In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :
About HTML Email Design, Twitter RT Tracking, Increasing Webinar Attendence! All this and more…
Show length 22:20
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01:20 The Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn Group is still rolling – HTML Email Design
05:31 John Blue sends in an article on some killer Direct Marketing in Forbes Magazine
06:02 Michael P. asks about Twitter RT tools – check TweetReach
06:43 Mac App Store, Verizon iPhone are both “Old” News
08:20 Chicago Mike Reports on Illinois possibly forcing Amazon to close affiliate program
09:33 How to increase your webinar audience
12:30 Does Refer-a-Friend work?
16:07 Kiva Continues! Robert Rodriguez Home Repair in the Great State of Texas – Strifeistan, Africa and now the Great State of Texas!
17:15 Sample MindMap posted at John’s Blog, Chris likes MindNode
17:40 Upcoming Events – The 25th Annual MOC Awards! Time to vote for the Marketing Over Coffee Awards! Slavik has stepped up to sponsor the awards. Chris at NEDMA and SocialFresh Tampa
21:08 Question of the Week –Are you using any Twitter RT tracking tools? And, why haven’t you bought the MOC app from iTunes yet? Or The Marketing Over Coffee T-Shirt (and limited edition Beantown Version)
Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris. Digg Marketing Over Coffee
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Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters in the Music Alley from Mevio.
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall
John Wall 0:19
tomorrow marketing over coffee I’m John Wall I’m Christopher Penn Today’s marketing over coffee brought to you by blue sky factory or email provider of choice you can we have a new ebook
Christopher Penn 0:27
16 ways to integrate social and email marketing. So the URL is blue sky factory comm slash social sharing
John Wall 0:35
social sharing alright cool can check that out and toll free freedom Virtual Phone system 200 plus free minutes no contracts and instant setup for as little as 995 a month you can try it out on the marketing over coffee comment line at triple 83232771 so with 30 inches of snow between us and the last marketing over coffee, basically here we are back in the donut shop. Yeah, it’s completely snowed out last week. We got just crushed it Like 24 inches or more in my house, we had completely killed. glacial Yeah, yeah, it was just nuts. And of course the snowblower died too, you know. So that was great. That was fun. And you’re just back down at Blue Sky factory this week. So we’re getting pushed out one day but we’re back back in the game here. And so we’ve got a bunch of stuff to catch up on I did marketing over coffee LinkedIn group still just like on fire completely rolling. I think that the earliest thing I had to happen since last year, we had HTML email design came up as a topic, people are asking about, hey, where can I get email design done? You know, because basically, and you know, my whole take on this is just that because a lot of times the emails being opened up in a client like outlook instead of a browser, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not supported. There’s a lot of things that don’t work and you and but from, also, from what I understand, it’s pretty much just a matter of testing. That was the only thing that I mean, I guess if you did it enough, you would know this stuff in your head, but pretty much anyone can do it. As long as when you get the message you check it out in Outlook. You know, all at least three versions go? Oh, 307 10 and, you know, check out stuff on the Mac side. No, in fact, you guys offered as a service to at blue sky was one of the things you’d mentioned.
Christopher Penn 2:12
Yeah, I mean, so there’s, there’s, you know, of course the paid service stuff. But look, let’s talk about just HTML email in general. So, especially clients like outlook typically support 1996 level HTML. So tables and some basic formatting. Style Sheet support is very spotty at best, and it’s completely inconsistent from one client to another. So don’t plan on using any of those design practices you’ve learned in the last 15 years. That’s straight out the window. JavaScript or any kind of scripting is not okay. That will get you blocked flash will get you blocked or or you know, not be allowed through even something as simple as forum posting having a form inside the email. Even though it’s straight HTML. Almost every browser client will give you a big honkin warning saying you know, this email message contains a full Do you want to even open it? Which, of course, you know, for the savvy person who’s expecting it, you know, that might be okay. But for your average, you know, b2c consumer, they’re just gonna close the email and run away and deleted as fast as possible. So when you’re making these things, I mean, you’ll literally go back to the very, very, very basics and and, you know, basic graphics, good practices and stuff like that. Keep it relatively light, for example, was a two years ago now that we did a test with blue sky factory on template design, with the marketing over coffee newsletter, and we had, you know, the beautifully designed one on one hand and had the, the, you know, Chris had it with the ugly stick template on the other side, and they performed equally well because people were interested more in the content than the format. Treat emails exactly like web pages. So if you have stuff that you want above the fold, you know, test that out. There are plenty of paid services, we offer one called inbox free That you know will slip me it will take an email to render it and every possible email combination you could want, you know, Outlook iPhones stuff, but you don’t even need to do that if you want to do there’s the free version is render your email as a as a web page, put up on your website somewhere. And there are sites like browser shots.org, which will at least get, you know, give an idea of what it’s going to look like in Chrome and IE and Firefox and stuff. And that will help somebody because outlook basically uses Internet Explorer is a rendering engine to render it and stuff. So all that stuff, that’s all the free stuff. And you know, just keep it simple. That’s the other thing is people spend so much time on templates and graphic design and not nearly enough time on decent content in the email like it’s a beautiful template says nothing.
