'Net Features : Netflix

6 Super Calls-to-Action (Plus Tips)

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:20:00 GMT

Whether it’s completing a project or taking an action, people will take as long as you give them to do it. This is why in business, deadlines (enforceable ones) work and why, on the Web, calls-to-action (good ones) are integral to a website’s success.

IaaS and Web hosting provider SingleHop recently released an infographic (click here) that details five tips for a more successful call-to-action (CTA). In it, the company details that, unsurprisingly, the click-through rates (CTRs) of above-the-fold CTAs are substantially higher (72 percent) than below-the-fold CTAs (47 percent). While that may be best practice number one, SingleHop provides interesting data on the fact that buttons, as opposed to text, provide upward of a 200 percent higher CTR. With SingleHop’s tips in mind, Website Magazine has compiled six super CTAs.

H.BLOOM

Super CTA: Nothing creates urgency (and a sense of value) more than mom does. By providing the date for Mother's Day, the copy leading into the CTA enhances the urgency and the words "Shop Now" are direct. Additionally, this floral subscription service's CTA uses high contrast to grab attention.

SKYPE

Super CTA: In SingleHop's infographic, it's suggested to play with shape, which Skype uses in a purposeful manner. It's clear to the user that the CTA is part of the product description and the best course of action is to "Join."

NETFLIX

Super CTA: After offering a one-month free trial and then conveying value (e.g. you can watch your programs wherever you want), Netflix directs users to "Start Your Free Month." Notice that Netflix uses its above-the-fold real estate to confirm and then reconfirm that a one-month free trial is available.

MailChimp

Super CTA: This beautiful, sleek homepage uses a calming color palate, but hits users with a sense of urgency with its "Sign Up Free" CTA.

Volusion

Super CTA: Volusion wants users to try their product for free. If you couldn't tell, the e-commerce software provider uses the same CTA in the center of the page (larger) and in the upper right-hand corner (smaller) to reinforce where they want users to go and what they'll do when they get there.

PagePart

Super CTA: While PagePart's CTA differs from the rest on this list, it's appropriate for this mobile and social Web platform, because business owners want to create a mobile website, which is why they ventured to PagePart in the first place. The words "instantly" and then "Go" provide even more urgency.

Bonus: There are myriad factors to keep in mind when designing a website, but there are many seen repeatedly (like a missing call-to-action). Make sure your site isn't making these mistakes by checking out this article by Rafi Sweary, the co-founder of WalkMe.com.

Janitor Monkey Will Clean Up Your Old AWS Instances

Michael Garrity — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:12:00 GMT

If you’re like me, you probably sat down with your family over the holiday break to relax and watch something on Netflix, only to find that its service was uncharacteristically down. Well, it seems that the company has corrected this problem, and now wants to share what it learned with the rest of us.

Netflix officially released a new open source tools for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances this week known as Janitor Monkey. This solution, which is part of the company’s “Simian Army” of internal management tools, is meant for enterprise organizations that employ a public cloud through AWS, particularly when they are unknowingly spending unnecessary money because they have forgotten to shut off an old instance.

“It is pretty easy to lose track of the cloud resources that are no longer needed or used,” say Netflix’s Michael Fu and Corey Bennett in a recent blog post. “Perhaps you forgot to delete the cluster with the previous version of your application, or forgot to destroy the volume when you no longer needed the extra disk.”

Janitor Monkey works largely with Netflix’s open source Asgard tool, which lets administrators delete their unused resources; this process is streamlined thanks to Janitor Monkey, which does the work of automatically tracking down these useless instances and allowing Asgard to clean them up.

According to Netflix, Janitor Monkey had deleted over 5000 resources from the company’s production and test environments when it was being used as an in-house product.

In addition to AWS instances, Janitor Monkey also detects EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots and auto-scaling groups, and all of them come with their own unique rules for how they are marked. (For example, EBS volumes are marked as “cleanup candidates” if they haven’t been attached an instance for 30 days.) Once Janitor Monkey inspects these resources and applies the appropriate rules to them, it will determine if they are, in fact, cleanup candidates and, if so, it marks them for clean up and schedules a time for Asgard to do it. These events will be logged in an Amazon SimpleDB table by default, and it should be small enough to fit inside Amazon’s free-pricing tier.

