Tag: mobile

Designing Emails for the Mobile World
If you are an email marketer, you need to be thinking about how people are now consuming email. This activity has been taken for granted for many years, but it has changed dramatically in the past few years with the proliferation of smart phones that can render HTML properly.

So, forget text messages. Make your emails mobile friendly. This is easy, here are the key ingredients:
1. Start with a good, brief subject. This really hasn’t changed and remains to be hugely important. Your subject should compel the reader to open the email instead of pressing delete. Keep it short… think 60 characters…
2. Pre-headers… many email marketers still don’t do this. Don’t create a fancy email with images, tables, and formatting without first inserting a plain text sentence before everything. This loads first and will display as the preview text on many devices (and in many web browsers, AND in MS Outlook. Keep this to the length of your average tweet… and it should include your purpose or call to action. don’t repeat your subject.
3. Links… your links should go to mobile-friendly pages. If they don’t, stop email marketing and start focusing on designing mobile friendly web pages. It’s the future people, get on board.
4. Images… think back to 1999… small, light weight emails were important then, and they are still important now. They open quickly on mobile devices and people don’t want to wait for your images to load.
5. Be brief. Most people don’t want to read 1,000 word emails on their phones. Say what you need to say in 100 words or less. If you have more to say, include catchy headers and hooks and then link to the text.
6. Phone numbers people can click are a real boon to business. Do it.
7. Let people reply. Stop sending messages from unattended email boxes. Why wouldn’t you want someone to reply to you? Isn’t that why you’re emailing them?
Want some more advice? Here’s a great article from ClickZ on email marketing for the mobile world by Melinda Krueger.
Voice Interactivity Changing the PPC Game

Those with Apple iPhone 4s devices may be less inclined to run text searches on Google.com as they grow more comfortable with interfacing with the Siri voice interaction platform. Furthermore, Google voice search and the probably development and maturation of voice interactivity embedded into more and more devices will ultimate force a shift in the way consumers interact with advertising on the internet. One can hardly assume ads will go away. They never have. In fact, with each new technology, ads seem to become even more prolific than on the previous technologies. Consider it sort of the Moore’s Law of paid search advertising.

So what is in store for paid ads if I never visit an actual search engine? Perhaps when I ask for “restaurants near Reston, VA” the system will deliver two sets of results? Or, will the results be intertwined? And if so, how will I know as a consumer which results are sponsored and which are organic? And where to social signals play in all of this? Maybe it’s important to me that three of my friends recommend on restaurant over another, or that one restaurant is offering a half-off coupon?

Advertising is an important aspect of the consumer experience and ultimately underwrites the fact that the internet is essentially free.

Will Apple build its own ad network for Siri usurping Google altogether? That’s a definite probability if not a certainty. Look at iTunes. It’s a complete silo from the internet, controlled fully by Apple.

The voice interactivity is a vast uncharted pioneer town ripe for entrepreneurs and bright ideas to move in and conquer.

Just what will be next for consumers and advertisers alike? Ask Siri, maybe she knows.
Flash Forward – by George Fox

The following article is by a colleague of mine, George Fox. George is a guru in all things web design and development and we’ve been working on a number of projects together this past year spanning the web with regards to intake, branding, conversion and usability. You can access George’s blog here for more insight: http://tigerfox.posterous.com.

Adobe Flash

In early August, one of my colleagues forwarded me an article on Read Write Web heralding Adobe’s open beta of Edge: a tool for creating animated web content in HTML, CSS and javascript. At the time I wrote:

I’ve been following Edge for the last year when teaser footage of it showed up on Adobe Labs. I’m sure it will eventually be pretty cool, but any talk of Flash’s death is greatly exaggerated. I have Edge on my (personal) laptop as well as Tumult’s Hype and used to have Sencha Animator. I don’t think there’s any danger of any of these replacing Flash for its breadth of mature programming capability, workflow or file I/O in the next few years. I do think that a vast majority of Flash banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics will be replaced by HTML5/CSS3 alternatives. But deep stuff like games, applications and specialized front-end interfaces will require more than basic web technologies alone can deliver – at least until a competitively-priced robust, easy-to-author framework comes along.

FWIW, Adobe doesn’t have a spotless record when it comes to championing software… Anyone remember PageMaker, TypeManager, Dimensions,
Framemaker, AuthorWare, LiveMotion or GoLive?

