This will tell you how many files were loaded, how long each one took, and the order in which they load. This will help you pinpoint the sources that are slowing your page load times.

YSlow is a tester built into Firebug. It will analyze your page and give it a grade based on industry standard practices. The first time you run this, you will get a bad grade, and all things may seem a bit overwhelming. Here are some areas to concentrate on:

• Make fewer HTTP requests: Try consolidating JavaScript and CSS files. The fewer requests, the faster the load time.
• Compress components with gzip: Most web servers can compress responses. This makes for smaller files, and smaller files load faster.
• Put JavaScript at bottom: If JavaScript is at the top of the page and takes a while to load, it halts everything below it until it finishes. Move it lower.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): If you web server is serving up dynamic web pages, it does a lot of work to do that (reading and setting cookies, etc.). Most web servers are set up to only allow two connections per client. So if you are serving static content (like images, CSS files, etc.) from the same place, this adds work and creates a bottleneck. By using a CDN, you can offload those requests, reducing the strain on you web servers. The static files will then load faster and your dynamic content loads faster, too. For more info on CDN, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network.

Step Two: Address – After finding the issues in your audit, this is where you actually pick which things to fix and then fix them. Some may be as simple as having IT enable features on your web server, but others can be more involved, such as publishing to a CDN. So choose your battles, and once your done…

Step 3: Repeat - Web load time optimization is not a “set it and forget it” thing. As your website changes and technologies change, there is always room for improvement. The best thing you can do is stay on top of it.

According to eMarketer: “Members of the ‘smartphone class’ stand apart from other Americans in the way they shop, communicate, consume media—even how they use their spare time. Its members define themselves by their connectedness and their sense of empowerment through unfettered access to real-time information.” The research firm estimates that nearly 3 in 5 consumers will have a smartphone by 2016. Additionally, eMarketer mentions that the “smartphone class” takes part in something we all probably do when we’re bored: turn to our mobile devices.

“Depending on their mood in the moment, gratification might mean completing a quick task or finding a fun distraction. For marketers, this rising content consumption means an increasing number of touchpoints where they can reach consumers,” according to the report.

One of those touchpoints could be in an mcommerce setting. IBM reports that purchases made from a mobile device account for 13% of online purchases, up from just 7% the previous year.

According to a recent article, “IBM adds that 17.1 percent of all sessions on retailer sites are now initiated on mobile devices, increasing from 6.1 percent in the first quarter of 2011.”

Internet Retailer reports that 12.5% of mobile users are will to share their location with retailers in order to receive special offers and coupons. Additionally, 33% of mobile users would like to receive coupons or special offers via SMS or through an app, and 21% of smartphone users said they would be interested in mobile advertising if it was offering a deal for a location near them.

And finally, Return Path reports that 88% of people check their email from a mobile device daily. Return Path also estimates that more people will be reading email on mobile rather than a desktop device by the end of 2012.

What other interesting mobile or digital marketing news have you come across recently?

Over the coming weeks we’ll be introducing you to different departments within Knotice. We’ve got our Professional Services Team, developers, Creative Services department, and more.

Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the ‘members’ of the Creative Services department. These team members are soft, fluffy and enjoy taking naps. Meet the stuffed animals of the Creative Services Department:

State of the Stuffed Animal Union: Mr. Speaker … The President of the Stuffed Animal Congress, Llama! We set this up at work. Llama is the president, Duck is the loud-mouth vice president since he can actually quack and the angry birds are the conservatives who don’t agree with anything President Llama says.

It’s a dangerous time to be a stuffed animal at work …

Mike brought in a Rubik’s cube at work to help when he suffers from designer’s block. It seems his elephant has figured out a side on his own … with no help from the idiots in the peanut gallery putting in their two cents. He’s a smart little guy.

An error page or a slow-loading page can feel like a locked door at the store. It can also feel like a long check-out line. With the web now being a sometimes a first, if not the only, exposure to your business, you want that impression to be easy and meet the average users’ expectations.

Nearly half of web users expect web pages to load in 2 seconds. Adding a second, making for 3-second page load can lead to 40% of users abandoning your site. Studies have also shown that an increase of one second in page load times can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.

Not too long ago the golden rule was 7 seconds. But that was in the time of dial-up internet and not-so-smart phones. Today, with cable modems and fiber optics in the home and 4G LTE on smart phones, people don’t want to wait. The 7 second rule is not even valid in the mobile world. Most people are more patient with their phones, but the abandonment rate still goes up the longer they wait.

