Event-Tracking.com

Still looking under the hood, but at referral traffic.

The usual suspects are there: feedly, social sharing, etc.

Except, this one:

Event-Tracking.com - which looks like this, if you're afraid to click [JPG].

612 visits of the 865 MTD (70% of total blog traffic) or so are attributed to this referral page.

It suggests that something is terribly amiss with the conversion from classic GA to universal GA, or with my inept implementation of the universal GA javascript on my various blog properties.

/sigh

Google Organic Keywords

This blog has had unusually higher traffic than normal (>800 pageviews this month), so I thought I'd peek under the hood to see what was up with that.

And, I found this:

[img] Google Analytics Reporting - organic keyword search

Someone please explain how that could possibly be a search string that ends up at my blog.

Nag or Nurture

I recently was subjected to a very aggressive call from a sales rep of a marketing automation solutions provider who denied knowledge any communications that their marketing team sent out; and during the call it was suggested that I should unsubscribe from their marketing materials if I wasn't interested. Clearly not a thought leader in marketing automation, just another tool in the shed.

IKEA Newsletter

Today I signed up for IKEA's customer newsletter...as an 120-year old person. Seriously! That's the earliest birth year (1895)  that was offered on their sign-up page. It's hard to imagine a 120-year old putting together anything from IKEA. It was the lengthiest, multi-page sign-up I have seen from a consumer catalog company.

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year start

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year end

It could be that when the e-newsletter sign-up page was first produced, back at the dawn of the commercial internet, 1895 was a possible year for a date of birth. But then, there is also a top range part of the birth year and for IKEA, it's 1997 (or you'd be turning 18 in 2015). It begs the question.. why not just have birth month and birth day like most consumer companies? Why would you target a specific demographic like 18-120 yrs old. 

I'll have to see if I can change my birth month from December to something earlier in the year like July to see if they have a birth year-specific marketing campaign. It would be really surprising to get a "happy 121st birthday!" note from IKEA as a result of this albeit flawed email newsletter sign-up form.

Thinking Out Loud

As I am thinking about where leads should nest, either initially in an email marketing platform or loaded directly into a company's CRM, I wonder about the best possible customer interaction for what we want recipients of our marketing messaging to do or respond in a favorable fashion.

In a situation where all leads are being entered into CRM regardless of the source, from a 3rd party list (bad idea), a hosted webinar, a tradeshow, or due to a non-transactional web conversion, often times the communication strategy is mixed for who is really a prospect (no expressed interest in your products or services) and who really is a lead (more than just contact information, but also a potential sales opportunity).

In either case, prospect or lead, neither party is really ready to buy from you after a few touches or website impressions. And, calling to qualify leads and prospects into a warmer lead may not be the best approach.

As a marketer, I'd say, sure.. let's load everything into our email marketing platform. If and when a prospect converts in a favorable way, e.g., multiple downloads of e-books or whitepapers, participation in the company's webinars or product demos, then the messaging tactics need to change. And then, you could push that prospect into being a lead.. and subsequently into a CRM where salespeople can call on it or nurture the process with more emails or calls.

How is this process in your company?

Microsoft SmartScreen Filtering: False Positives

I have recently run across two scenarios where Microsoft's SmartScreen service for Outlook mail has flagged single-opt-in subscription content as spam. It's annoying because one of those subscriptions is from Microsoft's Virtual Academy; which also has a glaring email autoresponder issue that I'll address in another post.

Imagine if you could: a giant inbox funnel with a mesh strainer on top of it called SmartScreen. The difference is that with Outlook.com (formerly live.com, hotmail.com, etc), it captures 110% of all incoming mail. Even the legit emails get caught in this spam trap.

What is SmartScreen? It's an Internet Explorer safety feature, really intended to be a phishing filter security feature. This is weird because I'm experiencing its affects using Chrome so I suppose Microsoft has separated its function from IE and made it app-centric instead.

What's the cure for businesses with legit email?

One possibility is to report the false positive to Symantec through this link. Another, is to contact Microsoft, but that like asking Google customer service to reset your free Gmail account password (which, if you signed up with verification service before you had mobile phone service, it just might be a problem for users trying to reset their password through automation tools. Just how many people have tied a landline w/o caller ID to Google's text verification password reset?).

Basically, you're nearly stuck.

But, what you should have been doing all along..

• Have an unsubscribe or preferences link
• Have your company name and postal address listed in the email's footer
• Double opt-in for promotional content, if your ESP has that capability
• Have legit unique content that's relevant to the receiver; even when they sign up for your services. Receipt nor open of an auto-generated welcome email does not constitute an acceptance of newsletter subscription; especially not in Canada

Contact Curation

Once a year I glean through my entire roster contacts on LinkedIn and push people off the island. It's not a long list and I do like to stay in contact with people. Perhaps this is due to the marketer in me. Usually it's people who have done one of the following things:

• Not made a post, comment, or share by social media, email, phone or mail
• Recruiters who have not done the above
• Connections I have never met in real life who do the above

The exception to this are those I've added to my LinkedIn roster because they have a skill or expertise I want to know more about (e.g., I met this Caucasian guy who is fluent in Mandarin whose role is to mitigate between domestic US and foreign subsidiaries.. that is very, very cool), I want to meet them some day, or their company makes something awesome and meeting their CEO or founders would make a great memory; or I met them in person and they would make a fantastic connection.

It's hard to tell who you can connect to based on LinkedIn settings. I don't mind writing referrals for people who are connected to me to their 2nd degree contacts. I do mind getting pinged by invite hoarders. People whose claim to fame on LinkedIn is 5000+ contacts on LinkedIn. I think you're just setting yourself up for a lot of spam if you do that. Just how many people connections do you need to become a rain maker? Would these connections want to refer business to you?

Having never made a LinkedIn article post, it bugs me that my profile has 500+ followers, most of whom I'm not even connected to on a 1st degree basis. I'm not sure how LinkedIn came up with this feature. Maybe you automatically follow someone if you comment on their shared links or posts.