What's Better? Email, Twitter or Facebook?

When it comes to list building, which used to be an email-only activity, the advent of social networks has muddied the waters a little. When thinking about your "mailing list" the concept of the "list" has expanded. And with that expansion comes the question of focus. Not the tired "email is dying" meme (it isn't), but rather where should the harried marketer focus her time now?  Building Twitter followers? Growing the email list? Fleshing out Facebook pages?

The answer is, of course, to focus on what works best of you.

So the first thing you need to do is determine what "best" is.  If you're building a community then you should focus on where your audience is - so that might point you towards social media.  If your goal from list building is lead capture to load the sales funnel, then email may well be the best, because (a) it allows you to reach out to prospects privately and automatically, and (b) capture demographics such as location or phone number.

But when that is all said and done, how do your figure out whether your activites are making a difference? And is that difference enough to meet your definition of "best"? When you communicate with your audience, how are they engaging with you and your content? How can you compare subscriber activity in one medium, say email, with follower activity in another, such as Twitter?

Introducing the Social Media Engagement Report from FeedBlitz, which splits out your audience's activity by distribution channel. You can compare clicks from a post to your followers on Twitter with clicks from your email list to activity from your Facebook pages.  You can drill into activity by channel and even down to the individual user, so, for example,  you can figure out which of the Twitter accounts you post to is generating the most activity.  The report is real-time, so if a power user retweets your post you can quickly see the effect of their followers clicking through.

The social media engagement report does require a little care when interpreting.  For example, with Twitter, we can't reliably tell which of an account's followers clicked the link to your post; just which Twitter account the post was originally tweeted to. So although that's counted as a click in the database, you might want to mentally consider it analogous to an email list's open rate.

So which is better? Twitter, email or Facebook? Of course, the answer is "it depends" or "your mileage might vary" - but now you have the ability to compare all the outbound channels you're marketing through on a single page.  And, armed with that data, you can now make informed decisions about where to focus your time, attention and money.

Remember, you can't manage what you can't measure. 

Log in and go to Newsletters / Reports / Social Media Engagement Report to measure your audience's engagement, powered by FeedBlitz.

   

RSS Metrics: The Good, the Bad and the Invisible

Metrics matter - it's rule #1 for marketing programs. If you can't measure the success of a program (whatever success means to you) then you have no idea how well it's working and whether you should invest in it, tune it, or kill it. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Simple, really.

So online marketers invest a lot of time setting up measurement systems for their online programs, such as Google Analytics for web sites and open / click through tracking for email marketing programs. It's even possible to get stats-addicted, endlessly micromanaging and tuning online programs while the bigger picture - and the bigger opportunities - pass you by.

But that aside, getting to know your basic metrics - and their trends - is fundamental. That's true for bloggers and new media sites, because we all feel good when our stats go up and feel in our guts when a key metric burps.

So how come the state of RSS metrics is so parlous? Most bloggers focus on their RSS circulation as the key metric, and the only other useful metric commonly available is reach (more on both these below). RSS services like FeedBlitz and FeedBurner give you that top line circulation number, even though it's almost certainly meaningless.

RSS Metrics: The Bad

Screeeeech. Rewind. Circulation is "meaningless"?

Yup. Not because the number isn't accurate. It's certainly the best number the relevant service can come up with, and it can be tuned or altered from time to time to "improve" it.

No, it's not because it's inaccurate (but, man, we can surely debate that until the proverbial cows come home). No, circulation is mostly rot because it's not a particularly useful metric to be tracking. It's analogous to the total number of email subscribers in your email list. As any decent email marketer will (or should) tell you, size doesn't matter; it's quality that counts. And quality is largely measured by metrics such as open and click through rates. In other words, it's how many recipients interact with your mailing that determine how successful each mailing is. Same with advertising - better targeting yields better response rates which, in turn, command higher prices. And so it should be with feeds.

RSS Metrics: The Good

So where are we in RSS-land? We have subscribers (or as we call it, circulation), the total (-ish) number of subscribers to your RSS feed, and then there is reach, which is a measure of how many of your subscribers have interacted with your feed. Reach is a good quality metric, as it tells you how much activity your feed is generating. While reach will vary from day to day and post to post, the trend in reach will tell you whether you are gaining or losing attention from your readership. Reach, not circulation, is what you should really care about.

The FeedBlitz RSS service calculates your reach on any given day by determining how many unique readers interacted with your feed (either opened it or clicked through). Useful, yes. But sadly reach, too, has its problems. Your reach total is probably under-reporting activity, because it has the same problems as email open rates: If the subscriber doesn't have images displayed you can't track the act of opening the email or reading the RSS article, because it's the call to the server for a tracking image that is counted. No images, no counting. Instead, for that subscriber, you have to catch them when (or, rather, if) they click through.