However, just to double check itself and make sure it isn’t acting too hastily, Janitor Monkey will then inform the administrations attached the specific resources with an alert sent two days before it is scheduled to be cleaned up. Out of the box, Janitor Monkey is automatically configured to run on non-holiday weekends at 11 a.m., but it can be modified to run at other customized times.

Political Campaigns & Digital Marketing: Did They Miss the Mark?

Administrator — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:30:00 GMT

We all know how online marketing and social media can be a goldmine of potential consumers.

Brands like Whole Foods Market and Samsung have succeeded on Twitter with as many as 3 million followers each. Coke triumphs over Pepsi on YouTube with about 108 million views and 83,700 subscribers. Among media brands, Disney dominates with nearly 38,700,000 Facebook fans. In 2011, Netflix’s display advertising received 36.9 billion ad impressions and was cited as one of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States.

But when you look at political spending, campaigns are still spending more on traditional media platforms than online. Consumer brands are learning how to harness online and social media, but political marketers can take a lesson from those finding success with digital marketing. Online and social media is an advantageous investment if political campaigns wisely use online channels, especially their analytics tools.

But if online and social media are so powerful then why are the presidential candidates and Super PACs not investing more into online advertising? Why are campaigns and Super PACs less interested in social media than offline?

Traditional media is still the force in political spending. True, online spending is six times higher for this year’s election than it was in 2008, but for political advertising, TV is the main medium—approximately $7.3 billion dollars for broadcast TV, cable and radio versus $159 million for online, according to Borrell Associates.

Historically, political campaigners had two rivals in the final stretch on an election: a Democrat versus Republican, and those two camps spent money on their campaigns. Now, Super PACs have flooded the ad market, driving up the competition and the inventory price within paid search advertising. For instance, if there are only two people bidding on keywords, there’s a limited competition with keyword bidding. However, if you have 10 people bidding on the same keywords, it drives up the price of inventory and increases the cost-per-click.

Obama advisor, David Axelrod, may have put it best when he said that local TV is “still the nuclear weapon” within an election. This doesn’t mean, however, that political marketers are not concerned about the digital battleground. One of the biggest wins is the investment by the Obama campaign in its social and online media. By numbers alone, Obama leads in many fronts on the digital battleground—from Twitter, online display ads and paid search marketing. But you need more than mere numbers to be successful. Candidates, like consumer brands, can better leverage online and social media to keep and win supporters.

First, test, track and analyze your political messaging in the digital space. For instance, let’s say you have a rally in the battleground state of Ohio and want to ensure high voter turnout. Social and online marketing are useful to engage and motivate your base, as well as communicating with your base quickly and in real-time. As you gather your online following, you can test and track which messages resonate with those people before creating a costly TV ad or making a speech. That’s a competitive strategy that marketers can use before going to market.

Second, marketers should invest marketing dollars into online display ads to target undecided voters. Marketing is not solely about the size of your budget but who’s going to spend their budget more intelligently. Display advertising or banner ads can be the tipping point because of its granular level of targeting. Within this channel, you can find such information like demographics, geography, and user behavior, making display ads far superior than TV and allowing marketers to gain more precise and targeted reach.

Third, think like your competitor both online and offline. Some people believe that “big data” can solve many marketing problems but that’s a misconception. Like any amount of information, you need to gather, organize and properly analyze it. You need the attention to detail and objectivity to find any missed opportunities or big wins – for you and your competitor. By investing more resources into data analytics tools (Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst), you have greater insight into the effectiveness of your online advertising than with other medium, such as how many donations are you receiving from a banner ad versus a paid search campaign.

To sum it up, it might not be that political campaigns are less interested in digital marketing. They also need to consider if they are investing their ad dollars where it counts—through quality analytics.

About the Author: Jon Morris is the founder and CEO of Rise Interactive, a digital marketing agency in Chicago, specializing in digital media and web analytics.