I am, of course, talking about the wildly successful online promotion that Old Spice ran yesterday, where the ad team spent the entire day taping and posting personalized responses to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more.  In case you haven’t seen the new Old Spice campaign, you can watch their latest commercial here… but this campaign has been so pervasive I’m guessing most  of you have.

It’s been a few hours, so by now this statistic is already out of date, but as of this morning Youtube surfers had spent over 11 years worth of time watching the Old Spice personalized responses, and I’d imagine that’s only the beginning. Over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure their videos will get even more views.  I’m sure it wasn’t cheap to have the ad company spend the entire day crafting these video responses, but I’d be very surprised if the exposure Old Spice body wash received yesterday wasn’t a great deal more economical than the cost of a national television ad campaign. I’d also be surprised if the exposure they received yesterday wasn’t much more effective than a tv ad campaign because instead of interrupting the viewer (which is what a commercial does), people sought out the videos, watched them, and shared their favorites with their friends.

This is probably the best piece of online marketing I’ve ever seen. Not only did they leverage several forms of media, but the uniqueness of the campaign captured the attention of celebrities, popular media programs, athletes and talk show hosts, many of whom provided free promotion of the campaign to their own audience.  This helped build things to a fever pitch (and most definitely resulted in significant amounts of lost productivity yesterday), and all the while the audience was being sold something.  I’m positive that sales of Old Spice body wash are going to go through the roof after yesterday’s promotion.

It just goes to show that online marketing and traditional marketing are getting more entwined every single day, and when you get the mix of technology and marketing just right, the results are incredible. It’s already happening, but in the coming years, the blurred line between website development and promotion and traditional marketing will be completely erased.  Companies who want to survive will have to bring both adept technical and design abilities along with a keen marketing sense to the table, eotherwise they will not measure up to the needs of the market.

This email starts off great. The first thing it does is let you know why you’re getting it and how to stop getting the emails if you’ve changed your mind.  They understand that if people don’t want to be on your list, then you don’t want them on your list either.  Moving on to the email itself, they’ve made an appropriately short pitch of the product they are promoting (in this case, summer cocktails) and they link directly to a menu that lists all the cocktails available as well as their prices.  It’s short, to the point, and gets the message across.

They also get bonus points for including some editorial (non-sales) information.  They’ve linked up two videos that show you how to make a few summer cocktails yourself.  It’s always good to include some free information if it is of actual interest to your list.

I only have two complaints:

1. They haven’t included any method of tracking results. Just to be clear, you don’t have to offer free stuff for every single email… but it’s good to do so occasionally for two reasons. First, it will allow you to track how successful your email campaigns are, and  secondly it gives people a reason to allow you to continue to send them email. If you only every send ads and never send any bonuses, you’ll lose subscribers.

2. There is no social media linked from the email (Twitter / Facebook) — however, a brief search showed me that as of the date of this post, they don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, so that’s a problem that goes a bit beyond Email Marketing.

So, a much better example this time around! Next time, hopefully we can find an email piece that does everything (or almost) everything right!

When Ariss Valley first approached us, they had a completely flash-based site.  Visually it wasn’t the worst site I have seen, but a fully flash-based site has a lot of negatives. For starters, it almost always requires web designer intervention to make any changes and updates to your content, and while there are ways around it, typically flash sites are at the very least hindered from a SEO perspective and require more work (and therefore more money) to optimize properly.

We began hosting the Ariss Valley site in late April, so that’s where our server logs start. For the month of April, I extrapolated results based on the daily average of the one third or so of the month we had stats for.  The new website we developed for them was launched around May 17th, so it was live for about 14 days in May.  Below, we have a table comparing their traffic and other stats from April to May:

Comparing the data from April (last full month with the old website) vs. June (first full month with the new website) brings about some pretty startling revelations. Let’s take a look:

Traffic

Right off the bat, from April to June they saw an increase in traffic over 70%, which is a huge jump. That’s just a stone’s throw from double the traffic! Looking at the daily stats in May, the traffic ramped up significantly around the time we launched the website and continued on to the end of the month and into June.  An improvement of this amount alone should put a grin from ear to ear on any site owner’s face, but things get even more interesting as we examine what drove this increase in traffic and how users interacted with the site.

Search Engine Visits

These represent the number of visitors that came to the site from a search on Google, Yahoo or Bing.  As you can see, the visits almost tripled from April to June… and while that’s obviously a great improvement, when you look at the search terms they were found, on the news gets better. In April, almost ALL of their search engine traffic came from terms directly related to their business name. That means most of the users that found them through a search engine already knew of or about their business and were looking for it specifically.

The June results tell a different story completely: While the searches related to their business name still remained very strong, they saw a huge increase in subject related terms such as “guelph golf courses”. We’re talking going from < 50 visits to several hundred. This likely means that users who aren’t specifically looking for them, but just want information on a golf course in their area, are now finding the Ariss Valley website.

Bounce Rate

We’ve saved the best news for last!  Bounce Rate is the amount of visitors that leave a website within 30 seconds of arriving, so like a golf score, you want it as low as possible.  A high bounce rate usually means the user didn’t find what they were looking for or didn’t like what they saw and left almost as soon as they arrived.  In April, the Ariss Valley site’s bounce rate was an abysmal 79.9% — that means for every 100 visitors, 80 of them left before spending any real time on the website. Fast forward to this month, and their bounce rate has plummeted to a much more respectable 39.6%. While there’s always room  for improvement, they’ve essentially improved their bounce rate 100% over what it was.

