Building Viral into Product DNA

Viral or social marketing are the hot topics of the moment. The attraction is obvious, you can spread the word about your product or service to people at a low cost, through trusted channels, namely their friends and family, and get them to pay attention and act upon the referral more easily.

However viral marketing isn’t as easy as it looks. If you truly want to base your marketing on social, viral or word of ‘mouse’ you need your customers to be really engaged with your product, to truly love it and feel the need to tell people about it.

Skype is a great example of a truly viral product. Skype let ‘the whole world talk for free’ but in order for users to call their friends for free they had to tell them about Skype and convince them to visit the website and download it for themselves. That way the user won, their friend won and in the end of the day Skype also won with huge growth and tiny acquisition costs.

Also your user experience should be filled with viral hooks within the customer journey, points in the interaction with the product when it makes sense for the user to share the product with their friends and family.

Hotmail is one of the earliest examples of viral marketing, which in the 1990s allowed Hotmail to grow from nothing to 12 million users in 18 months. This was achieved by a clever combination of offering free email addresses, and a powerful viral hook included in each and every email sent from a hotmail address ‘Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com’. In this way Hotmail ensured that users shared the product with everyone they communicated with using their Hotmail account.

For viral to work best marketing and product need to work together and encapsulate sharing in all aspects of the product from the very beginning. A great real world example of building viral into the product from the beginning is Graze. Graze is naturally viral and everything from the snacks themselves through to the packaging they arrive in is designed to have a Wow factor. People are naturally inclined to chat about Graze with their friends, show off the Graze box at the office and hand out trial coupons to others, spreading the word about Graze to their friends and family because they love the product.

Yes you can think about how you can help your customers to tell each other about the product and you can even reward your customers for spreading the word. However to truly harness the power of viral then you should be thinking about how to build a product that users will want to tell each other about or one that is different enough that people will naturally ask about it. Moo did a great job of designing a really different product that customers would naturally comment on when they launched their minicards. Mini cards were half the size of regular business cards making them a real talking point, helping minicard owners to stand out and ensuring that the word about Moo spread virally.

Viral isn’t something you can easily add retroactively, so to take best advantage of this powerful marketing channel think about it early and often and make it a part of your product’s DNA.

A B Testing: Marketing as Science

Recently I've been asked about A/B testing for online marketing and it occurs to me that many marketers spend a vast majority of their time working on new campaigns to drive conversion, acquisition, retention or monetisation and not nearly enough time perfecting existing channels and communications with the more scientific approach of AB testing.

What is AB testing and why is it important?
AB testing, also known as split testing, brings some science to the practice of marketing. Essentially AB testing involves making small incremental changes, one at a time, so that you can see what impact these changes will have on conversion, click through rates, sales or other targets. In this way marketers can scientifically prove the impact of specific changes rather than making recommendations based on gut instinct.

Before you start with AB testing you need to consider a number of questions:

• What do you want to test and in which medium or channel?
• How will you track metrics and measure improvements?
• What is your goal or objective?

What do you want to test and in which medium or channel?
AB testing can be used across almost any online marketing medium including emails, triggered messages, online advertising and web pages such as purchase flows or landing pages. In deciding where to start with AB testing you should consider what has the greatest impact on your business objective. If you can achieve a 1% improvement in people completing transactions when shopping with you, this is likely to have a greater and more immediate impact on the bottom line than a similar improvement to a landing page shown to new visitors.

How will you track metrics and measure improvements?
Tracking is essential for AB testing. What you’ll need to track will depend on the campaign, channel and objectives however you should think about tracking some of the following:

• No. of emails sent / page views
• Clicks
  
• Click through rate
• Sales
• Conversion

A baseline also needs to be established by measuring the performance of the current version of the communication. The current version will act as a control and will be run against a number of test versions, and therefore the baseline will provide a marker against which to measure improvements.

What is your goal or objective?
Before beginning tests you should decide on the key performance indicators for the test. By being clear about the objective of a particular communication in advance of the test you’ll be able to choose a winner from your results easily and without bias.

Running your AB Test

The golden rule with AB testing is to make one change at a time so you can see the incremental improvements achieved by each individual change. This allows you to isolate the revenue, conversion or CTR impact of each change. Therefore the next thing to do is to create your test versions. In creating the tests you should look at changes to the following areas:

• Headline
• Call to action
• Copy
• Graphics
• Colour
• Configuration / Layout of elements
• Headings

The temptation to make numerous changes is very hard to resist but remember in order to truly know which element has caused an improvement it’s very important to be patient and only make one change at a time.

