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The Digital Marketing Podcast
9 Useful Tools And A GDPR Email Marketing Update
00:17:27
This week Daniel and Ciaran have some more tips and tools for you. We start with a brief overview of the new GDPR EU legislation due to take effect in May 2018 and how it affects email marketers. We also discuss nine tools all focused on helping you...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:18]
B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we've got another Tips and Tools episode for our lovely listeners.
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B
We have. So we've come across quite a lot of new tools that we've been using in recent days and quite a few people have commented they like these kind of quick tips and tools episodes. So we. You'll get some value from this one. So what's the first one we're going to start with?
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A
Let's start off with a tip. You're going to tell us or give us a little bit of update about some important changes that have been made to email legislation.
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B
Yeah. So as of next year, so it's 2017, currently in 2018, the GDPR rules come in and basically the GDPR rules will essentially change the rules across the EU. So if you're outside the euro, you don't really need to worry about this.
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A
If you're marketing to people inside the.
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B
Eu, it's probably relevant, it probably is still relevant. And also, anyway, I would think about this from a kind of best practice point of view as well. So essentially what's happened is that the way that the EU works is that an idea is kind of sent out, a directive is sent out and then it's up to the different countries to go through and to implement their own laws based on that directive. So what's happened is essentially all the different countries across the EU have come out and implemented their own laws and they've interpreted it in slightly different ways. So you've got quite a mixed bag across the eu. So what that means is in some countries, like Germany, there are very strict privacy laws and strict rules about email opt in, whereas in other places we've been a bit more relaxed about it, potentially. So at the moment you're supposed to have an active opt in, but you can kind of get away with having a form that someone fills in and you pre ticked a box for them, for example, or it says untick this box if you want to not receive stuff first. And it's all a bit am I ticking? And it's never been best practice. But what the rules basically now say is that you need an active opt in and that's not just business to consumer, that's business to business. And that's the big change. Because B2B, you needed an existing relationship. Now that was really tenuous. You can interpret that in all sorts of different ways that maybe they gave me a business card at a show three years ago. So what I would say is that look at your processes. Do you have an active opt in? Do they go through and tick a box, say yes, please send me stuff. Or when they fill the form in, is it completely explicit that by filling in this form you are opting in? So that's the direction you need to go in. Now we're going to put some discussion into the show notes. There's lots of great people like Litmus and various others that will be talking about this as well, that will give you a guide to this. But just make sure you've looked at your sign up your process and is explicit about you are opting in for things. And you're going to kind of need this in place if you are within the EU or if you are potentially selling into people in the EU as well. And it's just best practice now, absolute best practice says double opt in. And what that essentially says is that I say, yes, please send me an email. You send me an email and then I click on it to say, yes, I want this thing. Because what that gets rid of is the fact that I could go off and subscribe you to any number of newsletters because I'm just going to stick your email address in and you're going to start receiving them. So double opt in gives you absolute evidence. So that's what I would lean towards. But at the very least make sure that you've got explicit opt in. Okay, so that's your GPR. We'll put some links in the show. Notes Targetinternet.com podcast what's next?
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A
Well, the next one I'm quite excited about. I'm not sure what it is, but the name excites me. I feel like donning my Indiana Jones hat, getting my whip outs and discovering whole new worlds from the past. It's called New Relic. Daniel, please don't disappoint me. What is New Relic?
- [03:46]
B
Enough of your weekend habits, let's move on. So New Relic is an incredible tool. So I was having some problems. So as you know, targetinternet.com, we have this digital marketing elearning platform and there are some bits of it that were going slower than I would have liked and they weren't loading quite as quickly as I would have liked. And I spoke to my developers and they basically said, yeah, we can't make any faster, it's the server slow. And I knew, I knew that our server was super, super fast. I Spoke to our hosting company, went, no, there's no load on the server at all. That's not sort of slowing it down.
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Did you feel it in your bones?
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I did, I felt in my bones and I didn't really know at all, but the hosting company told me I was. My feeling in, my imaginary feeling in my bones was correct. So what I then did is do a bit of investigation. And as a, I mean I used to be a developer, so I could have dug into the code and start playing around with it, but my skills are probably so rusty I would have been there for a month. So I wanted to install some software on my server and we use Rackspace for hosting. Absolutely brilliant hosting company. And we use Plesk, which is kind of an interface that allows you to manage hosting and add email addresses, that kind of thing. So I had to dig around and I found this software called New Relic. And what it basically allows you to do is what was called application performance monitoring, which all sounds marvelously techy. What it basically does is it will look at your code running and it will work out the bits that are slow and it will flag them up and any errors on your server, it will flag them up as well. So you just leave it running for a kind of period of time and it will flag up for you. These are the things are actually eating up the most time on the server. So I was then able to go back to my developers and went, no, no, no, it is that particular bit of PHP that you wrote that I know is causing the problems. Can you go and investigate it particularly? And what it turned out in this particular case, which is very specific, but it was sending an email and the email was never really going and therefore it was just waiting for that process to finish before it carried on, which was causing a few second delay, but that was enough to make the page feel really clunky. So New Relic, go to the website, take a look. Absolutely brilliant piece of software. There is a free version that's hugely powerful and then there's some paid for options as well. But I'd really recommend it because it was a lifesaver for us and it's really led to some great speed increases for the website.
