Novamedia blog

The government has given companies until 26 May 2012 to comply with the new EU's Privacy and Communications Directive which requires the user's consent before using cookies. This could open up a hornet's nest of problems and could potentially make websites a lot less useful and user-friendly.

So what exactly is a cookie? It's a small file placed on your PC by a website that they can retrieve each time you visit pages on the site. It is not dangerous and cannot harm your PC and it can only be used by the web domain that stored it in the first place.

Let me give you an example from one of our websites. The World Malaria Day website (http://www.worldmalariaday.org) has an option at the top to view the site in French. If you click on this flag, the website stores a cookie on your PC that holds the information saying that your language preference is French. The next time you visit the site, this cookie is retrieved and the site is automatically shown to you in French. Without this convenience you would have to click on the flag every time you visited in order to see the site in French – not very user-friendly at best.

Without wishing to confuse matters, there is another type of cookie which is non-persistent and which expires when you leave a site. These are called session cookies and are strictly necessary to hold web pages together. For example, if you have entered a password to access a site then every page you go to on that site needs to know that you have logged in and are able to view it. It can check a session cookie to do this. Without it, each page you went to would say "sorry we don't know who you are – go away!".

A similar thing might be used to keep your basket contents when shopping. Not being able to track this would be like having a supermarket basket with the bottom missing. Every time you put something in, it would immediately fall out again and your basket would remain forever empty.

A bigger impact will be felt if third party applications such as Google Analytics have to get permission to use cookies. If people are able to opt out then the reporting you are getting about your website visitors will be less accurate and therefore you will be less able to make informed decisions about your marketing. Will there be an alternative technological approach that can be adopted? It seems a wait and see approach is what is generally being recommended in the hope that analytics companies will come up with a solution.

As far as our sites are concerned, the majority just use the necessary session cookies but we will be carrying out a review and implementing changes where necessary.

When we set up the distribution list database to send an email campaign, we also add to it some test addresses. These will of course contain one or more of our addresses but will also contain at least one of the client's email addresses as well.

The first thing we do is to send the email to ourselves and run a series of checks to ensure that everything is working:

• Does the email work in both its HTML and text forms?
• Does the unsubscribe link work and go to the correct unsubscribe page?
• Does open tracking work?
• Do all of the click-through links work? (We test these whether or not they are being tracked).
• If personalised emails are being used, are all merge fields working as they should be.

We also check the email to ensure that it isn't spammy and also that it looks good in a number of different email systems such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

When we are happy that everything is OK, we send a test email to the client so that they can check it and make any final changes.

Once the client is happy that it all looks and works as it should, we send the email out to the distribution list. We use specialist email marketing and sending software which will take each email and send it out separately to each recipient on the distribution list.

Then the interesting bit starts. Our system records all sorts of things to help you to analyse the success of your email marketing campaign. It records who has opened the email, which links they have clicked on, which email addresses have bounced, which email addresses are badly formatted and who has unsubscribed from your mailing list.

The open tracking is done via the insertion of a tiny invisible image in the email piece. If a user's email software has images turned off then the open event will not be recorded. However, the result is still a good indicator of how successful your email marketing campaign has been. We have had open rates in the range of 10% up to 85% though a typical open rate range would be between 20% and 40% and anything in the higher end of that range can be regarded as a good figure.

We usually leave it for a week before producing the email marketing report that is then sent to the client. This gives enough time for most of your recipients to have had a chance to look at the email. We can send the report earlier or later than this depending upon your requirements. One of our clients has customers who are out working in gardens all day long and who may not look at their email as often as the rest of us and so they prefer a two week wait before the report is produced.

The report is produced as an Excel file and emailed to you.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 3 – The distribution list

We run email marketing campaigns for many clients and these go to lists of varying sizes. You can supply us with a list of recipients or, as we do with a lot of clients, we can use the opt-in list from your website. For some clients we have actually constructed and manage their website as well so we can access the online database which we will have built in order to download the latest additions to the mailing list.

It is important that all lists only contain the names and email addresses of people who have actually opted in to receive communication from you or people who are legitimate contacts of your organisation.

It is also important that you offer all recipients a way of opting out of receiving communication and that you actually carry out their request when they have asked to be removed from the mailing list especially if you are managing your own lists. For those clients for whom we hold their definitive mailing list we make sure that any unsubscribe requests are actioned so that the contact doesn't receive any more emails.

If you supply us with the list, we process the list to get it into a format we can work with. More often than not distribution lists are supplied to us in Excel format but they can be supplied in any database format that we are able to read. Check with us before sending.

If you want to use merge fields in order to personalise the email, then these will need to be included in your list as separate columns. There's more about this in our other blog post in this series: Part 1 - Producing the email piece

The process of setting up the database also includes adding in the columns that will record the opens, click-throughs, bounces, bad format emails and unsubscribe requests. These columns are used to report back to you the results of your email campaign.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

Once we have designed the email piece we can then set up the campaign. This involves various steps and settings within the email campaign application that we use.