Next you’ll need to decide on the proportional split for your traffic, e.g. 80/20, 50/50. Certain business issues may come into consideration, for example when testing on a page which drives the majority of your sales you’ll want to test among a small percentage of your audience to avoid negatively impacting conversion rates and therefore revenues. However in order to give you confidence in making decisions based on the AB test you’ll need to test with an adequate sample size. If your sample is small you have two options available: to test a smaller number of variants or run the test for a longer period.

Now you’re ready to start and a number of treatments (including your control) should be run concurrently. Essentially this means that you randomise which treatment is shown to each user and run them in parallel randomly splitting traffic between each treatment. If this isn’t possible you can split sequentially, by showing one version for a set amount of time followed by another version for the same amount of time, results will be less reliable but still useful.

The actual implementation of the AB tests can be done in a number of ways ranging from simple and cheap scripts to using sophisticated applications such as Offermatica, Inceptor, Optimost, Visual Sciences.

When the tests are complete you'll need to look at the metrics for each. The winning test based on your established key performance indicators then becomes the hero. The hero should then become live and be shown to your main audience in place of your previous control.

But that’s not the end, now you should start again by making individual improvements to the hero. And so the cycle of AB testing continues.

And what if you don’t have the patience?

AB testing requires a great deal of patience, however there is an alternative approach for those of us with a little less than the required measure of patience. At the beginning of your testing you can instead create and test a number of radical re-designs against your current version or control. The design which gets the best results becomes the hero and control going forward and then you make incremental and individual changes to that in the normal way allowing for potentially faster improvements but in a less controlled and scientific manner to begin with. Although less scientific in nature this may allow for greater improvements in a shorter timeframe.

Social Media Marketing's growing importance

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the roles new online channels will play, and indeed much derision from some as to the impact Twitter can have as a marketing channel. The release of a number of reports and survey results help to show the growing importance of these social media channels for marketers going forward.

A survey of 18,000 marketers at Online Marketing Blog found that the top ten digital marketing tactics which marketers are planning to use in 2009 are:

• Blogging (34%)
• Twitter (29%)
• Search engine optimization (28%)
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
• Email marketing (17%)
• Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
• Pay per click (14%)
• Blogger relations (12%)
• Video marketing (10%)
• Social media advertising (7%)

Out of the top ten, six of these can be considered to be social marketing.

At present the top sectors currently engaging in social media include: retail, consumer goods & services, high tech, media & entertainment, automotive, financial services, Government and Travel. This list closely mirrors the top spenders on online advertising at present and it’s no wonder as Hitwise numbers show that social media is now driving 7.1% of traffic to e-tailers up from 5.2% in 2008. Hitwise figures also show that the importance of paid search, though still vital for online retailers has fallen from 27.8% in 2008 to 22.5% in March 2009.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to see that of the Top 500 e-tailers 56.8% have a presence on the social networking site Facebook.com, 41.4% or are on YouTube.com, 28.6%, are on MySpace.com and 20.4% are using Twitter.com, according to Internet Retailer.

These reports help to substantiate the importance of social media marketing and demonstrate that we’re likely to see advertising budgets moving away from traditional online channels in 2009 and towards social media marketing.

The growth of social media marketing is an opportunity for many but for those companies who are not ready for social media marketing and those who aren’t currently planning for it this should serve as a timely wake-up call. Brands need to begin testing to see how they can best use social media to develop ongoing communications with customers and find ways to integrate social media into their current marketing mix.

Companies who aren’t planning to use social media as part of their marketing could find themselves playing an expensive game of catch-up.

Skittles becomes social

Skittles have launched a new website, well in fact they've launched a lot of links to various web 2.0 and social media sites where their customers are talking about them. The homepage shows various chatter about Skittles on Twitter Search and other navigation links point to their Facebook page, YouTube for Video and Wikipedia for product information.

Skittles parent company, Mars, have essentially handed over control of their homepage to Twitter users, and with updates in real time you can see both positive and negative comments posted. It's a big step away from the traditional use of websites in FMCG for delivering controlled messages to consumers but a very interesting experiment in social media. The novelty of this move will no doubt generate a lot of press coverage and exposure in blogs and social media for Skittles.

The website launch has certainly got people talking, the Twittersphere is abuzz today with mentions of Skittles (and indeed some nostalgic purchasing of Skittles it would seem). However as the buzz around this launch settles I wonder if people will still be talking about Skittles on Twitter. In fact the design of the website seems to suggest that a more traditional homepage may be waiting in the wings, with separate links for Home and Chatter both pointing to Twitter Search at the moment.

Skittles have taken a brave step into this new world and I'm sure we'll see many companies follow with a more gentle integration of social media into their online presence in the coming months.

Facebook for the old and the young

There's been lots of discussion about the aging of Facebook recently. This doesn't feel like a new phenomenon to me as quite a few of my own Facebook friends are in fact my aunts and uncles having mastered email and even Skype and now joining Facebook to see what it's all about, and maybe even see what their kids are up to!