John Wall 4:47
Right, right. It’s gotta be worth reading. It’s content people want to see now that is a great point because it’s if you’re spending more time with a template than the content, you’re in trouble. Yeah. You know, another thing that I thought about that is go mess. They do. Web monitoring you know, you pay them x thousand or whatever and they basically check your website from like all over the world, but I know that they have a full, you know, this ridiculous thing where you put in your homepage on their when their dashboards and it shows you like 200 browser combinations and device that you know, if you go for a paid version, you get everything. But yeah, the free services are that you know enough to at least make sure you’re it’s classic 8020 you know, pretty much if it works. On the top eight versions, you’re fine. Don’t worry about the rest of the world. But right. Let’s see, john blue sends over an article about some killer direct marketing in Forbes magazine, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. There’s just there’s a guy that’s as they do direct mailing, it’s hardcore, ultra focused lectures and things like that. So they’ll talk about World War Two historians or they have some DVDs of astrology classes from, you know, noted professors at Stanford, and they get, you know, 190 bucks for this kind of stuff. And it’s a huge business model. So, basically the direct marketing not dead yet. file is Well, we’ll put that for today. We had Michael Procopio had emailed and longtime listener was asking about Twitter tools. And he’s looking for a tool that will list accounts retweeting his tweets. And since obviously they would seem to be folks that are you know, following his brand he checked 140 Google had no luck on that. Tweet reach will do that
Christopher Penn 6:19
tweet rage, will will tell you who’s, who’s in your audience is sharing your stuff to their audience.
John Wall 6:27
All right, so that’s the end and you know, obviously cursors the you know, search for your hat your name and RT that will give you a set list of stuff on the ghetto style. Hardware watch. Well, hardware and software to it. One thing was the Mac App Store last week that was kind of big that’s going to be stale news now.
Unknown Speaker 6:47
A weeks goes by and dead
John Wall 6:50
straight. Obviously, the App Store you know, killer for them with the new MacBook Air not having physical media. Yeah, I’m in it. So that’s the new way to go. I haven’t been bent over there play around. Have you checked it out at all?
Christopher Penn 7:01
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think it’s really useful for is discovering new stuff. So you can, especially on the free front, you know, you can specify, show me what’s, you know, what’s topping the charts in education that’s free for the Mac, and you’ll find a lot of pretty decent software that way. So it’s a good way to discover new stuff.
John Wall 7:21
All right, cool. And then, of course, Verizon carrying the iPhone. That was big news last week. You know, there were a couple interesting things I saw with that. It’s a CDMA phone. So that’s the same network sprint is on I’m still of course holding out that there’s going to be a sprint one, which I’ll be a long time before I get to let my breath out on that one. I think you can’t browse and talk at the same time, which is kind of interesting. No travel. You know, if you leave the country, the things are Breck, you can’t do anything.
Christopher Penn 7:50
There was another
John Wall 7:51
Oh, it works as a five user hotspot out of the box. That was kind of Yeah, that’s very cool. And I don’t know early reports show the Verizon network like Being 510 times faster and some Tat, you know, totally unscientific tests. Right. So right, this is, but so that’s been big news across the board.
Unknown Speaker 8:09
I just be happy not to deal with a DMV.
John Wall 8:11
Yeah, that’s pretty much everybody that I talked to is kind of the same boat. They’re just like, it’s just such a pain to deal with those guys. Well, I got an interesting Chicago, my kid sent me an email talking about Chicago or Illinois actually looking at taxing the Amazon affiliate program. And Amazon basically sent an email out to their affiliates saying, you know, if this goes through, we’re just gonna
Christopher Penn 8:34
shut the shut the doors. Yep. California did that. And Amazon pulled all their California affiliates.