Some of the most important are settings that our client has to supply such as:

• The From Name
• The From Address
• The Reply-To address
• The message subject

I won't blabber on about the importance of the From Name mainly because I have already written a blog post on this very subject. The From Address will typically be the email address of the person in the From Name but it doesn't have to be. The Reply-To address can be different to the From Address if you wish. Then when the recipient clicks Reply in their email application their reply will go back to this person instead.

We can personalise the email and set the From Name and Address dynamically based on a column in your distribution list. For example, if you are sending a campaign from several different people such as when sending to a list supplied from various sales reps within your organisation. This example is also when the separate Reply-To address might come in useful as you may want all replies to be co-ordinated from one central address.

The message subject is important and I will be writing a separate blog post about this in due course – watch this space! Suffice to say at this stage that the subject line should trigger some sort of recognition within your recipient so that they don't look at it and immediately dismiss it as spam.

What else do we do when setting up the campaign? Well we need to make sure that we are tracking bounced emails and to that end, we set up a unique email account to collect the bounces and record these in the database so that you can see which addresses have bounced. We can set it up so that you collect bounced emails instead but we don't recommend this especially if it is a big list as you could end up with hundreds of emails coming into your inbox.

We also set up all of the click-throughs so that these too can be recorded in the database and reported back to you.

One of the things we can do is to add an attachment but we hardly ever do this unless we are sending the email to a very small number of people and the attachment is a very small file size. Adding a large attachment to an email can massively increase the amount of time it takes to send and also runs a higher risk of being rejected as spam. What we recommend instead is that the attachment is uploaded to a web server and then we add a link to it within the body of the email. This gets round the two issues mentioned and has the added benefit that we can track clicks on this slink to see who has downloaded the attachment.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

The first thing we do when working with a new client is to design an email template which will be used for the email marketing campaign and also any subsequent campaigns. We will set up text styles, colours, fonts etc. and incorporate logos and images as required.

It is essential that the email piece to be sent out is designed to look good but, more importantly, is also 'designed for the inbox'. This means that it should work in whatever email software the recipient is using. In practice it is impossible to ensure that it works 100% correctly in every email program because they all render HTML content differently, but we can ensure that the design is as flexible as possible so that as many recipients as possible can see the email the way it was intended to look.

However, we always create a fallback in the shape of an online version. In the version that you contact receives we place a link at the top that says something like: 'If you are unable to read this e-mail, please click here to see our online version.' Therefore if the received version doesn't quite work the way it should, they can still see the email designed and laid out as intended in the online version in their browser. We also use this online version as the one that we show to the client as the email piece is being put together. Once they have approved the online version we then proceed to produce the HTML and text versions (see below).

There's the possibility that a contact's email software won't let them view HTML emails so we also produce a text version of your email so that these people don't miss out on your message. The email is sent out in what is called 'multipart' format – i.e. both HTML and text – and the recipient's email program will decide which part to display.

If you want the email to be personalised then this can also be done. For example, you might want 'Dear FirstName' at the top of the email (where Firstname is a column from the distribution list database). You might also want the email to be signed off by different people such as when sending to a list supplied from various sales reps within your organisation. The text version needs a bit of work: all 'click here' type links have to be converted into the full URL, graphical text has to be re-typed and we have to make sure that text referring to any images is re-worded so that it makes sense.

It's even possible to insert a completely different block of text / images in an email based on criteria from the distribution list database. Let's take an example to show you what I mean. Suppose you were organising three conferences in different locations and you wanted to show a picture of the recipient's nearest conference centre and its address in the body of the email. Your distribution database would need to have a column containing a location name and we can code the email to look at this location name and then display the appropriate content.

We can also track click-throughs on any links within the email piece should you wish to do so.

When all is said and done, it is the content of your email campaign that is the most important factor. It is that which will decide how many people respond to your call to action. I think another blog post might be needed on that very subject in due course.

For further information on how our email marketing works, see...
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

I went to see a client recently who was asking me a lot of questions about our email marketing service which of course, I was more than happy to answer.

But it occurred to me that a lot of what he was asking was not on our website. The page dedicated to email marketing covers the service in as much detail as is probably needed to get across the salient points but does not go into any depth about the full details of an email marketing campaign. So, I thought to myself, I feel another blog or three coming on.

When we are producing an email campaign (and even though we have run over 600 of them) we still run through a checklist of 51 items, so there's a lot to it!

I've written the blog in four parts to make it easier to digest:
Part 1 – Producing the email piece
Part 2 – Setting up the campaign
Part 3 – The distribution list
Part 4 – Testing, sending and reporting

I had a client recently ask me to put together a new website, not a large site, but a site nonetheless. Not an unreasonable request seeing as we design websites!

So we were working on the site when the client sent over several images and asked us to add these to some of the pages. Now, I took a look at these images and they were quite a disparate bunch. My suspicions were immediately aroused. These didn't look like the sort of images a client would normally send. They were all different sizes, all very different subjects and of varying quality.