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A
Fantastic. The next one we've got for you is called Autodraw and it's quite a simple tool really. But if like me, you struggle drawing things, well, you know, I can draw anything, but whether people can recognize what it is, it's another thing. And that's been a bit of a problem for me really, but so, you know, you tend to rely a lot on Clipart and what have you. But. And what Autodraw does is it sort of combines those two things. So you go into the application and you quickly draw something on your touchscreen and what the system does, it recognizes that and smartens it up and makes it look pretty good.
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So it's basically using artificial intelligence. It's learning as well. This is an experiment from Google and essentially what it does is it will learn over a period of time what people are trying to draw and it will iterate for that process to go. Actually, that wasn't it. So if you start drawing a face, for example, or a car, it will auto suggest you, oh, it's a car. And it will complete it for you and it will give you some clip art where, I mean, as a thing on its own, it's kind of fun. It's not necessarily that useful. But where this will become more useful is if you're using a smartphone and you kind of draw something really quickly with your finger, it will actually turn that into something that's actually kind of valuable for you potentially as well, so you can communicate. So as we've been using emojis and all those kind of things, this is kind of next stage on for that potentially as well.
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It's also got great potential for a lot of fun with your creative department. If you send them a link to it and ask them to make use of it, they'll be suitably disgusted with you. But it's a lot of fun.
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It is, it is excellent worth to have a look and Google did a lot of these things. The other thing I'd look at, if you're looking at these kind of things, is look at Chrome Experiments. So Chrome Experiments is a website from Google to search Chrome Experiments and you need to be in Google Chrome and there's loads of really clever creative stuff like this they're doing with the browser to see what are the limits of the browser, what kind of interactive stuff can we do as well?
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So I've got one more for you, Daniel. It's called UpTimeRobot.com and I came across this a bit by accident really, but it's really, really useful. It does what a lot of services out there do, which is to basically monitor your website and make sure it's up. So what the system does is effectively it's pinging your website regularly every couple of minutes to make sure it's there. And the moment it spots it's not there, it sends you a message to let you know, and actually if you run a number of different web properties, this is hugely, hugely useful. I think it's also useful even for small operations that maybe rely on somebody else to provide their hosting. It's quite nice to know if your website's gone down for a period of time. It does two things. It tells you when it's down and it'll also tell you when it's back up again and how long it was down for. So you get a nice little log and the free version is, is quite powerful actually. You can actually have up to 50 monitors that's monitoring 50 different web services. There's a pro plan there as well. So if you want it to SMS message your phone in the middle of the night to let you know that the website's down, it'll do that. And then charging a minimal amount, it's like $4.50 a month if you bill that annually on the pro plan and comes with a lot more monitors and whatever. Take, take a look. It's uptimerobot.com I just, just loved it. It's beautifully simple.
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Yeah. What I'd say as well is that there are a lot of these out there, but it's very unlike. It's unusual to get free ones. One thing of the free one though is five minute monitoring intervals. So it will check your website every five minutes. The ones that are paid for, it checks every minute. We use siteuptime.com which is another one of these and we have a 30 second interval. So if our website's been down for 30 seconds, we get notified. And it obviously just depends how mission critical your website is. But I would suggest any website being down for any period of time is not a good thing at all. It reflects your brand very poorly.
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A
So one last one from me, Daniel, and that's Google Data Studio. This is a relatively recent addition if you want to take a look at it. If you go to log into Google Analytics, so google.com analytics and you'll find this as one of the options. I sort of stumbled by it by accident, I think just after Christmas, if my memory serves me rightly. And when I first looked at it, it looked really exciting. But I've never mentioned it before because it had a three report limit on it, which just if you're going to do any level of reporting, only being able to do three almost didn't make it worth even investigating what it does. But essentially it's, I suppose you'd call it a dashboarding tool really. It enables you to pull together lots of different data from different sources and create some lovely graphs and charts and just basically dashboard to see how things are doing.
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So what's fantastic is you can bring in your Google Analytics data from your maybe email service provider, your display advertising, all into one kind of dashboard. What's great though, because somebody said to me you can do dashboards in Google Analytics already because you can go through to each report and you can pull them into a custom dashboard. The problem with the custom dashboards in Google Analytics is they only show you things like the top 10, whereas this, you can define a lot more what you want. You can pull in any number of different parts of report into one place. It's visually very beautiful. You can create really nice visual kind of things, better than Google Analytics as well. But also it can do things like get data directly from MySQL and places like that. So you can do database queries. So if you've got financial data in your own database and things like that you want to put into the reports, it will do those for you. But you can also manipulate. It's not that it's just done you a kind of static visualization of the data. It allows you to add filters and all those sorts of things as well. It's quite a complicated product, there's quite a lot to it, but a lot we've spoken about dashboarding single customer view. This allows you to do it very easily and it's free of course as well.