What has struck me recently is that the younger generation have stopped using what we'd see as traditional online communications channels like email. By looking at traffic to Facebook versus email sites we can see the impact already. Younger users don't have the same need for email now that they have Bebo, Facebook and the likes. My 18 year old cousin has been a big user of social networking for many years, spending an unnatural amount of time glued to Bebo. And her first foray into email just happened recently, out of necessity, as she started college and was given a student email account.

How she and the rest of her generation will use online channels for communications in future remains to be seen. However what we can be sure of is that marketeers will need to continue to adapt and allow customers to choose how and where they want to communicated with, be that on Facebook, Bebo, Twitter or on email.

My Favourite Reads of 2008

It's amazing how many books you can read when traveling, with all that free time to kill and so 2008 offered me a great chance to catch up on many books I'd been meaning to read for years. Thanks to those 26 hour bus journeys in South America I got through quite a few!

Here's my pick of the bunch:

• Shantaram - A captivating story of life in the slums of Mumbai for an ex-convict who escaped from a high security jail in Australia. The writing really brings Mumbai to life and there is never a dull moment. Be warned you won't be able to put it down!
  
• The Poisonwood Bible - Follows a missionary, his wife and four daughters on their move to Congo in the 1950's showing how Africa changes their lives forever and how trying to force different cultures to take Western government and cultures doesn't work.
• Marching Powder - True story of a British prisoner's life in San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia. An unbelievable place where prisoners pay for the pleasure of entering the prison, live with their entire families inside the prison, run businesses and take justice into their own hands.
• My Sister's Keeper - Explores the moral dilemma's that genetic engineering creates by exploring the lives of a family where the eldest sister has leukaemia and the younger sister has been designed to be an exact match in order to keep her alive. A very emotional page-turner.
  
• Empress Orchid - A fascinating glimpse into the lives of those who lived inside China's Forbidden Palace and all of the politics that go with thousands of royal wives and concubines.
  
• A Thousand Splendid Suns - Set in Afghanistan this book follows the life of Mariam through an arranged marriage and the Taliban. It gives a real insight into Afghan culture and to the many wonders lost to the world through all the hardship this country has endured.
  
• Atonement - I hadn't seen the film before reading the book and therefore the twists in the story were new to me. If you're looking for a gripping, fast read with a real moral story then this is it. As I live in South London reading about the Blitz and the bombing of Balham tube station really brought the impact of war to life for me also.
  
• Suite Francaise - The actual writings of a French woman living in occupied France during World War 2, a brilliant account of the lives of real people during the war.
  
• On Chesil Beach - I love Ian McEwan's writing and 'On Chesil Beach' didn't disappoint, in fact I read it in one sitting. It describes the pressure on a young couple in the 50s on their wedding day and how feelings that go unspoken and misunderstood can have a dramatic impact on events.
• The Pact - Examines the effects of a suicide pact gone wrong between a teenage couple which leaves one dead and the other standing trial for her murder. Another gripping story by Jodi Piccoult, you won't be able to put it down.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - And finally the conclusion of the Harry Potter series. I was so sad to leave the world of Muggles and magic at the end of this book. As a lover of Roald Dahl growing up I think this is a new children's classic that people of any age can enjoy.
  

Grazing and long forgotten resolutions

New Years resolutions are hard to keep and coming towards the end of January many of us are already lamenting broken resolutions for yet another year. But at least when it comes to eating more healthily I've found a new company, Graze, that makes it easier to snack on healthy food than it is to snack on chocolate and crisps and all the usual.

We've all heard that grazing is healthier than having 3 square meals a day. And we all know that 4 o'clock feeling where your energy levels have hit rock bottom and you just have to have something to nibble on. But finding healthy snacks, and choosing them over the more readily available snack food, is not always easy.

Problem solved! Graze deliver a box of fresh healthy foods to nibble on to your door (or desk) whenever you want it. Their selection is brilliant, loads of tasty nuts, dried and fresh fruits, seeds, olives and really interesting mixes of all of the above. Plus you can tell them what you like and don't like so you're always bound to love the snacks they send.

And I love the packaging it's just gorgeous. The snacks arrive in a simple brown cardboard box that fits through any letter box. Open it and you have three little parcels of goodness waiting for you, all individually packed (in biodegradable packages of course) so you can eat them straight away or keep them until you want them. And underneath each box there is an image of freshly mown grass just to remind you that everything you're eating is fresh, healthy and 100% real, nothing artificial about it. Another nice touch just to make you feel extra healthy and good about your choice, the Graze nutrition team include a little summary of the nutritional value of all your tasty snacks so you can feel really virtuous.

Simple and brilliantly done, plus as an introductory offer they're offering the first box for free and the second half price. I tried it and I'm hooked. Try it for yourself.