Reminder: Upcoming webinar on display advertising opportunities

We wanted to remind you that this week we’re holding a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategies.

Join us on May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST.

Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising
• How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to improving your campaigns
• How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy

Hope to see you there!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

Updates To Our Homepage

Take a look at the Google Analytics homepage and you'll notice some small design and content changes that will improve your experience. Besides some under the hood improvements such as HTML5 and CSS2 validation, here are a few of the changes:

• Added dropdowns to the top navigation across the whole site so users can find their way to the content they want better. Try hovering over Product to see a dropdown.
• Updated the features scroller in the middle of the page with a more intuitive UI and cleaner look.
• Updated the News & Hightlights section, which now includes a link to a recent Forrester Research article, "Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics".
• Added a new box to the bottom right that allows the user to flip through our Strategic Solutions, including the recently announced Application Gallery.

Thanks to our fearless webmaster Mike Rigoli for spearheading these. Let us know what you think in comments below, but only if you love it. Joke :-) Enjoy.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Comparing Results to Industry Norms

I am frequently asked about what response rate a client should expect based on 'industry standards' or results from similar programs at other financial institutions. While the DMA does compile statistics and reports on direct marketing response rates with their Response Rate Trends Report, and there are other tools available from alternative sources such as MarketingSherpa, there are significant flaws to using general standards or even the results from another bank's program as a guide for setting expectations.

It is difficult to find comparable benchmark results since you will need to find programs with the same or similar:

• Target audience
• Product features and benefits
• Offer
• Channel mix (were there other marketing channels used to support the program)
• Timing (not only to reflect seasonality, but overall environment conditions at the time of the program)
• Brand strength
• Competition

After more than 30 years of marketing services experience within the banking industry, I have found that the best benchmark against which you can measure the success of a current or future campaign is the results from previous programs at your financial institution. While the timing of the previous program may be different, far more of the variables described above stay the same. Sometimes developing this benchmark may require analyzing a program that had not been previously measured, but this guidepost will be far more accurate than an industry or competitor result.

Life Cycle Financial Sales Training... Part II

The birth of a child is an exciting time, no doubt. Life changes so quickly. Values get reevaluated. New perspectives evolve. New priorities emerge. Yes, that one day when a child is born, much changes.

In our financial lives, the birth of the first child means you are now a "Charlie", as I call it. No longer a single individual or married couple, you are now a family.... and families have different financial needs than their non-parental counterparts. As we train bankers to develop deeper customer relationships, we include financial counseling tips that bankers can use to really make a difference in their customers' lives. For the "Charlies" and "Deltas", families with preschool aged children or school age children respectively, there are some important conversations we should be having.

Probably the most important is to review the topics they should already have mastered, learning the savings habit and taking care of their credit score. After revisiting that, we can move on to a few new topics, savings for the child or children's college education (or just savings for the child) and starting long-term savings for long-term goals or retirement. By now, this young family has some goals, whether short term goals or long term goals and they need to be planning to create that future....
We can help our customers by talking about the need for mortgage loans to buy that first home (or a bigger home as the family expands).
We can help our customers by asking if they have started participating in their employer's 401(k) plan. If not, that is the number 1 recommended savings vehicle, especially when the employer gives a matching contribution! You can't beat matching with any other investment out there. And if they are participating in their 401(k) plan, we can remind them that they can also deposit up to $6000 per year into their own IRA plan and build an additional retirement nest egg. When our employees are well-versed in the IRA rules and regs, they can talk to many customers and help them plan an annual contribution program ( of course, customers should consult with their tax advisor regarding deductibiity).

If we are helping our customers move through each life cycle stage with just a few of the basic financial planning tenets in place, we will know that we have not only made a difference in their lives, but that we have developed a loyal customer as well.

Next time, we'll look at how we can be helping our "empty nesters" and retired "foxtrots" also.

Are you including life cycle financial selling in your basic bank training? If not, we can help. If so, please let me know what you do. If you are passionate about financial education like I am, please email me at slovejoy@marketmatch.com.