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I think one of the interesting features of it, it's got file upload, so you can upload a CSV so common separated value files and that could come from any, any source. And actually to be able to do that and have a beautiful visualizing tool that's not Microsoft Excel, that's quite exciting.
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Yeah, I mean we've used this for creating blog posts. So you basically go in, you upload your CSV file and it will give you some data and then you can visualize it and then you can download that as an image and you can insert that into a blog post should you want to. So visualizing your data not just for dashboarding and reporting, but actually for creating content, it's phenomenally useful as well. And because of all the visual options you've got, you can put things on brand and make sure it kind of fits in with your other content as well. So it's definitely worth looking at.
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So it's in beta, definitely worth checking out. And as I say, now that they've lifted the three report limit that they had initially, well worth Delving in and having a play with, because actually you could come out with something that's, that's useful on a regular basis.
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So what's the last one we've got? Well, the last two, there's kind of.
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Pair, we paired them up. So Daniel and I were. I shared one and he outdid me with another, which very often happens in our planning discussions. But the one, I've been using this for a long, long time actually. It's a Google Chrome extension called awesome Screenshot and I revisited it recently because when I went to use it, it had a new icon on it. And then when I looked it's like, oh, that's a good new feature. So basically what awesome Screenshot does is pretty simple. It enables you to create screenshots of things that you see online. I very often find myself using this when I'm pulling together reports on images in a various different aspects of analytics and just want to pull it in quickly to Word or PowerPoint. You create a screen grab of what you're seeing. It just saves you having to recreate the whole thing and speeds up time. But what this does, you can select, I know you can do this normally at a system level just by using the screenshot command, but this actually enables you to select specific areas. And also before you save it, it enables you to annotate on it, which is particularly useful. What the new feature does is it enables you to do Video Screencast. Now I would add that the Video Screencast feature is limited on the free version to up to 30 seconds. But I'd also add that actually when you're doing screenshots, 30 seconds is pretty good.
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Yeah, I think for most situations you just want to demonstrate. Look, when I click here, this goes wrong. Or click here, then click here, then click here. You're telling someone how to do something. I mean, it works fine. There is a paid for version that gives you expanded kind of video duration as well. But I think for this kind of thing where you just want to go through and just do a quick screenshot, a quick demo, it's absolutely fine. There is a paid for version as well, isn't there?
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Yeah, the paid for version is. I think it works out about $20 a year. So it's not hugely expensive. Gives you unlimited projects, which means you can save all of your stuff into different folders and unlimited images and actually unlimited screen recordings. But I have to say, for years I've been using the free plan and that's very good too. So yeah, check it out.
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So my recommendation on this as well is actually if you're an Evernote user. So Evernote allows you to kind of collect your notes into one place and file Amazon Skitch S K I T C H does basically the same thing, screenshots but annotations, drawings over the tops and all those kind of things. But it allows you to output in lots of different formats and it will allow you to file them immediately into Evernote very easily as well. So I would take a look skitch if you want the screen recording thing we just mentioned as well, if you want to get into screen recordings in more depth and we've mentioned this one before, but I'll give it another plug now is screenflow. Screenflow is lovely for creating screen recordings. You can put sound over the top of them, you can turn the sound off, you can record different bits of the screen, you can add effects, zooms, highlight the things you're typing. It does loads of really clever stuff and I use it a lot. There is a trial version that will put watermarks over the top of what you do and there's a paid for version, but we've used the last three versions paid for versions and absolutely love it. So if you are going to go for screen recordings, try ScreenFlow as well.
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Really actually so good. I've used it as a video editing tool as well. You know, not just for your screen recordings is it's such a lovely simple interface. If you ever loved Imovie back in the day when it was a little bit simpler, you'll really love this because it's got a lot of that kind of simple user interface functionality built into it.
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And don't underestimate the value of screen recordings as content as well. So if you just demonstrate how to do something and you kind of voice over that now, the sound quality needs to be pretty good, but there's a huge level of value to that kind of content as well and it makes it very easy to produce that stuff in a fairly sophisticated looking format as well.
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So we hope you've enjoyed this little roundup of useful tips and tools. If you've got any suggestions of your own, or if you found any really cool things that you'd like us to share, please write in, please get in touch and we'll definitely give you a plug if you do, because we love tools, don't we Daniel?
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We do, absolutely.
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We love gadgets, we love the toys.
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So targetinternet.com podcast you will find all the show notes of all these tools and you can submit own there as well.
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Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.
- [17:26]
B
You.