The latest Marketing Sherpa brief arrived in my inbox today and had some great insight into sending marketing e-mail to BlackBerry and mobile device users. While marketing to users with mobile devices is still under the radar of most marketing executives, it’s prudent to know that business users are adopting these devices and reading carefully crafted HTML e-marketing campaigns on them.

Here are my takeaways from the article. Feel free to read yourself — you can access the article for free until August 1st.

• 64% of key decision makers are viewing email (and your company email marketing campaign) on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.
• BlackBerrys are more heavily used by business users than Treos and iPhones. BlackBerry users are younger (under age 45).
• You don’t have to communicate with BlackBerry users with all-text messages. While text messages are the best strategy, multipart-MIME messages (HTML and text version in the same message — the email client decides which to display) can be a good option.
• Companies should market to mobile device users separately so display issues don’t occur. The best way to do this is survey your customer base or ask for mobile preferences on a newsletter sign-up page.
• Messages should be crafted differently than traditional e-mail marketing. Message width and wording are both considerations. Displays on newer BlackBerry devices are 320 pixels wide.
• Your company name should be the first thing the user sees, followed by a short “hook” or offer. Personally, I liked the way Marketing Sherpa advises marketers to “be brief, be brilliant and be gone.” Mobile device users scan email, not read it.

The article also provides a link to download Blackberry simulators in case you’d like to see how your company’s e-mail marketing messages look on the BlackBerry platform.

Finally, I feel that while BlackBerry devices are the most popular devices right now, iPhone is sure to make a splash among a more consumer-oriented crowd in the next 6 months to a year. Now’s the time to research your customer base to see how many customers read email through mobile devices. If more than 10% do, perhaps it’s time to start a new segment in your e-mail marketing list for mobile users. Besides HTML and text, offer your customers a mobile option when subscribing to your company’s e-mail newsletter.

Newspapers, who have recently struggled to retain advertising revenue, are getting a boost from an unlikely source: Google.

Over the last few months, Google has been piloting a program that offered newspaper ad space to Google Adwords advertisers. That pilot program is likely to lead to an announcement today that Google Adwords advertisers can now buy newspaper ads via their Google Adwords account, reports the New York Times.

More than 225 newspapers are said to be participating in the program, with coverage in 91% of the top 35 media markets.

While newspapers will ask for “rate card” ad rates, advertisers can make a lower offer on the ad space, which will help newspapers fill spaces normally filed by “house ads” which don’t generate ad revenue for the newspapers.

This expanded program will offer online advertisers the opportunity to venture into the print world. I see this as good news for advertisers that want to advertise in print, but it’s either too daunting or expensive when working directly through the newspapers. There’s also the possibility of getting less-than-rate-card rates, which is attractive for small businesses trying to get more advertising coverage in their local markets.

With tools like Instant Messenger, text messaging, MySpace and Facebook, e-mail marketers face increasing challenges in trying to reach younger audiences.

It seems hard to believe, but younger web users such as Gen Y’ers view e-mail as a passé communications tool. Jeremiah Owyang on his web strategy blog shared the following anecdote:

“A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with my kid sister, in a humorous way she told me that she ‘Only uses email to communicate with old people like me.’ And I’m not even in my mid 30s.”

In fact, many younger people interact more with MySpace, Facebook and their cell phones than e-mail. I asked an intern at a client of mine for his reaction to this, and he responded that he either uses IM, Facebook or text messaging to talk to friends. He only uses e-mail when at work.

With these trends in mind, it’s not surprising that companies are either experimenting with or starting alternative “online” marketing programs. The New York Times recently profiled outdoor goods retailer Moosejaw Mountaineering, which started a mobile marketing program this year.

With text messaging’s popularity among many younger folks (under 30 years old seems to be the profile of the text messager), it’s a logical choice to allow those customers to interact with companies via their cell phones. In Moosejaw’s case, they have a “texting” link on their homepage that allows text message users to interact with the company, even offering to send order tracking numbers, account information and rewards information to customers via text message.

While text messaging hasn’t reached the critical mass that e-mail marketing has (Moosejaw sends text messages to just over 1,000 customers according to the Times article), the potential is there. 115 million Americans have used cell phones to send text messages, and this number is only more likely to grow.

