- speed (improve agility and time to market)
- scalability (scale up or down depending on resource requirements)
- lower maintenance costs (see previous bullet)
Showing posts with label webinar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label webinar. Show all posts
Digital Media in the AWS Cloud
One day, I'll take the hint and stop signing up for these webinars. Ten minutes into it, my brain glazed over because the content dramatically shifted from being marketer friendly to heavy hardcore IT. All I managed to ascertain from this one were the benefits for hosting media on Amazon's cloud. However, this isn't any different than prior AWS webinars.
Fast & Frugal Webinar - Running a Lean Startup with AWS
This was a multipart webinar series that Amazon AWS hosted. I thought that the speakers would shed some light into a few notions that are critically important to small business owners, primarily what a lean startup is, how these startups are using AWS for their business, and how to take this knowledge from webinar to execution. Some parts were way too technical for a mixed business audience.
"Lean" is a concept that is closely associated with manufacturing, and according to Wikipedia it is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work.
Recommendations for Lean Startups:
Use innovation accounting with three learning milestones. (1) establish the baseline to build a minimum viable product and measure how customers behave right now. (2) tune the engine and experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the baseline towards the deal. (3) pivot or persevere when experiments reach diminishing returns, it's time to pivot.
Leverage AWS. Why? Your server infrastructure needs will change. If you are able to run on the same infrastructure at launch and a year later, you overbuilt your launch infrastructure, or even worse, your business is not scaling. Goal: find a Scalable Business Model.
Build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Toss the vanity metrics (ones use in frilly reports to senior management, shareholders, or key stakeholders) and instead measure key assumptions that answer what we are trying to prove with this startup. Use 3rd party SaaS metrics or Amazon's elastic mapreduce. Goal: learn from the process, iterate or pivot in a new direction.
Use the building blocks AWS provides. It is on demand, available, elastic (use as much or as little as needed), pay as you go, low cost, no contracts, no upfront payments, and no cap-ex.
Vertical scaling - increase hardware, cpu, memory
Horizontal scaling - increases instance number, master/slave replications
Database sharding - indexes partial customer datasets
Goal: stay lean by using only what you need and reduce costs.
"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." --Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
"Lean" is a concept that is closely associated with manufacturing, and according to Wikipedia it is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work.
 |
| The Toyota Way, an example of a lean process |
Use innovation accounting with three learning milestones. (1) establish the baseline to build a minimum viable product and measure how customers behave right now. (2) tune the engine and experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the baseline towards the deal. (3) pivot or persevere when experiments reach diminishing returns, it's time to pivot.
Leverage AWS. Why? Your server infrastructure needs will change. If you are able to run on the same infrastructure at launch and a year later, you overbuilt your launch infrastructure, or even worse, your business is not scaling. Goal: find a Scalable Business Model.
Build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Toss the vanity metrics (ones use in frilly reports to senior management, shareholders, or key stakeholders) and instead measure key assumptions that answer what we are trying to prove with this startup. Use 3rd party SaaS metrics or Amazon's elastic mapreduce. Goal: learn from the process, iterate or pivot in a new direction.
Use the building blocks AWS provides. It is on demand, available, elastic (use as much or as little as needed), pay as you go, low cost, no contracts, no upfront payments, and no cap-ex.
Vertical scaling - increase hardware, cpu, memory
Horizontal scaling - increases instance number, master/slave replications
Database sharding - indexes partial customer datasets
Goal: stay lean by using only what you need and reduce costs.
A rant about webinar content
HubSpot webinars are starting to suck. Today's webinar was supposed to be on "The Competitive Edge: Social Business and Competitive Analysis". Now there's 25 minutes of my life I can't get back. If you're going to use marketing buzz words in your presentation agenda to attract an audience to your webinar, at least cover them in the webinar with sample campaign data and/or qualitative facts.
Have Data, Will Target
Coremetrics, featuring a real world case study with Estee Lauder, hosted a webinar today on retargeting emails based on behavioral triggers. Beauty products are a tactile product, meaning customers like to touch and feel the product at a store counter before purchasing; and one might assume that customers would rather do that at a brick-and-mortar place than online.
Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:
Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:
- Coremetrics for enterprise web analytics
- Coremetrics LIVEmail (not to be confused with Windows Live email)
- Experian's CheetahMail for email delivery metrics (opens, clicks, opt outs) and automated email campaigns
- Online display ads paired with cookies and search keywords with select ad networks
- A network of more than 250 websites, 50 of which are e-commerce sites
- An in-house list (does not use 3rd party lists at all)
EL's approach for retargeting emails:
- Determine segments and top performing product categories
- Customer service-oriented messages to customers
- Free shipping plus samples; call-to-action embedded in the ad itself
- Use registration confirmation, cart abandonment, and cookies that track categories browsed
- Segmentations based on visitor engagement, category affinities (serves up specific ad displays), referral sources (Google, Facebook), site tools (product reviews), level of engagement, and customer value
The results:
- Remarketing email open rates were 3-5x higher than broadcast emails
- Revenue per email was 6x higher than broadcast emails
When asked in the Q&A section about the open rates for broadcast emails, Estee Lauder commented they were average for the industry. This suggested that for the beauty and personal care segment, open rates were roughly 15% with a 3% click-through rate. Open rates this low usually means that the data hasn't been cleansed in a few years, there's plenty of duplicate customer records, fake customer records from users wanting to take advantage of single-use offers multiple times, or there's simply GIGO in their database. But, I digress. Back to the webinar...