John Wall 8:39
No kidding. So they shut the program down and they said
Christopher Penn 8:41
the program down and if you’re in California, you are no longer eligible to join the program. So I think they said the impact on California was about a loss of about two and a half billion dollars in an e commerce, you know, income tax on the income tax side because these affiliates are no longer earning the money from Amazon,
John Wall 8:58
right? Yeah, well, and of course, you know, looking from the vendor side, that’s a big deal with Amazon. But yeah, even worse on the flip side is that there are entire companies that do nothing but make their revenue off of affiliate marketing. And so these types of legislation basically just close the company right down, shut the doors and kill it. Well, of course, you know, it kills all the local jobs. I’m sure the principals just move across the border to the next state and they continue collecting the checks but yeah, pretty much no faster way to choke it off and lose out so interesting on the legislation watch.
Christopher Penn 9:31
We got a ton of stuff in the LinkedIn a group by the way. Now, Jeff picker was asking what’s the one single thing you’ve done to increase your relevant webinar audience? I know you do. Actually, you do probably do more webinars than than we do.
John Wall 9:42
One single thing to include to increase the audience Well, you know, the biggest thing from pure numbers thing is don’t invite people just once you know, get different lists segment and blast two or three times. Because you’re just you’re not going to get everybody in the first round invites. You know, there’s people that are just not gonna We get the message or whatever, you know, there’s diminishing returns with every round. But I’ve never seen a second round email that still didn’t pull, like 25 to 30% of what the first one did. So, you know, if you’re looking, I mean that, you know, that’s pretty a lame answer as far as things go, but that’s the second, you know, that’s the biggest bang you can get for doing nothing. I mean, literally, it’s just like pull the trigger again a week later at a different time. And you’re gonna get a lot juice. The other one of it for big, huge numbers is partnering, you know, work with another vendor or pay a publication to sponsor the thing, right, and, you know, you can, I’ve seen, you know, webinars that have pulled 90 to 100 people pull 700 or 800 people, right, I mean, that that’s those are kind of two of the biggest thing. I don’t know any other traffic boosters you work for you for webinars,
Christopher Penn 10:44
believe it or not, as long as you’ve done the legwork in advance. Twitter is actually incredibly powerful for doing that because what tends to happen is a lot of people don’t sign up for webinars, so they sign up and they don’t show up because they’re not sure what the schedule is when you crack out the old Twitter account. But you know, just letting folks know, hey, 15 minutes till the webinar, there’s still time to register, there’s still time to jump in, you know, five minutes, you know, but this webinar is going on right now that that stuff works really well, because people are like, Oh, you know, I got, you know, my meeting got moved, or I think it’s got rescheduled. So it brings a level of, you know, almost real time interaction with the folks who presumably are interested enough to follow you. And you know, that that can really quickly pump up the numbers, you know, have a good app that say, on average, we’ve seen 20% lift or so give or take from doing that stuff from the hour before. There’s looking at the number of registrants in the webinar cuz all the ones we do are behind a red wall. So you know, you see 100 people registered and suddenly you tweet out saying in 30 minutes, we’re doing this and feel like I know,
John Wall 11:47
right, I got I got
Unknown Speaker 11:49
excuse
Unknown Speaker 11:52
me, there’s 150 registers. So
John Wall 11:54
that’s it. That’d be interesting to track. Because you guys your audiences is Twitter savvy. So that’s really good. Because one thing I’ve noticed with is that there is a quality difference in the folks that sign up two weeks in advance. Mm hmm. Those are the best leads. They want to go there. Yeah, they’re like, Okay, I’m looking two weeks out of my calendar. I’m gonna, I’m gonna scratch in some time, the folks that you get two or three days before, those people are living a day at a time and they may not be available when right webinar rolls around. But yeah, the Twitter point is interesting, but they’re sitting at their desk right then exact, there’s no better way to convert them than grab them right now.
Christopher Penn 12:27
So Exactly. We’re here Danny star asked, what are some best practices advices concerns when using a refer friends type program to grow your business? Any kind of referral program?
