Rianna Braden

Marketing & Project Management

New Generic Top-Level Domains! Wait, what?

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What’s a generic top-level domain?  Believe it or not, you are already very familiar with these types of domain extensions.  The most popular generic top-level domains (gTLDs) include: .com, .net, .org, .gov, etc.,.  There were only a couple dozen of these in the past, but they’ve been multiplying exponentially in recent time and there will be hundreds soon!

What these new domains mean for your company and others remains to be seen, but there are likely some new generic top-level domains that will pique your interest for future websites.  Learn more about ICANN’s generic Top-Level Domains program and the new and upcoming domains below and here’s a teaser preview of just one new gTLD per letter of the alphabet:

.autos
.best
.credit
.deals
.email
.forsale
.gifts
.how
.international
.jobs
.kitchen
.luxury
.marketing
.new
.organic
.pizza
.qpon
.rsvp
.solutions
.tips
.university
.vision
.works
.xxx
.yoga
.zone

About the ICANN new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD).

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/program

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), founded in 1998, has as its mission to ensure a stable and unified global Internet. One of its key responsibilities is introducing and promoting competition in the registration of domain names, while ensuring the security and stability of the domain name system (DNS).

In 2005, ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) began a policy development process to consider the introduction of new gTLDs, based on the results of trial rounds conducted in 2000 and 2003. The GNSO is the main policy-making body for generic top-level domains, and encourages global participation in the technical management of the Internet.

500+ New gTLD Agreements Signed & Counting.
As of 12 September 2014, ICANN has executed 515 New gTLD Registry Agreements.
https://www.icann.org/news/blog/500-new-gtld-agreements-signed-counting

List of new gTL domains:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registries-2012-02-25-en

Google Analytics: Equal Parts Awesome and Frustrating

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It was the best of times…it was the worst of times. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful and robust website analytics tool and, best of all, it is free! Unfortunately, for marketers that specialize in acquisition email efforts especially, all of the traffic doesn’t show up all the time.  And, in particular with commercial email traffic, it can be as low as <20%.

This can be a difficult conversation to have with advertisers that are unused to the relationship between bulk email and site analytics, so it is important to identify upfront if an advertiser is particularly sensitive to site analytics issues.  Other methods of traffic validation can be employed to help to mitigate skepticism and prevent the need for post-campaign explanations. The same message delivered post-campaign might be perceived as defensive, or worse evasive, so I urge you to be proactive with this discussion.

Other methods of traffic validation might include:

– click details from the email platform (date/time stamp, click url, ip address and even email address if able to be shared)

– server logs (pulled directly from the advertisers’ website hosting, these show all visits’ details. Data available varies, but many include: date/time stamp, url, ip address)

– clone a landing page for use only by the email campaign (this isolates the acquisition email traffic, so any visits or conversions can be attributed by those broadcast(s))

– 3rd party click tracking (though the quantity of clicks can be unreliable with acquisition email traffic as well, the dates/time and proportion of click activity seems to be OK and this is something that can be set up without advertiser assistance)

Does your traffic show up, but you aren’t sure that you’re interpreting it properly?  Check out this article for some common mistakes that marketers make, You are doing Google Analytics wrong. Here is why

Email Opens – when should I be disappointed?

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Reasonable, or acceptable, email opens vary widely by the nature of the email campaign. The 2 primary categories of email campaigns are retention and acquisition.  Within each of these, however, there are many different types of recipients and email messages.

Retention
Within retention, you can have promotional and transactional emails that are going to very different types of “house list” subscribers – from past  purchasers, to sweepstakes entries to active or lapsed.

Average Opens to be expected can range from 10-20% or more, depending on the message and type of recipient.

Acquisition
Within acquisition, you can have promotional or informational emails that are going to a broad range of qualities of prospects. Relevance, frequency and timing are most important when setting up an acquisition email campaign strategy and schedule.

Average Opens to be expected can range from 1-3% for one-off messages to cold leads.  5-7% can be worked towards if a formal, lead campaign is strategized and cold leads “warmed up!”

A quick search online for “average email opens” or “average email response” will result in many different results based on various studies and averages by industry and category. I strongly urge that each marketer execute campaigns and test to create their own baseline %s of expected responses isolated to the advertiser, or even offer, level.  There are many factors in the % of response based on actions by recipients and, depending on your email system, only some of these are directly within your control.

For opens, marketers should consider and test the following:
– data (quality of recipients, relevance, geography, interests)
– sender reputation (IPs, email platforms or vendor partners)
– creative (From Name and Subject Line)

If clicks are being analyzed then one must also consider:
– creative (content, copy, image-to-text ratio, layout)
– calls-to-action (is there a strong reason for the recipient to want to click through to the site? have you included both hard – “buy now!” and soft calls-to-action – learn more, navigation bar)
– offer (is there an offer, or is this an informational email and all information is already in the ad?)

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moi@riannabraden.com

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