Re-messaging for online display ads looked at customer behavior while visiting EL's website(s) or partner websites, specifically targeting customers who interacted with the site but did not purchase which triggered an ad to appear via browse cookie on the ad networks used.
In context, ad serving in the example of Clinique ads went like this:
- skin care shopper gets a skin care ad
- make up shopper gets a make up ad
- abandoned cart shopper receives and offer ad
Re-messaging (targeting specific tailored ads to specific product interests) for display ads resulted with significant ROI improvements such as more impressions and click-based revenues.
On the whole, EL has few challenges and they are common to just about everyone who transacts and tracks marketing spends online such as privacy concerns, measuring ROI, or determining the number of touch points within a 24-hour period.
If you're getting higher quality responses (more clicks, higher revenues) from your customers because you've now sent them a targeted email specific to their interests instead of one intended for all audiences, of course you'll get a higher response rate.
EL has either a really good design team or a great ad agency that can produce color-rich imagery that sticks to each product's brand. They aren't really challenged with lack of content like the rest of us. This chart shows some of the challenges faced by content marketers in the US:
Don't let the lack of content stop you from setting up parts of the process for demand generation or automated email follow-ups. Estee Lauder uses one creative per branding ad campaign and rotates it with fresh content every few months. This insight didn't happen overnight and takes careful market planning for budgetary spends and execution.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Attended an Amazon webinar today that covered their Simple Email Service. I have yet to test it out. Initial impressions suggest that you should stick with your existing email service provider for basic email marketing broadcasts because there aren't a whole lot of tools nor analytics built yet for SES. It is a basic as basic gets.
A few things to note:
There are two types of email sending options: formatted or raw message; both of which are also supported by API functions (SendEmail, SendRawEmail). The basic feedback analytics are reminiscent of basic web stats (GetSendStatistics API) which will tell you about delivery attempts, rejected messages, hard bounces, and spam complaints. And, everyone's lists are served up separately, so even if you have an overlap of customers with another business that also uses Amazon SES, their spam complaints do not affect your broadcasts (unlike how Gmail blocks spam).
Most ESPs have sending limits built into their pricing contracts. Amazon is no different. Every SES user is assigned a quota (max number of emails that can be sent in 24 hours) and an access level (everyone starts out in the sandbox to test SES features and can send up to 200 recipients a day), which is tiered. However, you can only send to and from a verified email address.
Pricing. ESPs that support small to medium sized businesses such as iContact, Bronto, Vertical Response, or ConstantContact, shouldn't fret about Amazon's pricing structure. Pricing is tiered and is based on the combination of two elements: data transfer and CPM per email message.
Current CPM is $0.10 per thousand messages sent. Data transfer pricing is as follows:
Pricing examples:
1000 email messages to one recipient per day with content size 10kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 3.1 GB in/out data transfer
= $3.73 for the month
1000 email messages outbound to one recipient per day with content size 100kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 31 GB in/out data transfer
= $10.70 for the month
Amazon EC2 users are already subscribed to the free pricing tier and are capped at 2000 messages for free each day.
To get started with Amazon SES:
Subscribe
Verify email addresses / create your own whitelist of verified addresses
Send Email
Request production access
Get Feedback
Limits on sandbox accounts: 100 whitelisted verified addresses, up to 10MB per message (because most popular email readers cannot handle more than that).
Limits on all accounts: Does not support SOAP or file attachments
A few things to note:
- Supported APIs
- Built-in Features
- Sending Limits
- Access Levels
- Pricing
There are two types of email sending options: formatted or raw message; both of which are also supported by API functions (SendEmail, SendRawEmail). The basic feedback analytics are reminiscent of basic web stats (GetSendStatistics API) which will tell you about delivery attempts, rejected messages, hard bounces, and spam complaints. And, everyone's lists are served up separately, so even if you have an overlap of customers with another business that also uses Amazon SES, their spam complaints do not affect your broadcasts (unlike how Gmail blocks spam).
Most ESPs have sending limits built into their pricing contracts. Amazon is no different. Every SES user is assigned a quota (max number of emails that can be sent in 24 hours) and an access level (everyone starts out in the sandbox to test SES features and can send up to 200 recipients a day), which is tiered. However, you can only send to and from a verified email address.
Pricing. ESPs that support small to medium sized businesses such as iContact, Bronto, Vertical Response, or ConstantContact, shouldn't fret about Amazon's pricing structure. Pricing is tiered and is based on the combination of two elements: data transfer and CPM per email message.
Current CPM is $0.10 per thousand messages sent. Data transfer pricing is as follows:
| Data Amt | Cost |
| First GB | Free |
| up to 10 TB | $0.15/GB |
| next 40 TB | $0.11/GB |
| next 100 TB | $0.09/GB |
| 150+ TB | $0.08/GB |
Pricing examples:
1000 email messages to one recipient per day with content size 10kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 3.1 GB in/out data transfer
= $3.73 for the month
1000 email messages outbound to one recipient per day with content size 100kb
= 31,000 recipients sent per month
= 31 GB in/out data transfer
= $10.70 for the month
Amazon EC2 users are already subscribed to the free pricing tier and are capped at 2000 messages for free each day.
To get started with Amazon SES:
Subscribe
Verify email addresses / create your own whitelist of verified addresses
Send Email
Request production access
Get Feedback
Limits on sandbox accounts: 100 whitelisted verified addresses, up to 10MB per message (because most popular email readers cannot handle more than that).
Limits on all accounts: Does not support SOAP or file attachments
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)