QR Codes: Best. Practice. Ever.

January 12, 2012

QR Codes work well, except when they don’t –  but they can!  Following my 2012 New Year’s Resolution to stop doing dumb things (wish me luck), and coming on the heels of multiple successes in which QR codes have helped me make money by helping my clients win new customers, I offer herewith my take on the value of QR codes.

 

What’s Cool

I love QR Codes and all 2-dimensional (“2D”) codes for two reasons.   First, they help to combine the best of the physical world with the best of the digital world.  Second, they make life easier by eliminating the need to memorize, type, or otherwise manually translate a URL in order to render content digitally.  The highest use of 2D codes is to bridge an excellent real world experience to an excellent online experience.

As of this writing, however, we are in a place where their use is not widespread, so be aware of situations in which your printed content and your online content probably should not substitute and, rather, might need to be a bit redundant.   Each version must still stand on its own, since the vast majority of people are not yet acclimated.

Marketers love QR codes because they make interaction with the physical world clickable and, therefore, measurable.  I get to do more of what I love, too: obsess about large CRM data sets, mining and combining it to detect the faint signals of user behavior that will help satisfy more people.  Everybody wins!

What’s Broken – Why QR Codes Disappoint

According to Forrester Research, however, those who do click on QR codes – primarily young, affluent males – generally hate them.  This is mainly due to the bumbling mis-steps of marketers.

Firstly, QR codes are ugly – - although plenty of people have found ways to fix that (read on).

Secondly, many people are confused about how to scan them.  This is exacerbated by the walled gardens created by competing companies.  Microsoft (just one example) has its own unique 2D code technology, which requires its own unique reader app.  How lovely.

Third: the various free downloadable apps required to read QR codes don’t all function the same way.

Last and worst: user disappointment.  Simply being redirected to the same byzantine website available via large screen device is uninspiring, to say the least.  People typically avoid browsing websites on a small phone screen, so why use a QR code to force them?  Effective QR codes don’t link to ordinary websites.  Instead, they link to an instantly satisfying, sharable experience – on a par with music, photos and email, or content that is uniquely useful wherever the QR code is displayed.

Try thinking of a QR code as new type of “share this” button, a way to augment enjoyment of the real world, and a delightful sharable experience.  That thinking alone should keep you out of the weeds, but to be thorough, here is a list of best practices.

How to Fix It – Turn QR Codes into a Viral Experience

Here are some basic items to consider when contemplating use of 2D and QR codes.

1. Audience awareness.  Again, most people are not acclimated.  Do the obvious: include instructions to help new users engage.  Even savvy users need to be informed on what rewards to expect.  For some examples, see the last page of this QR Code usage guide I created for a print / QR code campaign promoting an iPhone app.

2. Usage patterns.  If you plan to use QR codes multiple times for multiple campaigns, treat each as its own campaign – complete with strategy, goals, success measures, etc. Then, for each instance, caption each code with the URL, app instructions, Call to Action and reward info. Set the stage for fulfillment by setting user expectations before they scan your code. See the example linked in section 1 above.

3. Size and placement.  Your 2D code must be of sufficient size, placement and proximity to be easily scanned. This excludes TV (too fleeting), subway (no wireless signal means no way to access the online content) and Billboard (too distant; depending on which reader software you use, your own pulse may cause your handheld phone/camera to shake too much to reliably scan the code).  Ideal: printed material or flat surface, within arm’s reach. Up close and personal.

4. Visual Appeal.   You can beautify a QR code, either through free experimentation, or for a price using a reputable designer.  It’s not just a nice touch, it’s also a branding opportunity, so we can expect this beautification trend to increase.  Whereas the lowly barcode has faded like a footnote into the borders of package labels, the comparatively prominent physical placement of a QR code could harm the beauty of your content or its location – a slippery slope, indeed.  Who wants a future where a physical, beautiful world is obscured by electromechanical codes?  Fine for robots, not for me.  Moral: beautifying your QR code makes it buzzworthy and increases sharing.

5. Mobile-optimized.    Create an experience that is based on portability, location, SMS, sharing, or instant fulfillment and feedback – anything but an ordinary website.

6. Convenience.  Think: Is a 2D code the fastest, easiest and/or only way to access the content, share it, and/or fulfill some need?  If so, great; go for it.  If not, think about other ways to deliver content more effectively.  Again, an ordinary website, not mobile-optimized, is not a value-add experience and not a fulfilling one.

