Kevin Henrikson

Email marketing has proven itself as a solid marketing channel with enviable conversion rates. Sexier platforms like video and social media have not been able to duplicate the power of email to build relationships and drive sales.

However, now many people access their email via mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Retailers are responding accordingly. According to Return Path, in the last three months of 2012 mobile surged ahead as the dominant platform among the top 100 Internet retail companies.

Evaluate Analytics

Marketers should take specific steps to follow their customers and prospects on mobile devices. They should seek to identify exactly which platforms they use.  For example, if they read their email on mobile more than desktop computers, programmers and designers should modify the email presentation for mobile first.

The timing of email is also changing. Many companies have traditionally sent email marketing messages Tuesday through Thursday. However, with their mobile devices always in hand, consumers are checking for deals when they are shopping on Friday as well. Smart retailers will monitor their sales patterns and modify their email marketing to align with mobile access and availability.

Time of Day

Along with evaluating the day of the week, marketers should seek to identify the best time of day to send emails.  At home while relaxing, consumers may be more interested in background product information. Daytime messages can showcase sales and discounts.

To make email work better for mobile, marketers can:

• Evaluate analytics to find mobile usage trends and statistics unique to their company.
• Determine the devices used by their customers, and revise email design for those platforms.
• Research whether text or HTML is preferred by clients. HTML can be overwhelming on a small screen, yet surveys may reveal customers prefer it over plain text.
• Use responsive design techniques that allow each email message to be easily read on multiple devices.

The rise of mobile is driving many changes in email. For example, Google recently revised Gmail to give users more control on multiple devices. On the desktop, categories are shown as tabs. Users select the categories they want, and can instantly click the right tab. In a mobile environment, the tabs are equally user friendly, featuring color designation and quick access to additional tabs.

High Conversions

Email marketing offers an intimacy and personal touch that other channels cannot provide. That is one of the major reasons marketers work so hard to collect email addresses from prospective customers. They know they have a much better chance of making a sale to someone on their list than a random visitor to their site.

The change to a mobile world only makes this connection stronger because mobile consumers check their email multiple times every day. By making a close evaluation of their current analytics, and adjusting email design to match customer behavior, marketers can look forward to benefitting from mobile for years to come.

Lots of people ask me what I use at home for backups. This post should give me an easy place to send folks from now on. Picture your computer falling from your desk or your child spilling coffee on it. Imagine a virus locking up your entire system. Think of that intern accidentally changing the format on a business document. What if your laptop gets stolen? The dangers inherent in our favorite technological tools are widely known and the reality is that things just break. This is part of the reason online backup programs have become so popular. Combined with the fact that the majority of our most valuable information has become digital, it’s downright irresponsible not to use some sort of data-protection program. Important projects from work, cherished family memories, and critical financial records are all worth taking some extra time to protect. Among the hundreds of online backup sites out there, it can be difficult to pick a winner. Here’s the setup I use for all the macs in my extended family. If you still have a Windows box or two floating around, you can still use the second option.

Day-to-day Protection with Time Machine: For Mac users, one of the most convenient programs for file protection is Time Machine. Time Machine is a popular choice for onsite backup because it comes standard on all computers running Mac OS X. As a minimal precaution, it works perfectly for day-to-day insurance. Your daily data is backed up every hour, your weekly data is backed up every day, and your monthly data is backed up every week. The only limitation to the program is that you will run out of space, at which point your older backups will be removed. Apple designed the program only to protect users from instant and disastrous data loss; it does not have the appropriate capacity to be used for long-term or remote storage. Files accumulate until you’ve hit your backup drive capacity, and then you’ll have to prioritize your data. A good way to extend your limit is to add an additional drive for Time Machine’s storage, which can add 12-18 months to your unrestricted storage. In general, you want a backup drive twice as large as the data you’re backing up. With Time Machine running, you can rest assured that your progress on any project, professional or personal, will always be at your fingertips and never be lost. But if you are looking for extensive peace of mind against the very worst disasters, you’ll need a backup program more useful for storage.