RSS Metrics: The Invisible

Here's where the bad news kicks in. Did you know that you are simply missing out on almost all subscriber clicks on your RSS feed? That you're not tracking the vast majority of these subscriber interactions?

It's true. Unless our invisible subscriber above happens to click through to the source article (usually by clicking on the post's title) - if they click on anything else - dollars to doughnuts you're going to miss them. And that means you're not getting the big picture at all. In fact, perhaps (or even probably) you're getting only a very small fraction of it. Why? Because you're not counting clicks on links that are within the post. If our invisible subscriber clicks on anything inside the post - anything at all - they won't be tracked and that subscriber's activity missed.

By way of example I offer you TechCrunch's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/techcrunch (not to pick on TechCrunch, by the way; I'm just using a well-known technology feed to make my point).

TechCrunch, like most new media companies, liberally sprinkles its articles with links, some internal to the site and some to the third party sites mentioned in the post. Looking at the current feed I see the article R.I.P. Good Times: One Year Later - which has sixteen (16) links in the post, not including ads and FeedFlares (remember, you're accessing the posts via the feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/techcrunch not their website). TechCrunch has link tracking enabled via FeedBurner, and so the link back to the site via the article's title is tracked. You can tell because the link doesn't look like a TechCrunch site link; it has codes and funny characters (a tilde: ~ ) in it if you hover over it with your cursor / mouse pointer.

Not so those 16 links inside the post. They're regular URLs - no tracking. Now, let's say you're one of the bajillion people who subscribe to TechCrunch in your RSS aggregator. What do you click on? Do you click on the post itself, only to read exactly the same article online (only with more ads)?

Nah. More than likely you click on the links inside the article and head off to read about Sequoia Capital or the the deadpool or the crunchbase or whatever else is linked to in the post.

Which means that when you do that, the RSS feed metrics will under-record the feed's reach because your click isn't counted. The good folks at TC simply can't tell you how many of their RSS readers click on links inside any post because they're simply not collecting that data. And nor are you for your blog. If you extensively use links in your posts you're absolutely, positively, no-doubt-about-it missing out on feed-based activity.

If the likelihood is that these are, in fact, the links that are being clicked on by subscribers, can you imagine how much intelligence, how much useful information is being lost? Does that translate into lost revenue? Remember, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You're optimizing your online programs with massively incomplete information, and (worse) you don't even know how incomplete your knowledge is.

RSS Metrics @ FeedBlitz: Making the Invisible Visible

Wow, talk about burying the lead. Anyway, as of now, the FeedBlitz RSS service ALSO tracks internal links inside feed posts automatically. These links will appear on the RSS report and also make the reach figures larger (because we'll be capturing more activity) and more accurate (for the same reason). How much larger will depend on how often you use links inside your posts; the more often you add links within a post (I think TechCrunch, with double-figure counts, is fairly extreme) the better the metrics and the more likely you are to see your reach rise as a result.

As an example, read this article at http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz (why not subscribe while you're there!). Look at the links inside. Coded. Tracked. This will be the first article - possibly ever - on an RSS feed where I, the feed owner, will be able to see all the activity the post generates. Finally, fret not, SEO mavens: all the links are 301 redirects, giving you the full Google-juice benefit.

Better yet, if you use your FeedBlitz feed to power your email marketing, you get the same benefits too. This is a first for online social media marketing.

Cool.

Marketing metrics matter. Get the whole story and start a trial today.

   

Measuring Email Marketing Metrics

The FeedBlitz delivery metrics report now includes percentages as well as raw numbers for your opens, forwards, bounces, unsubscribes etc. The changes are part of a general effort to give publishers greater insight into their newsletters' performance.

The latest changes also allow you click a given schedule class to easily differentiate between overnight mailings and those sent to Twitter and IM subscribers which show up as "Express." Don't forget that, as you view the report, you can click on the chart's graphic elements to drill down further into the data.

The delivery metrics report is at Newsletters / Reports / Delivery Metrics report on the FeedBlitz web site.

   

RSS and Google Analytics Integration

FeedBlitz's new RSS service now enables bloggers, social media marketers and publishers to track RSS-driven click-throughs in Google Analytics (and also Omniture's Visual Sciences enterprise web site analytics solution). Further, FeedBlitz has made this feature available to our email marketing newsletter service as well.

FeedBlitz is now the only RSS service to enable publishers to view their RSS-driven activity in these two popular web analytics packages.

It's trivial to set up. For RSS feeds, go to RSS - Settings, and choose the click tracking service you want and save. For email newsletters, go to Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - Tracking and More and pick the tracking option you want, and save. That's all you have to do. Well, ok, that and wait for the metrics to appear in your web analytics results.

For the FeedBlitz RSS service, changes are immediate. Email service click-through changes are reflected in the next mailing. It's OK to specify the click through settings in both locations if you use both services; a click-through from an email based on a FeedBlitz feed will properly identify itself as being email, not RSS, driven.