7. Engagement.   Make it memorable.  Reward users, rather than disappoint them. Make your destination content instantly useful and satisfying.  Include share buttons so your audience can tweet, email, post and rave about the cool experience you provide.  Want viral?  Do that!

My take on QR codes: end of a fad!  They are here to stay.  QR codes and 2D codes can help you create a satisfying customer experience and, done well, convert sales.

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Posted by Ed

When Sales and Marketing Align, Good Things Happen in Threes

October 27, 2011

The path to sustained improvement is often a simple one – simple to do, simple to repeat, simple to remember.  In that spirit, I attempt here to boil down some alignment opportunities for Sales and Marketing leaders.  Below is a chart showing three focus areas each for Sales and Marketing which, if approached collaboratively, can improve business results and transform the relationship.  Below the chart is a set of definitions, followed by a few examples of how to apply it to your own situation.

3 Sales goals – Value, Volume, Velocity

Value.  Since it is almost as costly to close a small sale as it is to close a large sale, Sales professionals would be wise to focus on increasing the potential Value of each sale.

Volume.  The more deal flow you can create, the better your chances of growing the customer base and improving the company’s financial ability to innovate and fulfill their evolving needs.

Velocity.  Increasing the speed of deal flow through the pipeline also increases your capacity to sell, grow the customer community, and learn from them to help improve.

3 Marketing goals – Content, Community, Conversion

Content.  The more compelling and relevant your content, the more you will attract the audience most likely to benefit from your offerings.

Community.  The more your content resonates within and among audiences, the greater your capacity to build a community and engage in dialogue to improve sales, products, services, and support.

Conversion.  The more effectively you convert sales, the more you can learn from experience about how to improve the conversion process.

Conversations Worth Starting

Using the 3×3 chart above, look at the 9 intersecting boxes and ask the questions implied by the two nouns whose paths cross in each box.

Example 1:  Value + Content.  In the upper left intersecting box, where Value and Content intersect, you might be asking: How can we improve our Content to increase the Value of each sale?  Sales might ask:  How can the improved Value of each sale guide us in improving Content?

Example 2:  Conversion + Velocity.  In the bottom right box, where Conversion and Velocity intersect, Marketing might be asking: How can we improve the Conversion process to accelerate the Velocity of Sales?  Sale might be asking: What sales accelerators can we use as input for improving the Conversion process?

See how it works?  You may come up with better questions to suit your organization’s culture and challenges.  Now, formulate your own questions using the relevant nouns for each intersecting box, turn those questions loose in your organization, and watch what happens.

Make use of analytics, sales CRM and marketing automation solutions to help you measure and manage your improvement.  If you need assistance here, contact us.

How’s it working for you?  What questions would you ask your colleagues to help you get better aligned?

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Posted by Ed

Mobile Email Formatting Tips

May 26, 2011

This article was originally posted on the QVew Tips site, for use by clients of QVew, an on-demand platform for mobile/social marketing.    

Smartphone sales have overtaken feature phone sales, which in turn overtook  laptop and PC sales years ago.   Every year that gap widens.  Almost everyone with an email account reads it on the go for at least part of each day, and some days the only device available is the mobile phone.  For decision makers, the mobile device is the weapon of choice.  Remember, however, than for every smartphone owner consuming our gorgeous new  multimedia phone messages, there are still just as many feature-phone owners who get email mainly as enhanced text or HTML.  The moral: design your email messages to suit all mobile readers if you want good results.   Here are a few considerations.  As usual, I’ve included some resource links at the end of this post.

1.  Header fields (Sender and Subject)

On the small screen, it’s even more crucial to clearly identify yourself and your organization in the Sender and Subject field.    People often set their mobile devices to receive only header info, or they’ll visually scan the first few lines of a message before deciding which messages are worth their time.  It’s the electronic equivalent of sorting your postal mail while standing at the wastebasket.  Ever done that?  Thought so.   Effective Sender and Subject information will vastly improve your open rate.

The Sender field should have a human’s name in it and/or your business name, if you are a business.     Example:  ”Jane Doe | XYZ Corp.”   The Subject field gets a succinct headline (40 characters max) front-loaded to convey the main benefits to the reader.  If you have more than one subject, consider sending a separate message for each, unless you can weave multiple subjects into a single theme to fit that brief 40-character Subject line.     According to Epsilon, who have tested millions of emails for the world’s largest companies, the top factor in improving email open rates is a short, sweet, front-loaded subject line – one that has been a/b tested.

Avoid gimmicks.  Example: the “re:” gimmick spoof.  The “re:” tag indicates a forwarded message – NOT one originated by you.   Gaming the audience’s inbox in this way is actually a frequent scammer / phishing tactic.  You don’t want that reputation.  ”nuf said.

