Email Analysis

This weeks post is gonna be about email analysis. The example used here will be an email I received from PayPal titled 'Dominika, say hello to your new wallet'. I'm gonna analyse it using a list of questions to make it a bit more organised.

 Would you ever open it? Yes, I do as it provides information about a service I use quite often and this particular email informs about a new app version of this service .

Any personalisation? The email is relatively personalized - it uses the customer's first name in the title as well as in the main text. I doesn't however have any personalized offers or links to other pages.

Template? The design and the general look of the email is very simple - it's not very colorful, there's not too many images (there are two interchanging pictures of a wallet and a smartphone and a few fashion shops logos for which you can already pay with the new app).

Call to action? There is a call to action: 'Download the free app' and 'Check in to pay with the app at hundreds of shops including…', which are the only two in this email, the rest of it is just information.

URLs of images? At a first glance there doesn't seem to be any embedded information in the URLs of the images (such as my email address), however that may be due to my inability to find it.

Critique? In general the email is informative but not very exciting. Perhaps a use of a bit more images or colors could brighten it up.

Landing page? The page that opens after clicking the big button is where you can download the app for either iPhone or an Android phone. It also roughly explains how to use the app (by linking your bank account or debit/credit card to your new app account). After that, there are a few example of how this new app can make your life easier.

Calls to action? There is only one call to action that is repeated on the top and bottom of the page: 'Download our all-new app'.

Personalisation? This page is not personalized at all - there is no use of the customer's first name of any customized offers or links.

Critique? Visually the page looks good, it's not overloaded with images or text, yet at the same time there's not much information you get out of it like a guide to actually linking your bank account to you app account.

My failed attempt at adding Demographics to Google Analytics

Along with writing a blog I'm also now using Google Analytics to see the traffic on the blog. It gives you quite a bit of information - you can see the real time visits on your blog or the history of visits along with the information about the visitors language, country and also what platform the were accessing the blog from - a browser or a phone. I've also tried to add the 'Demographics and Interests Report', which according to Google tells you the age, gender and interests of your visitors. It actually turned out quite difficult to add it, so I started to look for help on Google Support and although they did have a guide as to how to enable the Demographics feature for a novice it wasn't very clear. Te next step for me then was the Internet. I looked for easy guides I could understand without complicated codes. Most of people were speaking very well about it, talking about its usefulness and showing how to use it to its fullest. However when it came to actually telling the readers how to enable it most were either just posting the link to Google Support page or simply paraphrasing exactly what Google said, like here. There was one blog that got me a little further, called 'Gravitate'. I managed to find the full code I'm supposed to replace in my blog code and found the old code on my blog code but there didn't seem to be a way to actually physically change the code. So, I have, in the end found the information I needed but wasn't able to do what I wanted, which is to enable the 'Demographics and Interests Report' in Google Analytics.

Big Data

  As a preparation for the class we were supposd to either watch some videos or read one of the suggested articles. All of those were concerning the so-called Big Data. One of the videos was a talk give by Hans Rosling. Now he was focusing on human health and he'd take for exampl child mortality or life lenght and show the averages of different countries over the years starting from 1970s. The main thing you'd see is that the developing or poorer countries (in Asia, Africa or Latin America) are now very quicky trying to 'catch up' with the developed cointries. But they all have different paths in which they're doing that - the quickest ones improve first on their health - they live longer and less of their children die (they also have less of them now). Once their health condition is better, their earnings or GDP inceased cinsiderably quicker than the other countries.

The video link:
'The best stats you've ever seen'
 http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html

Let's get this started..

This blog is supposed to be a class project but my hope is that I'll get to explore the immense world of marketing and digital media for myself as well. We'll see..