Chart of the Day: Simple vs complex subject lines
Many email marketers keep their subject lines simple and short, but are these causing recipients to fail to read on?
"Not only does this study suggest that complex language leads to greater email engagement, but it also once again proves the value of testing and optimisation."
~ Nikki Gilliland @ Econsultancy
The Automatic Readability index uses the number of characters to gauge the understandability of a piece of text. And that is what is used to create this rather complicated chart.
The chart shows a steady gradient increase in open% and CTO% as the complexity of the subject line increases. The difference may seem diminutive, but remember that this chart is working on a scale of billions of sends. So it can lead to some significant changes.
Before you start making drastic changes, remember to A/B test your subject lines to see if this appeals to your…
Chart of the day: Qualitative research dominates persona research and such research leads to revenue success
Most businesses are using qualitative research techniques such as interviews to create their personas, according to research by Cintell.
Quantitative techniques such as surveys were found to be the least used whilst conducting qualitative interviews with customers and non-customers was found to be most popular, with more than 8 in 10 using such techniques. Interviewing overall dominated the highest results of the survey, which suggested that qualitative methods exceeded persona research goals.
The research also found that 7 in 10 companies who missed revenue or lead goals did not conduct qualitative persona research.
High performing companies were also more than two times likely to research the motivations of their customers.
Source: Cintell
Sample: 137 respondents. Popular job titles represented were Director, VP of Marketing, Chief Marketing…
Chart of the Day: Google and Facebook online ad revenue surges whilst revenue of all other providers shrink.
Healthy markets are defined by competition. Consumers have many providers to choose from, and those providers must constantly innovate to improve their service or make efficiency savings to be able to reduce their price - or else the consumers will move to a competitor which is doing so. Monopolies are terrible for consumers because they are defined by a lack of competition - hence why in most countries regulators explicitly ban companies from establishing monopolies in most sectors. But what about Duopolies? This is when a market is dominated by two large players - they still compete, but often the competition is less fierce because of the lack of other providers.
As new stats from IAB, Facebook and Google show, the digital ad market is entering duopoly territory. Google and Facebook saw very healthy rises in…
Chart of the Day: New research highlights increasing importance of the different types of influencer marketing
If you think of the changes that the rise of digital media have wrought in marketing, the rise of importance of earned media to support online PR and influencer marketing has to be one of the largest.
A new in-depth report from Traackr starts by explaining 6 different types of influencers. This highlights the different opportunities from influencer marketing - like their previous infographic on 10 types of individual influencers.
The report then goes on to assess the overall importance of influencer marketing in larger organisations. This chart shows that, although it's not seen as a primary investment by many (just around one quarter), integrating into other activities is seen as important by more (just over half).
The importance of influencer marketing…
Chart of the Day: Email benchmarking report 2016.
The DMA’s Email benchmarking report, sponsored by dotmailer, covering email performance data from 2015, has been recently released. They cover emails delivered, open, click through and click-to-open rates. But the dramatic statistic is the click-to-open rate (CTOR), which has declined to 20% in 2015 from the high of 32% in 2013. So, why the extreme decline?
Let's look at what a CTOR is first: a CTOR, used to report on the effectiveness of your email content. It is calculated by taking your unique clicks and dividing by your unique opens and multiply by 100 to get the percentage (eg: (232 unique clicks ÷ 1200 unique opens) x 100 = 19%). Now to calculate an accurate CTOR, we need accurate clicks and opens. Unfortunately, open rates aren't always an accurate reflection…
Chart of the day: marketers salaries vary by sector, with a huge £23,000 difference between gambling and Education.
Research into marketing salaries by MarketingWeek suggests that marketing is still often understood and is seen as a cost rather than as an investment.
Agency and consultancy wages are also just second bottom on the list, whilst gambling and gaming takes centre stage right at the top.
Gaming and gambling was found to be the highest paying sector for marketers with an average salary of £63,409. This was followed by consumer electronics with an average salary of £56,901 and utilities which has an average wage of £56,716.
The MarketingWeek Career and Salary Survey found that the education sector earn the lowest average annual salary at just £40,117. Those in the charity and not-for-profit sector have an average salary of £42,915, however education came joint with IT as the sectors where marketers are happiest.
The survey…
Chart of the Day: New Survey reveals that the vast majority of B2B buyers across all generations consider mobile devices essential
If you work in B2B marketing you may have been thinking that all this 'mobile-first' lark only need apply to your B2C friends. After all, serious B2B buyers use desktops, right?
Wrong. Okay, so that's an overstatement. Of course, they use desktops, but they also use mobile. And not just the hip young millennial buyers - new research shows in even the 50+ group (baby boomers) say that a mobile device is essential to their job.
The results come from a salesforce report which asked over 7,000 business buyers about their device usage in October 2016. Because terms like 'millennial' are often poorly defined, I thought it would be worth delineating the age ranges counted as in each generation for this report. In the graph below, millennials were regarded as being 18-35, gen-Xers as…
Chart of the day: Website lead response management research
If you're involved in a business where you collect leads from your website you will know the importance of timing - 'timing is everything'. For example, for a financial services or travel company who offer brochures for download, phone follow-up is still often an effective technique if the profile of the lead fits. Of course, within B2B marketing, this approach is even more common when offering whitepapers to help prospects learn about a product or solution.
Today's chart-of-the-day isn't as recent as most we feature, instead it's a classic study designed to identify what day of week, time of day and time from creation to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates.
The full report summary gives details on contact times (similar to best mail contact days Wednesday and Thursday are far more effective than other days and surprisingly, 4…
Chart of the day: Facebook advertising cost per click across the World
Facebook advertising cost per click (CPC) is highest in Australia, Norway and Japan, where as Taiwan, Portugal and South Africa were found to be cheapest for CPC ads, whilst cost per "like" was found to be highest in Germany at $0.58 per like and cheapest in Mexico at $0.03 per like.
The study also found that cost per app install was highest in the United States at $2.74 followed by Japan at $2.70 and cheapest in Vietnam at $0.38.
Cost per like was found to be most expensive at 18:00, possibly when Facebook is the busiest.
Younger users were also found to be cheaper to target and females are more expensive.
Notably Instagram was found to be more expensive than Facebook advertising.
Source: Buffer Social and Adespresso
Sample: Adespresso analysed over $100…
Chart of the Day: Benchmarking digital media and technology adoption of the UK with eight developed countries
At one level, it's simple. The online opportunity for businesses to reach and influence their audiences online depends on the levels of use of the web by different types of individuals and businesses. Defining the Opportunity, Creating a Digital Strategy and taking action works best if you can define how many of your target audience are actively using digital media and technology to inform their buying decisions.
At another level, it's now highly complex to define this opportunity. While we can still use search engine gap analysis to assess the number of people searching for information about products online and review our 'share of search' or search impressions, many other platforms are involved. These include cross-device use from mobile to desktop and use of social media and influencers. Plus, we shouldn't forget that, even in developed…