John Wall 12:39
refer friend, you know, he’s so funny. Isn’t there’s such a stigma that those programs usually it’s kind of like, oh, what are you getting into? I you know, if those programs work for you, that’s great. I don’t know I I’m trying to think of case studies where, you know, there’s always those are again, like 10% left programs kind of or less, you know, I mean, I’ve I’ve read I haven’t I Never seen one that was just on fire I don’t know you know a better model is kind of the whole viral approach where if the product or service has the introduction baked into it so you know that always classic was hotmail you know when they did their original left it was like on every message at the bottom was like hey do you like this click to try it out and that works. But yeah, I don’t know I’ve never seen any big wins with that have you seen anything that’s worked with refer friend stuff
Christopher Penn 13:25
in most cases it’s it’s where you have stuff that is is more of an affiliate program than anything else. So it’s not just you know, refer a friend a big part of a pure referral program is you can’t suck at what you do. I mean, you you’ve got to be you know, kicking butt and taking names across the board. If your services literally you know, everyone’s marketing collateral says they have the best customer service and but you know, if you actually do you know, when you go to the bar at night, and you know, people recognize you and go, Oh my god, you actually have a service, then, um, you know, referral programs in that case, almost kind of take care of them. To some degree, because people are just that excited about, you know, working with you that they’re, they’re very happy to recommend you to anyone asking people to refer and offering incentives to refer. I mean, that’s pretty basic stuff you need to, to make sure that you ask, make it prominent somewhere in your communications, I mean, one of the best places to do it, hands down, and I forget who did this who said this, um, as it comes to the credit card industry, the best one of the best places to stick that is in the bill. Because it’s the one document you know, everyone reads.
John Wall 14:30
Yeah, yeah, sure. Cuz that is a good point that a lot of people strike out over new business immediately where it’s like, you know, it first leveraged or get referrals from internally. But you know, that’s more like it most the time. It’s the sales guys taking advantage of the communication there. It’s kind of hard to get a self feeding one where people are just gonna run over and give you a business. That’s, yeah, that’s the unicorn but you’re not gonna see.
Christopher Penn 14:56
Yeah, we’re filled. The affiliate program structure is really good. If you can, if you have the time and expertise to actually set up a working affiliate program, we did that back in the day with student loans and offered a reasonably good payout. I mean, it was, like $50 per conversion and stuff. And, you know, we had, we had a couple of folks who were banging down the doors with, you know, 10 or 20,000 referrals and stuff. So, you know, they made out like crazy. And of course, you know, when you’re paying $50, but you’re earning 1200 dollars on alone, you know, you’ll run that all day long, right?
John Wall 15:28
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s Yeah. Obviously, like affiliate programs, or even second tier ones. I don’t know. I’ve never seen I personally haven’t seen like a second tier affiliate, you know, somebody that’s a champion, that second tier and but, you know, the only folks I’ve seen are just affiliates on their own right, making huge checks. But you know, the infrastructure does exist for that and somebody must be making some money on that someplace.
Christopher Penn 15:52
There’s a lot of money in multi tier affiliate marketing. I mean, there’s a tremendous amount. If you’re really good at it, it starts to get into the whole pyramid. scheme got nothing a little bit but the money is out there for sure. Right, right. Yeah, basically it is it’s
Unknown Speaker 16:05
right in the pyramid up.
John Wall 16:08
Kiva continues, we have our hundred dollars, which is cycled through Africa, strife of Stan. And now finally back in the United States, Robert Rodriguez Home Repair in the great state of Texas. His business has been funded by marketing over coffee $100 still running around very cool. If you want more info on Kiva and how to do your own micro lending, send us an email we can send you an invite for that. That’s cool.
Christopher Penn 16:31
What is he doing with $100 friend?
John Wall 16:33
Well, it’s the loan was like eight grand you know, we’re just like one of 100 people that chip in the buck store these he does Home Repair you know, I should we should do a whole logo and ad for for him. But yeah, basically, it’s fixing up houses and stuff. He’s got clients to that’s, I don’t know, this thing just works. Like Like, I never thought we would see the money back from the Africa over the taxi guy. Well, the taxi guy yeah, that was just like I figured he would take the money and run and then Yeah, Africa was like transitioning from selling food to selling used handbags or something like that. And that loan totally got paid back like this is running. It’s all good. Good. So, yeah, it’s crazy. We talked about mind maps last week, I finally up on my blog, I put a sample map up there and PDF and some instructions on some stuffs all the link to that in the show notes. Cool. And the 25th marketing over coffee awards. It is time to vote the ballot is up at marketing over coffee calm. So you go over there. And of course, there’s a disclaimer right at the top of the ballot that you know, this ballot is only for our entertainment. We may or may not pay any attention to the results of the voting.
Christopher Penn 17:40
Wonder no one wants to sponsor this.