2. Top of message body: Text, not Graphics

If you follow these 3 rules, you’ll stay out of the weeds:  (1) don’t make me think; (2) don’t make me wait; (3) don’t make me work.   Avoid placing graphics in the upper left corner of your message body.   Use that valuable piece of real estate for an impactful text message.  Get to the point quickly, so your readers can begin benefiting right away.  Conversely, leading your message body with a graphic instead of text can cause confusion and delay reading.  Users of devices set to text-only who hav eclicked your juicy headline don’t want to find a blank screen (graphic placeholder).  Graphics-enabled users don’t want to see a tiny upper left corner of an oversized graphic – also very confusing.   Interrupting  busy people’s “flow” or confusing them with guesswork will result in fewer opens, clicks and conversions, and more deletes and unsubscribes.  Best practice:  lead with text, minimize use of graphics, and shrink the graphics to button size, thumbnail size, or narrow banner.   If your graphic is so large that no text is visible on-screen, shrink it.  If your graphic loooks too tiny when shrunk to small-screen size, design a new graphic that works.

3. Navigation and Conversion

Limit navigation complexity.   Width:  between 450 and 600 pixels is ideal, to minimize horizontal scrolling.  Use a single column format, not a multi-column newsletter format.  Opt for using screen-width-percentage tags rather than absolute pixel width, so your messages format on the fly to fit a myriad of device screens.  Height:  If possible, limit it to just minimal scrolling (max: one additional screen’s worth of content below the visible screen of content).  If you include a data capture form, avoid multiple required fields.  Just capture the bare minimum information to advance to the next level in your relationship with the reader.  Do you really need their mailing address if you already have their email address?  If the answer is still yes, then start by asking for just zip code  if you do location-based business.  QR codes are great for this purpose; NFC (near-field communication) is just starting to show up in devices and points of sale.

4.  Call to Action (CTA) links

Support your main topic or offer with both buttons and text links.   Some people prefer to click buttons; others will click text links.  Satisfy both camps.  Be sure your link supports the Subject line of the message.   Clearly state any time-limited offers or timeliness of the message to inject urgency.  Make your action button large enough so it can be reached by the outstretched thumb of those one-handed gadget-slingers.

Spacing of buttons and links is also important.  Buttons work great on smaller mobile touch screens because they can be larger than text and thus work better when fingertips navigate small touch screens.   Consider separating each text and button link by at least a line of text or equivalent blank space, to help our fat fingers navigate effectively and avoid annoying misfires that send us into oblivion, waiting for an ulttimately errant download.

Equally important:  send your recipients to mobile-optimized landing pages.   Mobile-optimized means everything mentioned in this article.  Optimizing your website for mobile may mean providing alternate navigation – especially if your main website menu is of the horizontal drop-down type; they can cause fat-finger misfires.

5. Alt text tags

Every graphic element can have an alt text tag.  Think of Alt text tags as a “Subject”  tag or action phrase describing its graphic element.  These tags are becoming increasingly important as we see telecom carriers tweak their data plan pricing.   Expect more users to set their devices to download the text-only messages first, then decide to download graphics or view video based on the text and alt tags.  Write a compelling Alt text label for each graphic element and Action button in your message.   Your tags will still appear in a text-only message in place of the graphic, to let readers know what they’ll receive if they decide to download the graphic version.    Moreover, HTML 5 will let those alt tag fields function as live links – without downloading the graphic element – which is great for busy people who don’t want to pay or wait for the graphics, so use the Alt tag to help people decide when and what to click.

6. Visual text/graphics balance – the 80/20 rule rides again

At least 80% of your message should be text with text links, and no more than 20% clickable graphics.  This helps make certain your full message gets across quickly even if it’s the text-only version, and it ensures fast, successful downloads for people who want the full visual message.  Even 4G mobile download speeds are generally slower than desktop device speeds.  In fact, a good acid test is to first compose your email as a text-only version, to be sure that your entire message and action links are visually appealing, tell the complete story, and generate a response.

7. Social Media Buttons:  Share or Snare?

If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other complementary accounts that might help readers get to know you better, include those link buttons.    If you opt for social “sharing” buttons, place them prominently alongside content your audience might wish to share.   Caution: while it’s magnanimous to provide social “share’ buttons so viewers can share your email with others, experience has shown that email readers generally would rather get more info themselves to facilitate a decision before they decide to share it.  With this in mind, it is actually more effective to have your social media buttons link to additional information to facilitate buying decisions.   Your own circumstances may vary; it is best to A/B test the social sharing / snaring button to determine which has best effect for your audience.  Above all, don’t “mix” the buttons.  They should either be all “share” or all “snare”, to avoid user confusion.

