting out any bad spots and transfer to a large pot. Bring to a simmer, covered; the water from washing will be enough liquid so they don’t stick. Once the mixture is bubbling away remove the lid and continue simmering about 90 minutes more until the tomatoes have lost their individual identity. Allow to cool to a safe handling temperature, then put them through a food strainer. I did this twice: at a coarse setting to remove the skins, then a finer setting to remove the seeds.

Meanwhile, sauté the onion in about ¼ cup olive oil until translucent. Remove then sauté carrots 5 minutes, then add celery and sauté 3 minutes more. Puree the carrots, onions and celery in a food processer and add to strained tomatoes. Cook 30 minutes then taste for seasoning. I only added 1 T of salt and 1 T of sugar and thought about using even less than this; the tomatoes themselves were that good and complete.

The result was fabulous, rich and tomato-y. Out of curiosity, I’d initially cooked the other squished tomatoes separately. Heirlooms are pretty, Early Girls are sweet, but San Marzanos have the robust flavor profile this sauce demands.

Dinner was an assortment of pizzas made with the red sauce and with individual tomato slices, accompanied by sliced green zebras (they were getting ripe faster than anything else) in a vinaigrette with garlic and basil. All in all, a pretty good day—assuming you like tomatoes, of course.