John Wall 17:44
I know actually, we got a sponsor to I did I’ll have more information on next week. But one of our listeners has stepped up and they’re doing the award. So very cool. The words done on the house. So that’s going to be cool. And actually I think they want they’re gonna do a certain size lot. So I think there will actually be the awards and then we may have just some straight marketing over coffee branded mugs.
Christopher Penn 18:02
Oh, cool. So,
John Wall 18:04
so yeah, yeah, yeah, the awards? Well, the big thing with that is actually I would, you know, I’m definitely gonna take the voting into account, that’s going to be part of the decision. But I just figured a good general disclaimer. That way, if somebody gains the voting or it’s right, then you just have the right to say, Yeah, no, this smells funny, we’re gonna ignore it. But ya know, for the most part, if, if you’re on the ballot, definitely send it around to all your friends, because that will be worth no doubt, there’s going to be some categories where we’re going to be on the fence and the voting will definitely tip us one direction or the other. It’s basically a baseline thing. Like if we’ve told you about and you’ve been nominated, and then you get zero votes. Yeah, you’re kind of bombing. There’s no way you’re gonna win.
Unknown Speaker 18:42
Unless we want you to win.
Christopher Penn 18:44
Yeah. We have a category a meta category for next year, like your best marketing for to win a marketing award.
Unknown Speaker 18:52
Most
Christopher Penn 18:54
most effective person who actually use their own stuff, the best campaign to win this award and know that Figure it out. I was speaking with mines node. Talking about mind mapping real quick mind node for the Mac is a phenomenal mind mapping application looks like a native and functional and native Mac App. Most of the ones that are out there are these really bad collages of Java implementations and stuff. And you’re like, oh, by the time the thing actually gets warmed up and ready to go, you’re ready to forgotten what you were reading.
John Wall 19:21
Okay. It’s just soaking up the virtual machine exact getting things booted
Christopher Penn 19:25
and connected. But yeah, my note is it’s free for the basic version. And I’ve been using it a ton. I love it.
Unknown Speaker 19:30
Oh, yeah. No kidding. You get into I got into it. Because
Christopher Penn 19:32
it was it’s that simple. Like, okay, now now do this now do this. Oh, okay. That’s
John Wall 19:36
Yeah, that is, uh, you know, it, definitely. The better ones have intuitive us, you know, you sit there and it you know, you hit insert, and you get a new note. And it’s just that easy. And they’re not all just that easy. But that’s cool. That’s cool. Let’s see upcoming events other stuff to travel what you just finished your Baltimore trip. Anything else on the road tour?
Christopher Penn 19:54
Yeah, just finished up Baltimore. February 8, I will be at Bentley University for the New England direct marketing Association marketing technology show I’ll be speaking on 21st century email marketing, then not too long after that, I’ll be headed down to Tampa, Florida for social fresh Tampa, I’ll be doing a session on Facebook analytics as it applies to trying to figure out what in the world to do with that gigantic thing. And then immediately after that, I’ll be in Frederick, Maryland for the Fred nmt conference, which is a it’s sort of a local regional conference on marketing technology and marketing stuff. So if you’re in the Frederick, Maryland area, make sure you sign up for that one. So and somewhere also, there is no say it’s like the 11th the 12th. I’ll be at the educational travel conference in Providence, Rhode Island speaking about again, email marketing and stuff. So I’ll be I’ll be shipping a lot of email.
John Wall 20:49
Tourists cranking up the years back and back and actually, absolutely,
Christopher Penn 20:51
it’s it’s getting it’s really muddy. So.
John Wall 20:54
All right, cool. I’ve got a company trip coming up first week in February. So we’re going to be rolling Greg video. No interview that way we’ve got his book micro marketing talk to him about that. So we’ll roll that for the rest of the world and Question of the week then what do you want to throw out to the listeners anything?
Christopher Penn 21:10
Question you actually I’d be curious to see if anyone else has an answer for Michael as well for the Twitter tools for monitoring you know what what the people who are you know, spreading your stuff who What are you using? How are you using it and stuff? Is there stuff that’s already out there that has a function that you know, they just turned on and when no one ever noticed so I’ll leave a leave a message either in the comments or in the marketing over coffee LinkedIn group now with even more people in it.
John Wall 21:36
Alright, that sounds good. That’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the QA Andrew.
Unknown Speaker 21:42
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can find Mr. Pan at Blue Sky factory comm and read more at Christopher S Pen calm. Mr. Wall blogs at Roane and marketeer calm and appears regularly on the podcast. The most sitting over coffee theme song is called melody by funk masters. And you can find it at music alley for me to go or follow the link on our show notes.