Rudy.rhetoric

My wife is an amazing woman.  She currently works primarily from home as an Email Marketing Manager for Catalyst Direct.  I’m not quite sure how she handles both the job and raising our 22 month old daughter, but man, she is doing an exceptional job.   She recently entered an article that was just published by the DMNews E-mail Marketing Guide 2008.  Wow, well done Lora.  I’m extremely proud of you!

the entire article:

Improving your e-mail marketing results doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars. When every penny counts, basic, lowcost optimization techniques can yield significant improvements.

Here are a few tricks of the trade.

Capture audit We all lose track of the countless places we gather e-mail addresses. It’s time to take a good, hard look at correcting this problem. Audit each of your online and offline e-mail capture methods. Create a matrix with column headings that refer to each source (SEM landing page, Web site, POS). Complete the matrix by pulling e-mail metrics from the past six months and segmenting the results based on source of e-mail capture. Then, determine where your most profitable e-mail acquisition occurs. Focus optimization efforts there and lessen efforts in the least profitable categories.

Capture forms Optimize your forms to capture only the most profitable subscribers. Sign up for Google analytics and run it on every form page. You need to know your completion rate versus impressions. What do people click on and what do they ignore?

After evaluating the data, it’s time to test: Test copy, both its tone and length. If subscribers feel they have either insufficient or too much information, they’ll leave. Test the number of fields. Fewer are better. Test imagery. The addition of e-mail examples (expandable in a pop-up screen) could alleviate subscribers’ fears about content and relevancy. Test layout. Many researchers concur that a one-column design brings the highest number of conversions.

Remarketing opportunities Before you dream up a new and costly campaign, examine previous campaigns and see where you might harvest new opportunities. Market to individuals who opened but didn’t click and to individuals who clicked but didn’t convert. Market to “loiterers”: those who opened or clicked on eight of your last 10 campaigns but still haven’t purchased.

Optimize e-mail creative With mobile rendering now the biggest concern, it’s time to face the problem of unreadable e-mails. Reduce the imagery in the top three inches of your design and set the heights and widths on all images. If your call to action is an image, provide viewable text links. Forget open rates. Readers should be able to get the message without having to download images or click on a web version. Make your imagery complement, not carry, the message. Focus on conversions instead. Don’t pay for a complete redesign to spice up your template. Instead, test the addition or placement of one element and discover how it can impact your click-through rate. Here’s to optimization, and to a higher ROI in 2009.

Boy do I enjoy road trips.  It’s a good time for me to zone out and put on the “Thinking Cap”.  Last weekend my daughter and I took a short trip to Syracuse for a family visit.  On the way I started thinking about the RubyonRails Framework.  Hmmm, how can one put Rails in Layman’s terms.  Then it hit me…Lunchbox!  When I was young going back to school always meant a new lunchbox.  No doubt, my favorite had to be the “Dukes of Hazzard” series.  Honestly, that thermos wrapped with the confederate flag? Cool!

Ok, so here it goes.
Rails would have to be compared to the most important part of the meal, the sandwich.  The sandwich not only held the other items in place but came in a that saran wrap baggie, keeping the bread and deli meat DRY(Rails Helpers).  Ofcourse, mom had to pack a piece of fruit, which I would have to compare to Test::Unit.  Good for you but would always cause pause before eating.  Desert?  Little Debbie on a good day.  Enter Scriptaculous and Prototype(who doesn’t like Ajax)  And finally, Ruby => Potato Chips.  The “Salt” of the Framework.

Voila! ~ RubyonRails in a Lunchbox

Recently sat down with my buddy Jeff for a “dining room hack session”.

First up!

Grockit ~ Jeff’s current employer which recently went Beta.  Together we dissected the different layers.  Pretty sophisticated stuff, yet ridiculously easy to maintain when implemented properly.  We talked about how he refactored the database (personally, never considered that).  Also reviewed Grockit’s monster MVC Javascript repository. Talk about taking the fat out of “fat models”.

Cucumber ~ Is a tool that can execute feature documentation written in plain text. Cucumber targets non technical business analysts, interaction designers, domain experts, testers (for the plain text part) and programmers (for the steps, which are written in Ruby).  Slick Stuff!

Pivotal Tracker ~ Very cool.  Created by Pivotal Labs and open to the developing public.  Haven’t spent a lot of time in here yet but looks very promising for future projects.

Extreme Programming Explained ~ Just ordered it myself.

If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, well… uh ~.  I recently signed up for Tweet Scan which enables me to tag certain buzz words within the millions of twits and tweets.  For example, I have an RSS feed that scans VisualCV.  So whenever a tweet is made about my employer I am immediately notified.  Easy enough.  Well, it gets better.

That my friends is a Tag Cloud.  Tag Clouds have been around for a little while now.  However, now that Twitter has scaled , the power in the above display is rather absurd.  The size of the word clearly displays the gravity of the topic.  Meaning, the bigger the word the more it has been tweeted on.  Click that word and you are instantly viewing the latest and greatest relevant tweets made across the GLOBE.  Seriously, does it get any sexier then that!