Looking at the results in Google Analytics

All the results are visible in Traffic Sources - Campaigns in your Google Analytics dashboard.

For clicks that originate from your RSS feed, Google will record "FeedBlitz" as the source, "FeedBlitzRss" as the medium, and the feed path (the part of your url after "feeds.feedblitz.com") as the campaign. Pick these options from the "Dimension" drop down on that page the campaigns page.

For clicks that originate from an email newsletter, "FeedBlitz" is still the source, but the medium will be "FeedBlitzEmail", the campaign will identify when the mailing went out (e.g. "Nightly 2009-04-04") and the content will identify the feedblitz list ID.

Now you can easily review the effectiveness of your email newsletters and RSS feeds and determine what changing settings will do (such as switching between full and partial content, for example).

Omniture Visual Sciences

FeedBlitz adds the "From" parameter, enabling you to differentiate between RSS and email clicks, and similarly varies the parameters on the email side to enable you to tell which mailing led to which click through.

RSS Service Recap

With this feature announcement, I want to briefly revisit our original posting announcing the service. In it I said "You'll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks." A bold claim. How are we doing? Since that launch, about 10 days ago, this is what we've added:

• Multi-feed merging;
• Tag filtering;
• and now Google Analytics integration.

Commitment fulfilled. FeedBlitz is keeping its promises and not letting our RSS publishers down. If you can't say the same about your RSS service, then please register for a 30-day free trial. Tune the Blitzed version of your RSS feed and then, once you're happy, make the switch.

   

Custom Fields Tutorial: Reporting and Analytics

Having established the data you want to collect - and you're now collecting it as users sign up - how to get it out? And what's the best way to make sense of all this raw data and turn it into actionable information?

Up until recently the only choice you had was to head over to the subscriber pages at the Newsletter Center, click the "Include custom fields" option, export the data and then look forward (not) to a lot of time with your favorite spreadsheet.

There is a better way. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, there are some new reporting features for custom fields that let you slice and dice through your subscriber data. It's easy to use, and you can get pretty much as much or as little information as you like.

Where to start?

Head over to the Newsletter Center and click the custom fields link. Once you've defined your fields, the reporting link enables. (If you're just starting out, use the subscriber update link form to add your own data to the system first). Click the link and dive in!

First up: Submission Summary

The first page up tells you how many responses you have for each question. The numbers may not be the same for all questions if some are optional, and if you added some other choices after folks started submitting the form. You'll get a margin of error indication for each field, and an export option at the bottom of the table. No spreadsheets required.

Now you can click on the field names in the table and you'll be taken straight to a "top 10" report for that field, along with a chart and another export button. As an alternative way to start exploring your data, the summary report also provides two special links for you for two slightly different flavors of the top 10 report.

The "predefined choices" report shows the top 10 values for all the fields where you defined the choices for subscribers to pick. In other words, all the results from list boxes, radio buttons and check boxes.

The "All fields" version does what it says - includes all the fields in the top 10 summary. If you have simple text fields, they'll be included here.

Drilling down - Top 10 and more

No matter which way you start drilling down into the detail, the detail reports all behave the same way. By default they'll limit themselves to the top 10 results (but show you how many responses fell into categories that didn't make it in). They all give you a choice of graphic layouts. They all give you a simple export option. And they all offer clickable tables for you to change your view into the data.

There are four ways to use the tables to navigate:

1. Clicking the field name shows the top 10 report for just that field;
2. Clicking the "All others" link (if it's there) shows all the results for just that field;
3. Clicking the a value for a field (e.g. the the FirstName "Dave") limits results to just those submitted by people whose first name is "Dave";
4. Clicking the number of responses shows you the detail for matching submitters and all the data they posted.

So it's easy to find out not only what your survey tells you (e.g. 54% of respondents are male, or that most people found you from a Google search), but also who they are (e.g. the respondent called "Phil Hollows" lives in Sudbury, MA, USA and his favorite color is red).

Once you're done drilling down, click the links in the report heading to jump start a new analysis.

Practical Results - The FeedBlitz Publisher Survey so far

Using these reports on the FeedBlitz publisher survey (currently standing at over 5,600 responses), it's trivial (and kinda fun) to analyze the data that has been put in so far. Here are some highlights:

• 59% of FeedBlitz publishers are in the US; the next largest countries are India (5%), the UK (4%) and Canada (4%).
• More publishers are in California (8%) than anywhere else, but (interestingly) the city with the most FeedBlitz publishers is in fact New York (2.0%) with London (UK) second (0.9%).
• 62% had not used any kind of mass mailing software or service prior to FeedBlitz.
• FeedBlitz publishers are more likely to be male (54%)
• Your name is more likely to be David, John, Michael, Jennifer, Chris, James, Steve or Lisa than anything else.

No spreadsheet jockeys required - so explore! The next tutorial will look at segmentation: using custom field data to send emails to targeted recipients.