In Summary

While we don’t have any firm statistics on actual improvement of business, based on the traffic improvements and performance of their new site,  it’s more than reasonable to assume that people  are coming to Ariss Valley because of their new and improved site — that is, people who wouldn’t have come to them otherwise.  In real business terms, this means their new website wasn’t a cost, but an investment that is going to pay off and start earning them money.

Do you still think your website is “okay” or “good enough”?  Websites are becoming more and more important to business every day, and a “good enough” attitude could be costing your business money.

Like many cafes, the Blue Dog has a loyalty program. This is where things make my internal marketer flip his lid a little bit. It is your standard “buy x number of drinks, get one free” program, with one important exception. You need an individual card for each drink you purchase.  So, if I go one day and buy a small coffee, I need a new loyalty card for that. If I go the next day and order a medium coffee, I need another card. If I order a large coffee the next time I need yet another card, and so on and so forth. So unless you are the type of person who orders the exact same thing every single time without fail, it can become a huge hassle to keep track of 20 different cards in your wallet or purse.

Now don’t get me wrong, I totally get where management is coming from — if I had to hazard a guess, I would speculate that they are looking to avoid the individual who will buy all small coffees and then trade in their free drink for the most expensive large specialty drink on the menu. I don’t have detailed demographic information, so this may be a valid concern that could cause the cafe to lose money, however the typical crowd that goes to an establishment like the Blue Dog isn’t price motivated… if they were, they’d likely balk at spending three to four dollars on a specialty coffee or beverage in the first place.

However,  it would be relatively easy to group drinks into categories or sizes and bring the total loyalty card combination possibility down to a reasonable level (perhaps small, medium, and large cards for example).  Currently, I don’t even bother with it most of the time I’m there because if I did, I’d end up with 10 – 20 different cards in my wallet.  What irks me about the situation is not that I’m missing out on a free drink every now and then (while that does make me a little sad!), I’m more bothered by the purpose of a loyalty program and how the Blue Dog’s system isn’t accomplishing that purpose.

Loyalty programs are developed to, if you can believe it, instill loyalty in the customer.  If you boil loyalty down to its most basic element, it will result in a choice of Business A over Business B. Sure, there are a lot of fuzzy feelings associated with loyalty,  and as a business owner, I can vouch for the satisfaction in a job well done and a customer who will be fiercely loyal to your company because of the great job you’ve done for them.  However,  looking at it from a purely economical standpoint, loyalty results in more revenue for your business at the end of the day.

The current loyalty program there is extremely inconvenient for anyone who doesn’t drink the same thing consistently, and as such I (and others I’ve spoken with) often don’t even bother with it.  As a result, when making a decision of what cafe to go to (and sometimes I go elsewhere), the loyalty program has no bearing on the decision… but if it was doing the job right, it would.

To sum it up in a sentence: I like the Blue Dog a lot, but the loyalty program drives my marketing side nuts.

Editor’s Note: I also love the Blue Dog, but this drives me nuts… I have about 8 different cards in my wallet, including one for “medium latte with flavor shot” and another for plain “medium latte”. Are you kidding me? Why not do what nearly ALL OTHER loyalty programs do, and assign a dollar value to the ‘free drink’ at the end of the card? Make it something reasonable, like $3 max. Or “any small beverage”. Or, if they wanted to go the really easy route, why not just offer a “small medium coffee or tea” (or a coffee/tea of any size, really)? That would make it easier on the baristas, the management, AND the clientele. It’s pure logic, coupled with a knowledge of other loyalty programs that actually work.

Now I know you’re thinking, “We know that Dave, but what does this have to do with with my website?” Well, it’s actually possible to compress your website as a zip file too! This digital alchemy will take the text files on your website, compress them, and then send them to visitors zipped. Don’t worry, the process is transparent for the visitor because their browser will automatically uncompress the files as they arrive and display them as if the website wasn’t compressed, only faster!

Why would you want to do this, you ask? Well, there are two very good reasons for using gzip compression (what it’s actually called) on website, so let’s take a look:

1. Makes Your Site Load Faster

If you’re using a large Ajax library or other text intensive files when loading your website, gzip compression will make your website load significantly faster. You have less than 10 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention, so even losing a few seconds while your site loads can be costly. Therefore, the faster the site loads, the better chance you have of grabbing that user.

2. Google Caffeine

Google frequently updates their algorithm to present users with better search results, and Caffeine is the name of their latest update (previous updates include Bourbon, Jagger, and Big Daddy among others). While Google keeps a pretty tight lid on the secret sauce that goes into their search engine results, the web professional community is usually pretty good at figuring out basic info about what Google is currently emphasizing for search engine rankings, and one of the factors that Caffeine seems to place greater emphasis on is page load time. So, now more than ever, it’s important for your page to load quickly as it could have an effect on your search engine rankings.

What Do I Do Now?

Now that you know about this fancy new zip compression, you probably want to make sure your website is using it, right? Well, the bad news is, it’s a little bit more complicated than zipping a file up on your computer… so it will be beyond the average user. The good news is, for someone who knows what they are doing, it is relatively simple to activate, so if you contact your web hosting provider they should be able to do it for you for little to no cost. If you’re a current client, we don’t charge to activate gzip compression — so get in touch with us today!