Whether load times are affected by server load, poor coding, heavy pages, or anything else, the consumer does not care. Their loyalty and their attention stems from the snappy performance they expect of you website. In part two of this article, we will hit some high points on making your website perform at its best.

For more information on how load times can affect your user experience check out this info-graphic here.

Forrester previously has stated that a lack of messaging focus across channels can weaken a brand’s prominence in the mind of the consumer. Such weakness leads to less-than-ideal customer experiences. So even if your brand messages are sprinkled across disparate channels without consideration for relevance and needs of the customer, it’s never too late to connect the digital dots and get your approach on track.

As you’ll see in this independent (non-commissioned) case study, vacuum and cleaning product manufacturer Oreck generated 10 times more revenue on Oreck.com, decreased abandoned shopping carts and increased conversions by connecting the various digital touch points with a unified approach. A key component to their success was the use of Knotice’s Universal Profile Management System, which allowed Oreck to create a robust warehouse of customer profile data for use to inform more relevant messaging.

While it may seem daunting for marketers to abandon the old separate-channel siloed approach in favor of a more complete view of the customer, making the switch can yield impressive results, as Oreck has demonstrated.

Check out this brief interview with Tarik Dekkar, Head of Digital and CRM at Oreck, for an inside look at how they used Knotice’s on-demand platform, Concentri, to achieve success using customer data for advanced segmentation.

Again, to access the complete report, “Case Study: Oreck Improves Media Spend ROI By Taking A Unified View Of The Customer,” follow this link. And, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can achieve the kind of success Oreck has seen, just shoot us an email at info@knotice.com.

Check out some of the creative submissions below:

Here’s Kim and Matt from Professional Services with their literal interpretation of Cinco de Mayo.

Sarah and Micah showing some enthusiasm about today’s festivities.

Ok, so here’s one picture of the food.

The weather has certainly warmed up now that it’s May, and though it’s not Cinco de Mayo themed, here’s a shot of some of our developers sporting their new uniform: plaid shorts.

The Creative Department’s stuffed animals (more on that in a post next week) were looking forward to their Cinco de Mayo buffet feast…

But someone had to go and ruin it all ….
Good thing most of them are herbivores. The moral of the story: Never let the pig have at the buffet first.

Jeff bridges (what a doll!) is back in the saddle again, this time for the soon-to-be cult classic “Tequilla Mockingbird.”

But enough about me. How do you react when you’re away from your phone? Do you get anxious, feel cut off from the world or out of the loop?

Almost everyone (younger generations, in particular) can develop a sense of attachment to their mobile device. In a world where so many people are constantly connecting via texting, Facebook, Twitter (this blog) – being without such instant access to the world can leave a person stranded in the abyss that is life without a phone.

What is it about that little buzz or ringtone that eats away at us when we know there’s a message, email or tweet to read? According to Geekosystem, “22 percent of people (surveyed) said they would be willing to go a week without seeing their significant other rather than go without their phone.”

The challenge here is balancing connectedness with contact. How do we interact with both our outside world and our immediate surroundings? There may be no easy solution, but the next time your phone goes off, ask yourself: Is it really the end of the world if those tweets don’t get read? If you don’t check that email in the middle of the night?

The answer is different for all of us.

Wondering if you’ve got a cell phone problem? Take the test.

Thanks to Mandy for her contributions to this post

One specific item I was looking for was curtains. I received a direct mail piece from Restoration Hardware where I found a set that would work perfectly in my space, but were just too expensive.

A few days later I received an email with the subject line: Special Pre-Season Savings of 15% on Our Entire Collection. Upon opening, I immediately saw the curtains I wanted, and knew I had to make them mine.

This image shows how the email from Restoration Hardware rendered on my phone.

When I clicked on the image within the email it took me directly to the drapery section of the Restoration Hardware mobile website (see image on left). Immediately my experience started to go south. I could barely read the content on site or navigate around. The font was too small and my fingers were too large to select what I wanted. The site clearly wasn’t mobile optimized.

This image shows the content on Restoration Hardware’s website I was presented when I clicked through from their original email.

Out of curiosity, I went back to the original e-mail and clicked on the mobile link at the top of the email to see if somehow I was missing the mobile optimized content.

Unfortunately, the result of my click was a very basic HTML version similar to a text version (see image at right). It was my last attempt to be patient and to try to work through it all. In the end, Restoration Hardware lost my business.