8. Consider using cascading style sheets (CSS).

CSS can help detect and change the size of image and text to comfortably fit different sized device screens.

9.  Testing alone gets 82% more revenue!

At Fan Foundry, we have discovered that our lifetime conversion rates exceed industry norms simply because we test our messages.   We have an 82% higher lifetme conversion rate across all client campaigns, based on comparison to performance reports from prominent email marketing software providers.   Does this mean that until email testing becomes more standard practice, you too can get 82% more revenue from your email marketing simply by testing?  Possibly.  Try it!

Send a test email to your own mobile email reader – or as broad a variety of email readers as possible – to check for visual appeal and link performance.   Some of the more sophisticated marketing automation software products actually have this testing feature built-in.   Test a different subject line; a different graphic; a different CTA button; etc.  After all the hard work you’ve done to create your gorgeous, compelling email outreach campaigns and acquire a faithful audience,  the few minutes spent testing gives your marketing ROI significant lift.   Wouldn’t you like to earn 1.82 times your ordinary revenue?  Well, then, test.  Conversely, if you ignore this step and send an error-laden email, don’t be surprised if people begin to ignore you and your results suffer.  Don’t be that person!  Make it count, grow your audience and build loyalty!

What has your experience been?  Any tips to share?  I’ll add them here and credit you.  Or you can discuss below, or just ask a question.

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Posted by Ed

Social Media ROI, a Case Study (Tech Event)

January 12, 2010

Many of the social media success stories kicking around the interwebs these days are indeed inspirational, yet I get frequent client comments along the lines of: “Oh, sure, Dell and Cisco can do it, but what about my small to mid-size enterprise?  What is realistically achievable? Our experimental budget is limited.”

The following true story may offer some insight as to how one small organization leveraged its existing relationships creatively.  I have withheld names by request, however if you contact me for specifics, I can share more.  It is told from the point of view of my experience with a start-up software company.  In this story, everybody wins, and social media makes it possible.  No, it’s not a multi-million dollar landslide victory, but it’s an important demonstration of how incremental change yields great results.
~

Today’s Featured Post:

Social Media ROI, a Case Study

Case study: Executive Summit event

The Players:  
1. Startup Software company
2. Online community
3. Executive Summit (event management organization)
4. Industry portals

Their needs:
1. Software company – customers, inbound prospects, PR
2. Online community  – affordable professional development
3. Executive Summit – speakers, tuition, attendee satisfaction
4. Industry portals – enrichment, community, reputation

PART 1 – THE CAMPAIGN

Software company purchases speaker/sponsor role at Executive Summit, and negotiates with summit management to discount* sponsor/speaker fee for every attendee the software company recruits.

*Note: discount arrangement was only possible because the Summit management company and the Software company had previously exchanged value by partnering on other successful events that similarly enriched their communities.

PART 2 – THE COMMUNITY

Software company announces Summit registration discount:
- via email to precisely targeted clients and prospects in its enriched database
- on industry portals, professional organization sites, and communities such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Announcement goes “somewhat” viral – LinkedIn, re-Tweeted, blogged.  Event website, SW firm site and community portals are linked back from those sources – expanding the community’s resources and increasing brand value for all involved web properties.
PART 3 – THE ROI

Discount code announcement combined with viral circulation results in increased event revenue sufficient to WIPE OUT entire speaker/sponsor fee (over ten thousand dollars) for Software company while significantly increasing the value of the event for all.

Community members’ recent referral activity, combined with additional Profiles of affiliations, interests, networks, corporate roles etc., leads to refined lead scoring and fast identification of previously unknown high potential prospects

THE RESULT

Everybody wins – as stated earlier:
1. Software company – customers, prospects, PR
2. Online community – affordable professional development
3. Executive Summit – speakers, tuition, attendee satisfaction
4. Industry portals – enrichment, community, reputation

~

Commentary:

This success story has no precise ending, because we have agreed to continue the partnership.  One thing seems reasonably certain at this juncture: there is no going back.  Heightened audience expectations must be nurtured to keep bringing the mutual benefits to this enriched community.   Once you have built a community, it requires care and feeding to thrive.

How have your community building efforts fared?  Do you have a story to share?  Love to hear your comments.

‘ Til soon,

~Ed

~

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Posted by Ed

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