Yesterday, Adobe officially announced they were euphemistically “focusing” Flash on “PC Browsing and Mobile Apps.” In other words, they’re abandoning further development of the Flash Mobile plugin. The very same product that many said was Apple iOS’s biggest failing and the intractable Steve Jobs’ personal bugbear. Now many are saying perhaps he was right.

I stand by my assertion that Flash isn’t going away soon. The news about Adobe abandoning Flash Mobile isn’t surprising – as far as I can tell they never got much traction with it anyway. But in line with what I said: as more “banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics” are built in HTML/CSS rather than relying on plug-ins, Flash’s web usage will ebb. It’s not just Flash Mobile that will be affected. This change will affect PC browsing and hasten Flash’s obsolescence. Just browse the comments.

Besides the kneejerk overreactions, there’s so much anger and apprehension. Too bad Adobe can’t simply state that they want to make the best software available rather compromise on shoddy initiatives or all that ambiguous mumbo-jumbo about ‘increasing investment in HTML5’ and ‘delivering compelling web and application experiences.’ Flash may not be dead, but this will be seen as an epic fail.

Now is much like ten years ago when Flash became ubiquitous. The state of the web was shifting from static pages to interactive ones; from CD-ROMS to streaming media. Flash had a decent authoring environment and adapted to the programming challenges well enough, but never could keep up with the shift toward simple standards-based accessible content. Even now, the best it can do is act as a browser or mediator for such content. We don’t need that anymore. What we need are tools that help us take advantage of the advanced capabilities inherent in HTML and CSS. I don’t think it will be one of our current crop of word processors, page layout applications or IDEs. Whoever builds a scalable, efficient, capable authoring tool for HTML5 web applications may rule the next decade.

Oh and Silverlight, watch your back…
iPhone App versus Mobile Web: Financial Times

I’ve written previously that I feel the mobile app world will soon be replaced by mobile-friendly functionality on the web for many reasons. Mobile devices will soon be smart enough to interact with newer websites to provide users with an “app-like” experience, but also data plans and bandwidth will become faster and ubiquitous.

Perhaps an early indicator of this is the Financial Times. The usage of their web site for mobile devices has usurped that of their iPhone app. This makes particular sense because the app would constantly have to download new data (news) to stay relevant… so why not just go straight to the FT website instead?

You can read the story to learn more about this on Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-ft-idUSTRE78L49Q20110922
Mobile App versus Mobile Web?

Should you invest in building out a mobile application for a smartphone, or instead, take your website into the mobile generation and just “mobilize” your website?

Well, as I wrote recently on this topic, I still believe mobile apps will eventually give way to feature-rich mobile websites.

One of the main drives I mentioned were corporate budgets.

However, the technology that will make this a reality is HTML5. Here’s a great article which explains what HTML5 can deliver that its predecessors could not, and therefore gave way to the rise of mobile apps:

http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/07/28/html5-adoption-rise-allowing-richer-mobile-sites
Should my business develop a mobile app?

I’ve been asking this question for the last couple of months and examining the space quite a bit lately:

“Should my business (or yours for that matter) develop a mobile application?”

The answer is a bit cloudy and takes some digging to truly understand. First, you must acknowledge the difference between a mobile app and a mobile web site. I’m not going to dive into the details on this, but simply stated a mobile app doesn’t require network access, running entirely on the device versus a mobile website where you have to connect to a site and transaction data (bandwidth).

Now, there are many more differences… speed, user experience, functionality, and more. I will assume you understand these differences. However, I hadn’t really considered speed as an issue until it was mentioned at the Washington DC Digital Media Conference a few days ago by the mobile panel session I attended. Incidentally, this very issue was briefly discussed, though I found that the panel was quick to dismiss the issue.

I contend that the mobile app (as we know it today), will be obsolete in less than five years.

I know, that’s a profound statement. I’m not saying the world is going to end, though. I’m just saying that the uniqueness of a mobile app is the fact that it is taking advantage of some shortcomings within the mobile web sphere and that the gap in those features will soon erode.

For example, mobile bandwidth will become nearly ubiquitous within five years to the point that data plans will be second nature. As smart phone device penetration eclipses 35% of the market this year, and probably approaches nearly 100% of the Western/Asian markets by 2016, data plans will come right along. Remember that 10 years ago, an unlimited mobile minutes plan for just phone calls was unheard of, and similarly for texting… soon too, unlimited data plans will be common place.

Next, mobile device ability to render the mobile web more consistently across the many different devices, to provide a consistent user experience will soon improve dramatically, In fact, we’ve already seen great strides in this area thanks to better OSs, browsers and standards.