I was emailing the client about the site so I thought I would mention the images and ask them where they had got them from. The reply was "We got them from Google Images". To be honest, that reply didn't come as a big surprise. As I said, I had had my suspicions which is why I asked the question in the first place.

So I had to gently break the news that we couldn't actually use these images on the website. The client of course asked why. The simple answer is - Google Images is not a free stock library.

All of the images that appear on Google Images when you do a search have been produced by someone, either photographed or drawn or digitised in some way or another. The copyright in these images belongs to someone. Taking images and using them on your website or in presentations or documents is stealing. It might not seem as bad as popping down to your local Sainsbury's and half-inching a packet of digestive biscuits but it's the same thing really except that it is so much easier to nick something from the screen in front of you.

The alternative of course is to have pictures taken. This might be OK if it's a set of portraits or a bunch of product images or even a set of outside images taken in the same location.  But it is not so practical if you really want such a varied selection of images.

Then the alternative is to use an online stock library. We regularly use two: iStockPhoto.com and ShutterStock.com. Each has millions of high-quality images which can be used on websites, presentations, documents and so on. They are also very inexpensive especially if you only want a lower resolution image for use on the web or a presentation – only a few pounds per image. We have used photos from both of these libraries on many sites. Probably one of the best examples is Grace's Day Nursery (www.gracesdaynursery.co.uk) which has some really nice, large pictures of happy children. Also the images used in this blog are all bought and paid for using an online stock library.

I know of a web design company who were hit with a £900 bill when it transpired they had illegally used images for a client's site. Is it really a risk worth taking?

The speed that technology moves nowadays is amazing. Smartphones would have been looked upon almost as magic only a decade ago (in fact I still think there is some sort of enchantment going on!).

Now, I'm old enough to remember when things were not quite as high tech as they are today, although at the time of course, what we had was leading edge. My first business which I started in 1986, produced 35mm slides for business presentations - thousands of them! Clients would fax us a hand-drawn brief and we would use a state-of-the-art computer graphics system to draw the slides on-screen and then send them by modem to an imaging company who would produce the slides and send them back to us by courier. (Later we would get our own imaging system at a cost of £40,000).

The system we used was made by a company called Autographix and it used an Apple IIe as its main computer allied to a graphics box which was the size of a large desktop computer. The Apple had no hard disk, just 3 x 5¼ inch floppy disk drives, two that were responsible for the system and one that stored the files we were producing. Each disk had a capacity of 360Kb. You would need 22,000 of these to store everything on my phone.

There were two fonts available, one serif and one sans-serif, in a choice of 6 sizes and the colour palette consisted of 64 colours. When you typed text on the screen a rectangle would appear to show where the text was going to be placed.

The modem that we used to send the files to the imaging centre ran at a speed of 300 bits per second. Today's broadband speeds of 10Mbits per second are therefore over 33,000 times faster than my old modem. To have sent a typical MP3 file on that modem would have meant hanging around for 29½ hours.

Where the numbers really get silly though is when we start talking about costs, especially if we talk about a cost / storage ratio. This first system cost me £7,500. That's £20,833 per megabyte of storage. A 64Gb iPad 2 today typically costs about £559. That's 0.87 pence per megabyte of storage. That means that my first system was 2,394,635 times more expensive than an iPad 2! Or, if you want to get into real fantasy land, a system with the storage of an iPad in 1986 would have cost just under £18 billion and that doesn't include inflation!

One of our services is email marketing. It's really effective for many of our clients and brings some good and measurable results to them as part of their overall marketing mix.

There are various things that make up a good email campaign. In this article I am concentrating on just one of those aspects – the 'from name'.

It's not rocket science this one is it? If you want people to open up the email you are sending them then make sure that they recognise who it has come from.  If they all know who you are personally then you could use just use your name but if there are some who may not know you or recognise your name immediately in an email then don't risk it. Use you company name and possibly your own name as well to make it more personal.

For example, if you received an email from 'John Smith' (OK I know, it's not very imaginative) you may consign it to the deleted folder right away. However, if it was from 'Apple Store – John Smith' then you may well remember John from the Apple Store and open his email. Even if you don't know John, you might still open it seeing as it come from the Apple Store and then you might well click through to their website and buy a couple of pounds of Cox's Orange Pippins (or whatever apples take your fancy).

In many cases, it may just be pertinent to use the company name and this is probably the most common form of from name that we use. Allied to a good subject line this is probably the most effective way of getting people to open your email. Recipients will recognise the company name and, if it a name they trust they are far more likely to open the email.

It could also be argued that people receive so much crap in their inboxes these days that a simple company name, uncomplicated by extra stuff such as the sender's name, will stand out and be easily recognised amongst the rest of the garbage in a person's inbox.

Also bear in mind that the way people have their email software set up, the whole of the from name might not be visible – the end may be cut off. So a short, pithy from name is also preferable from this point of view.