Moosejaw gets it — they have a well-established MySpace page as well. They seem to have struck the balance between being promotional and “hip.”

While we’re probably not talking about tens of thousands of customers using these technologies yet, it will become important that companies consider new ways to market to their customers. It will be interesting to see how the iPhone and other advanced mobile devices change trends in marketing as communication evolves.

The June 24 New York Post article called “Search & Destroy: Audit Could Siphon Ad $$ from Google,” reports on a soon-to-be-published audit by UK-based firm Internet Search Metrics. The audit claims that spending money on Google Adwords, Google’s text-based advertising system, could be the worst-spent marketing dollars on the Internet. Instead, the Post article hints that search engine optimization activities would be a better investment.

In the context of small business, there are a couple of points that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

First, the article states that “most executives, with little regard to how well their companies fare in the more important natural search results – the top sites that come up after an Internet search – overspend on paid search because it is the one area of the search market they understand.”

In my experience, most executives don’t have a clue about paid search or natural search. That’s why they hire consultants to run these campaigns for them. This, too, can be problematic. While there are certainly some firms out there that do great work, I’ve known some Google Certified Consultants who couldn’t run an effective campaign if they tried, and I’ve encountered some SEO gurus who charge their clients thousands per month while their clients’ sites actually drop in the search results.

The article (and the study) says that money is better spent on SEO. For small businesses, I disagree. Good SEO costs thousands of dollars per month, while good results can be obtained from a pay per click campaign for hundreds per month. Many small businesses can’t justify spending thousands every month on an SEO campaign, which is never guaranteed to work. Pay per click marketing, on the other hand, only costs companies marketing dollars when a customer is delivered to their web site.

I’m not saying that SEO is “snake oil” and that it never works, but for many small businesses, it’s just too expensive.

While the argument between paid search and SEO may not be solved any time soon, I’m focusing on what I feel is potentially a much more powerful promotional tool.

I’m currently experimenting with PR and strategic communications as a more effective way of promoting companies. My approach is traditional PR with a twist — utilizing traditional media releases with blogs, email marketing, print marketing and more. This PR 2.0 approach — this combination of online and offline media exposure — can naturally improve online search engine rankings while driving web site traffic and improving mindshare across mediums. Good PR efforts for small business can be much cheaper than search engine optimization campaigns as well, all while reaching more potential customers. This approach also eliminates “tunnel vision,” projecting a consistent message across media.

Need a Google Adwords tip? Here’s one — small tweaks to your ad copy can significantly improve results. A recent blog post by MindValley Labs proves that even a small change can dramatically raise your clickthrough rates.

The tip is to place an ellipsis (“…”) at the end of the final line of ad copy. The idea behind this concept is that customers see the ellipsis and infer that more information can be found by clicking the ad. For instance, “Get More Information…” should generate more interest than just “Get More Information” without the ellipsis.

I’ve tested this concept over the last week, and did see a dramatic improvement in clickthrough rate. The ad without the ellipsis had a 1.92% clickthrough rate, while the ad that included the ellipsis garnered a 5.26% clickthrough rate. All other wording and capitalization between the two ads were the same, so the ellipsis was the variable that made the difference.

You can read more about the ellipsis test at the MindValley Labs blog post.

Amber writes in with the following question:

“I was just wondering whether you could provide me with just some brief stats on expected response rates/conversions from a campaign directing them to a specific landing page as opposed to a homepage/product page on a website?”

My answer follows:

It would be tough to generalize that landing pages would improve your conversion rate because landing page design, which is a discipline all it’s own, affects conversion rate immensely.

One factor to consider is where the landing page receives traffic from. You’d have different content for Google Adwords landing pages than you might for other ads you might run (say for instance, landing pages for e-mail marketing campaigns). I would also recommend having different landing pages for each of your Google Adwords campaigns.

The key to improving your conversion rate is to give the person browsing your website information that is extremely relevant to the information they were seeking before visiting your site. Combine that with sound graphic design principles and your landing pages will certainly convert customers better than a homepage would.

One last note — sending search engine traffic to a product page can be an excellent tactic when their search specifically describes the product that you’re selling. In this case, the product page should act as a landing page.

Thanks for the question, Amber.