This is Restoration Hardware’s version of the email optimized for mobile that you see when you click on the mobile link.

I continued my search for the perfect curtains through a new vendor, West Elm. I received an email with an enticing offer to save 15% on my next purchase. Once I clicked through, to my delight, I was provided an amazing mobile experience, found the curtains I wanted and they will soon to be hanging in my newly finished living room.

This image shows the content on West Elm’s website I was presented when I clicked through from their original email, mobile optimized.

This image shows how easy it is to navigate the content and find the information consumers are looking for.

Here at Knotice, we recently published our mobile email opens report for the second half of 2011, where we have seen more consumers continue to open emails on mobile devices or tablets. Companies need to address and understand the visual presentation of this content, as well as user experience in these situations.

From my experience, it can become a costly lesson for retailers if they don’t adjust their strategy to optimize email content and direct the click through to a mobile optimized site when applicable.

While some marketers continue to struggle with fragmented data and despite workarounds to try and unite disparate data sources, Oreck abandoned the channel-focused approach and set out to integrate all existing customer information to get a unified view of its customers across digital channels, to better engage those customers.

According to the case study entitled “Case Study: Oreck Improves Media Spend ROI By Taking A Unified View Of The Customer,” Oreck was able to “unify data and connect the digital dots,” improve the customer experience, shorten lead-to-close cycles, and decrease abandoned shopping carts. They also said Oreck’s monthly ROI was as high as 184% compared to the baseline.

Other points of interest include:

• Three phases Oreck took to unify their messaging, increasing the likelihood of customers to convert;
• How they enjoyed a significant lift in conversions based on number of channels used within a multi-channel approach;
• The value of automating the personalization of each customer’s website experience based on individual data, and more.

According to the report, “Oreck decided it was time to get smart about impression delivery across multiple channels. Working with partner Knotice, Oreck created a unified view of the customer to effectively target and deliver brand messages with improved relevance to each unique customer across multiple channels.”

We invite you to download the case study here. And if you’d like to learn more and discuss how the Oreck example could apply to your unique needs, just shoot us an email at info@knotice.com.

When building web pages, CSS is usually included in head of an HTML document and broken out into style blocks. This separates the stylistic elements from the HTML structure, allowing for a more efficient code base. It also ensures your content has consistent styling – one edit made to a CSS style block is one edit made to every single element associated with it.

Unfortunately, just about every email client will throw out any style block it happens to come across. The same goes for jQuery scripts.

That doesn’t mean CSS is of no use when building HTML tables. It just means designers can’t use style blocks to ensure consistent rendering. They have to use inline style.

Inline style is CSS style applied to a single element, and must be applied to every element you want it on. So, if you want all of the text in your data cells to have an Arial font-face, you have to add inline style to each tag in your code.

Fortunately, nothing really changes when using inline style versus a style sheet (other than being time-consuming) – style properties are written the same way they normally would, with the exception that they need to be written on one line.

The following is a snippet of the HTML table code used as the main example in the last post. In this instance, I applied inline style to the data cell that holds the headline text. The “Date” cell text has no style associated with it (with the exception of the HTML italics tags) to demonstrate how a web browser will apply default font settings if content is left untouched:

What it will look like in an email and on the web:

There are numerous style properties that can be used when implementing inline style in HTML emails, though designers should always err on the side of caution when choosing exactly which ones to use. A good example is the use of the padding and margin properties in data cells. Though they’re more basic style properties, padding and margin styles can be extremely unreliable – particularly in Outlook.

Experience is the best instructor when it comes to figuring out which style properties can be relied upon consistently and which can’t. There are some good reference materials available online, though. A personal favorite of mine is Campaign Monitor’s Guide to CSS Support in Email. This guide provides a list of common email clients, and which specific style properties each accept.

When in doubt – and it really pains me to write this – the surefire solution is usually the least efficient. It’s a contrary opinion to the one I hold on solving standard web page design problems, but there’s nothing standard about HTML email design. If there were, no one would be using tables and inline style. The entire process is inefficient from the get-go.

With that in mind, there’s no reason not to take an additional 15 to 30 minutes to make sure your code is cross-client compliant. If experience really is the best instructor, then one of the first lessons it will teach is that an extra half-hour spent during the first build will save hours of time dealing with the rendering issues your quality assurance department will inevitably find during testing.