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This Week in Digital Marketing 23-27 August: Improve your email campaigns, tumblr and conversion optimisation is the new black?

August 26, 2010 by Ben Young

By now those of you in the US have probably tried Facebook Places, unfortunately the rest of us are still (im)patiently waiting. However there are plenty of demos, and we can deal with FourSquare in the meantime. However Facebook isn’t the sole company in the digital marketing world, this week we look at Tumblr, improving your email campaigns and conversion optimisation is the new black?

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Testing your Email Marketing

This is actually two posts, first up from the Bronto Blog 9 Tips for [email] Testing Success – looking at some really indepth points on best testing practice, ie “always run tests more than once” and of course (but often overlooked) “stick to one test variable”. The second is from Email Marketing Reports: What impacts your email marketing results? It’s a great article, looking at Weather?!? Other Marketing, New vs Old subscribers and many other factors.

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Tumblr reaches 1 billion posts!

We talked about this stat on our second episode of our podcast (due out next week) but TechCrunch announced that on top of prior news of Tumblr reaching a billion page views a month (currently 1.7 billion) that Tumblr now has a billion posts within the index! Clearly the growth is picking up in the micro blogging phase (which Tumblr & Posterous own). What I wonder is, is micro-blogging the no mans land? Where people are progressing to blogging, or to tweeting? Time will tell, in the meantime congrats to Tumblr.

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Microsoft now owns 28.1% Search Engine Market Share [in the US]

Bing has announced they’ve now completed the transfer of Yahoo Search to Bing. Which means of course they now control 28.1% of the market, for those of us in New Zealand it doesn’t really mean much where Googles market share has been indicated as high as 99%, however what it does signal is that SEM & SEO are going to get more competitive (and potentially more costly) but the return will rise as well. Now arguably you only need to optimise for two search engines instead of three. Read the full post over at Mashable.

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Conversion Optimisation is the new black

Falling for the adage of a great title we had to mention this post, we agree, a lot of our work this year has been on conversion optimisation. That is establishing measurement, testing & analysing changes of your digital assets against goals. A smart approach in this space allows you to generate more business from the same traffic, which also means you can pay more for traffic. A win in anyones books, make sure you read the full post: Conversion Optimisation is the new black.

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How big brands are using location based services

I still think that with 2.8 million members spread all over the world FourSquare isn’t quite big enough to get impact (in terms of a campaign) but with the boost Facebook Places provides it is something we need to forward thinking with. As such this Mashable post on the Top 5 Ways Big Brands are using FourSquare is quite timely, the first example of Bravo (a culture tv network) who has jumped in (and brought 50,000 fans with it) and been recommending great places to eat, shopping & hotels – all things that reinforce what they do.

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Facebook Places the lowdown

You can watch the Apple-esque video below (it’s actually not that bad and does make you want to try Places) but also read the full post over at the Facebook Blog. The thing about the growth of location based services, is that it adds new dimensions to the social web: time & space – a huge opportunity for companies to leap in and own a time & space in the online world. Interestingly it can also add a certain ‘status’ to the web, whereby the local places you hang out communicate who you are (also again an opportunity for brands).

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On a Lighter Note

Be sure to check out this Roger Federer video from a Gillette Ad shoot which has gone viral this week, real or fake you decide:

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