Long-term Security with Crashplan: There are catastrophes that will circumvent even the most meticulous data protection plan. Your information is greatly at risk in the event of natural disasters and other types of hardware destruction Crashplan is a cloud backup program that allows users to save their information anyway they choose from anywhere they choose. Much like Time Machine, its updates are frequent and automatic (default setting is for every 15 minutes), ensuring that all new information and old versions of the same are secured as soon as they’re generated. Perfect for work on the road, Crashplan can backup and retrieve your information from any computer with an internet connection. With no limits on file size and storage, Crashplan is one of the few cloud backup programs that gives users the freedom to avoid choosing which information is most valuable. This ability to be flexible and expansive is what separates it from the pack. Their family plan supports up to ten computers, which makes it perfect for securing all the computers you value most. For users with big data loads, they provide an option to seed the backup process with a drive they mail to you. There is a one-time fee of about $125, but for users like us with terabytes of data, the investment repaid itself in time saved, shaving the week-long process down to a few hours. More importantly, with no limits and total security, you can rest assured that all your information is in safe hands: yours. With these two programs working in tandem, there isn’t a single file in danger of slipping through the cracks of your digital world.

It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything here. Thinking about putting some posts up. Mostly just common questions people ask me or things I feel may be of some use. If you didn’t see it take a look at my first post in a long time. It’s a guest post over at SEJ called: “Look Ma, no pager!” Scaling a WordPress Media Network Without Losing Your Sanity

Took a couple tests from our room in the Bellagio.

(reports expired) it was a good speed though ;)

Ever since I’ve been on Verizon’s EVDO with my MacBook PRO my Mac won’t sleep as quickly. Sometimes it won’t sleep at all and lets the battery drain completely. What’s worse is when it does sleep it needs a reboot to reconnect to EVDO after waking from sleep. I’ve been looking for a solution for sometime.

I’ve now removed the VZAccess software from Verizon and am running with the native EVDO drivers that ship with OSX 10.4.7+. Found a few pointers that recommend this. There is a good summary page here.

What you will miss by Uninstalling

* Logging of each connection, connected time, data transfered
* Graph of current usage along with fastest upload and download speeds
* Manual Activation

You’ll now get a nice signal meter and connected time in the top title bar (see image below).

Google has been testing Video ads for some time. Tonight for the first time I saw them appear on a few blog posts here. They are ads for Pontiac’s new car. Will be interesting to see how the CTR and eCPM compare to the traditional ads.

EVDO on my Macbook PRO works just fine… Well the first time after a clean boot. If the computer goes to sleep the EVDO connection/card fails to reconnect. No amount of ejecting or restarting the Verizon app will make it work. You have to actually REBOOT. Searched the web for some solutions but came up blank. There has to be some process or command that will trick the card into working after coming back from sleep.

Ideas?

I’ve been playing with the Firebug 1.0 private beta for the last few days and it’s quite a tool. v0.4 the last release of Firebug had already combined the most popular features Venkman, Console2, and the DOM inspector. 1.0 adds a entire new set of features. JS profiling and Net request tracing similar to Tamper Data are IMHO the most powerful. Joe has been hard at work and been fising issues as quick as we find them. Firebug now has enough functionality that it could implement and examine all the tips included in my entire presentation at OSCON.

The new website Get Firebug gives you a glimpse of what is coming shortly:

• Inspect and edit HTML
• Tweak CSS to perfection
• Visualize CSS metrics
• Monitor network activity
• Debug and profile JavaScript
• Quickly find errors
• Explode the DOM
• Execute JavaScript on the fly
• Logging for JavaScript

I thought it’d have been easier. Ok it was pretty simple. Just FTP the new release over the current one. I made a backup first. I had hacked up the default theme a good bit to I had to restore my hacks. Maybe it would be easier if each new version of wordpress shipped with a versioned default theme. So default-2.0.2 or default-2.0.4, etc. This way any upgrade is as simple as copy over your files.

Went to search for some OSCON related blog posts and what do I get

Why don’t they put this on the search bar itself BEFORE I search? Bad user experience.