Third, developers will learn to better leverage newer (more modern) development techniques and CMSs that take a single website and render efficiently for the best user experience across a variety of devices – smart phones, tables and desktop. This is an important concept here, and the one I believe that will truly eradicate the need for many mobile apps. Businesses will simply build ONE website, and then the CMS will deploy it to the variety of devices dynamically.

Saving companies gobs of money, time and resources by reducing the number of different “things” a company needs to build will ultimately spell the end of apps. Companies don’t want to pay for and maintain multiple “things” (apps and sites). As business owners, we want to build once, maintain centrally, and deploy dynamically.

Now, a good friend and colleague of mine, Daniel Odio (who by the way is a mobile app genius), made a very compelling comment to me recently. He said, (in reply to my comment that HTML5 and the mobile web would make apps obsolete) that I was comparing mobile apps today with the mobile web in five years. Good point, I was! I also concede that I’m not an expert on mobile apps, though I do have some experience in the area. And, I will also say that I’ve built several mobile sites and have been experimenting with a number of mobile CMS platforms. I also will say that Daniel’s company (www.appmakr.com) is really freaking cool and I’ve used it to build two mobile apps already (soon to be published once Apple approves my developer account).

I digress…

I am not sure what the future of the mobile app is and what advancements are in store for this very popular media format. I believe that within the decade mobile phones will have a projector capability that will project the screen onto a surface and use infrared and spatial awareness to enable you to interact with the projected image as if it were a touch screen… so maybe mobile apps will take advantage of that. I also believe that phones will enable holography in a similar manner. But until then, I believe that mobile websites might be a better long term investment, especially if you are looking to build off of your existing web experience and just bring it to the mobile space. It might be cheaper and easier, but it might just not be as cool. Cool comes at a price, and building an iPhone app is not cheap. But, for that matter, neither is a great web site.

For some additional reading, check out this MediaPost article which demonstrates how Facebook is countering Apple’s app dominance by creating a mobile site versus an app:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=152531#
Getting Started with Mobile

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work lately establishing a major mobile search campaigns and working on research to demonstrate the ease of entering the mobile search market and the competitive advantage it will bring your company. As I put these presentations together, I’m coming across some great articles and resources that I will share as I uncover them.

To get started with the first few…

1. Here’s some high-level insight for a mobile search campaign by Laurie Sullivan.

2. Use the MobilePress plug-in for your WordPress site if you have a WordPress-based site.

3. If you want to create a standalone mobile-optimized site with little in the way of IT resources, check out MoFuse, based in RI. Their tutorials and easy-to-use software removes the “IT” from the picture, enabling you to create a site quickly.
Coke’s Emphasis on Mobile & Text Messaging

Here’s an article about Coke’s re-emphasis on mobile and text marketing:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=144376&nid=123451#

It’s compelling that one of the brand managers for one of the most well-respected brands is leaning on a fairly well established technology for future growth. Makes you at least question the state of your current mobile strategy.
A Cautionary Tale about Mobile Ads

I’ve shared my strong opinions towards click fraud regarding various ad platforms such as Google AdSense and Facebook before, so I’m not surprised by a recent article I came across by MarketingProfs.

http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4365/mobile-app-users-click-on-ads-mostly-by-mistake?adref=nlt020311

The article discusses data detailing how most mobile app users click on advertisements by accident more than they do on purpose.

Think about that! Let’s say it’s 50/50… That means you really need to double your cost (or divide your clicks by two) when calculating expected ROI and other metrics.

For instance, I know that 40% of the clicks on my Facebook ads never get counted by Google Analytics, meaning that those clicks don’t make it to my landing page (or a select few don’t have JavaScript/cookies enabled, which is very low). So I know that 40% of what I get charged by Facebook is a sunk cost, and provides no value. So when I calculate and try to predict the performance of future campaigns, I always make sure I factor in the 40%.

When doing mobile ads, it’s important to realize that your conversion rate may be a lot better than you see, because half of the people clicking your ad are going to abandon immediately. So divide that by two, and that’s a more accurate click-to-conversion rate.
Mobile Email Usage Skyrockets

A great article by MediaPost discussing the latest ComScore numbers regarding email usage:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=143363&nid=122890

Source: ComScore

Daily mobile email usage is up 40% year over year for November 2010. I’m not surprised about this stat, due to the proliferation of mobile devices that are highly email friendly such as the BlackBerry, iPhone, Droids and iPad.