5 Steps to Mobile-friendly Emails

Customers are most likely to read your emails on smartphones and tablets, according to research by Return Path.

Follow these five steps to make your emails mobile-friendly:

1. Use a one-column layout. Vertical scrolling is more natural to mobile users.

2. Use larger fonts, bigger buttons and high-contrast colors. Make it easy for readers to differentiate your email's elements.

3. Include a link in the pre-header. The link should take readers to a text-only or—better—mobile-optimized version of your email (essential if you want to influence Blackberry users).

4. Keep emails short. Edit ruthlessley and use attention-grabbing calls to action. Your emails will be read during brief intervals of downtime.

5. Link readers only to mobile-friendly Web pages. It's futile to send readers to a Web page that can only be read on a desktop.

The Original TED Talk

Teddy Roosevelt delivered "The Right of the People to Rule" in New York's Carnegie Hall on March 20, 1912.

Six days before, The New York Times heralded the speech through an article headlined ROOSEVELT INTENDS TO MAKE THINGS HUM.

Teddy chastised his party for its "ultra-conservatism" and ended on this high note: "In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism; leaders to whom are granted great visions; who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls."

 

Big Data Hurts Brands

Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore thinks Web ads personalized by Big Data will harm—not help—your brand.

In a blog post on LinkedIn, Moore says that, while Big Data and predictive analytics boost online advertising response rates a couple points, "they do not deliver a more personal, more relevant, or more one-to-one consumer experience."

"Don’t think that any of these techniques are going to create 'delight' among your target audience any time soon," he writes. "They aren’t. Spam is spam, with or without your maple syrup.  When you spam, you are consuming brand equity—not creating it. That’s what 'personalized' ads do."

If you want to create brand equity, Moore says, you have to engage your fans in a community, so they talk about you. 

Brand equity "is driven by social interactions with others in your target consumer’s community of interest," Moore writes. "By sponsoring such interactions, by facilitating them, and by (selectively) participating in them, you can indeed grow brand equity."

Three Secrets to More Sales

Responsible for B2B sales? Here are three secrets to better results: 
   
1. Do your prospecting with email. Emails get far better attention than cold telephone calls and are a lot less resented. They're easier to scan and digest. But don't send blasts to big lists. Handpick the people you send emails to and personalize them.

2. Keep your pitch short and relevant. Give every prospect an urgent reason to reach out to you. Use an event in the prospect's life (an internal reorganization, a merger, a downsizing, a change in the law, etc.) to trigger that response. Refer to the event in your subject line.

3. Don't give up 'til you've touched the prospect seven times. Most emails will not get a response. Don't let that deter you. Keep sending at two-week intervals. And be prepared for the phone call from your prospect (that's how more than 90 percent of prospects will reach out to you, if they do). Make that first person-to-person experience irreproachable.

Bread and Circuses

Will games become the new social divide?

TIME reports this week that 70 percent of big companies will embrace gamification in 2013.

While most will use gamification to attract customers, many companies—40 percent, according to new research from Gartner—will embrace it as an employee-retention tool.

Endorsing the latter, 20-something gamifier Katherine Heisler recently urged readers of Forbes to gamify the jobs of next-gen workers.

Citing a new workplace survey by MTV, Heisler argues that "Millenials overwhelmingly agree that their jobs should reflect their lifestyle."

The workplace, in short, should be "social and fun."

"Some people think of my generation as lazy, good-for-nothing slackers, feeling entitled to everything and entirely lacking a work ethic," Heisler writes. 

"But that’s wrong: Millennials have an incredible work ethic. We want to work, we want to succeed and want to reshape the world in our image. We are simply motivated in non-traditional ways."

When I was young and struggling alongside my fellow Boomers for a handhold on the slippery corporate ladder, money was a pretty good motivator.

But—excluding those at the very top of the ladder—money's in short supply today.

Will employers compensate for today's measly paychecks with "social and fun?"

Will circuses take the place of bread?