Until next time,

Sharon

Be Careful of 'Mental Opt-Out' With Email Marketing

For those who read my Blog, you know that I feel strongly that the email channel is significantly underutilized by the banking industry. Not only do marketers not effectively leverage this channel in conjunction with other direct and mass marketing options, most banks do a terrible job at even collecting email addresses in the first place.

Unfortunately, for those who have begun to use email marketing in support of customer communication efforts, some have gone to the opposite extreme by viewing email as a 'free' marketing tool without giving adequate thought to the importance of relevancy. As many realize in their daily scanning of their email in box, overusing the email channel can have a detrimental effect of the value of this channel and negatively impacting the overall customer experience.


It was with great interest therefore that I read a recent op-ed in DM News written by Mark Smith from Portrait Software discussing the mental opt-out that occurs when a company bombards a customer with too much untargeted email marketing communication, only to have the reader open the email and then quickly hit the "delete' key. The impact of multiple irrelevant emails is to either explicitly receive an opt-out to future email or to implicitly lose the intended reader's trust and attention for future communication that may have been of interest.

As Mark mentions in his op-ed, if you get a reputation for sending irrelevant communications, you are basically asking for mental opt-out. And just because a customer's name doesn't appear on the do-not-contact list, it doesn't mean they are paying attention.

As financial institutions get more comfortable with this channel, it will be important to ensure that adequate targeting is done and that the focus of each email is to positively impact lifetime customer value.

Upcoming webinar: Video Targeting

We previously highlighted a campaign that American Apparel ran on YouTube in which they targeted pet videos -- including one of the most famous videos on the site. Part of the secret of American Apparel’s success was their use of Video Targeting, a tool that helps advertisers find and target relevant partner videos on YouTube. As with other products we’ve recently launched, the Video Targeting Tool is integrated with Google AdWords and makes it easier than ever for you to run integrated, targeted, and measurable campaigns across the Web. Here’s how it works:

With so many of you now using the Video Targeting Tool, we rolled out some big improvements, including localized versions in 25 countries around the world. There are also a lot of new features to explore, so we decided to host a webinar that will give you an overview of the tool’s functionality, as well as best practices and case studies.

The webinar is scheduled for 10 am PDT on May 19th, 2010. To register for the event, please fill out the registration form here.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

Making local advertising easy: upgrade your local business ads to location extensions

Last year, we unveiled a new feature called location extensions for those of you who use online advertising to drive traffic to your brick and mortar locations. This feature allows you to include information such as your business name, address and phone number in your existing text ads. When a potential customer performs a search, their location or search terms are dynamically matched to your business locations, and your most relevant location appears within your ad on Google.com and Google Maps. 

Location extensions are the new and improved way to run local ads, so we’ll begin transitioning the local business ads in your AdWords account to ads that are compatible with location extensions soon. We wanted to give you plenty of time to get familiar with the new feature, so we thought we’d give you a heads up about the upcoming transition today. To learn more, please visit www.google.com/adwords/lbatransition. 

In order to make this as seamless as possible, we’re offering the following options to help you transition smoothly:

1. Upgrade your local business ads to text ads with location extensions. To take full advantage of the benefits of location extensions and ensure a seamless transition of your local business ads, we encourage you to update your ads through the five simple steps outlined on our website.

2. Automatically transition your local business ads. If you choose not to take any action, in the coming weeks, campaigns containing local business ads will be automatically enabled with location extensions using addresses from your local business ads. We’ll also replace your local business ads with new ads that are compatible with location extensions. While any of your addresses may now appear with the standard text ads in your campaign when relevant, each transitioned local business ad will continue to be linked to a single address and will only show to people near that address. 

We’ve heard from many of you who’ve already switched to location extensions that campaign management and attracting customers in your area is now simpler and more effective. With location extensions, you can deliver more exposure and local relevance by using the same ads for all your business locations without the overhead of maintaining a different ad for each location. Visit the location extension benefits page to learn about other ways it can help improve your campaigns.

We hope these changes help you reach more local customers with your ads, and value your feedback about this transition. Please share your comments or suggestions regarding the process using this form.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew