An Inventor's Shocking Forecasts for Marketing Technology
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Renowned futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil shares his bold predictions on virtual environments for marketing, the effects of an accelerated technological pace, and how information will transform communications.
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Lessons in Landing Pages
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You spend hours working on the design and copy of your email marketing campaigns, but how much time do you devote to your landing pages? If you’re like many marketers, the answer is simple: not enough. “It’s definitely one of the lesser-thought-about things,” said Jim Wehmann, senior VP-global marketing with Digital River, a provider of e-commerce and marketing solutions. “It’s too much of an afterthought, which is one of the biggest mistakes that a marketer can make.”
The Inbox Of The Not-So-Distant Future
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For better or worse, the email inbox is well on its way to becoming the nexus of all digital communications. Inboxes are also set to be able to do much more, reducing the need for subscribers to click through to take action. Future inboxes may also give consumers even more control over their email streams beyond eliminating unwanted email with a click of the "report spam" button.
Here are some of the changes affecting inbox experiences...
Canadian Digital Strategy Failing?
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It has been quipped ... we are 10 years behind the States. And next year we will be 11 years behind
U.S. policy makers are set to unveil an ambitious new broadband plan on Tuesday but Canada is seeing a "failure of imagination," says the head of the country's most influential technology school.
"Most people who study the digital field would say that Canada has lost some of the wind in its sails, and that's unfortunate," David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, said in an interview with CBC News.
The Underlying Drivers of Social Media Success
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One of the biggest challenges in social media is keeping up with the next big trend. MySpace and then Facebook, fan pages, Twitter, iPhone, Android, and of course the applications that extend across all of these. It's almost impossible for an advertiser to keep up with each and every platform and understand the best way to execute ad programs across the ever-changing landscape.
Auto-Responders With Personality
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I went ice-climbing a few weeks ago. I did what most other business professionals do and set up an out-of-office auto-responder informing people where I was, how long I'd be out, and what they could expect as far as a reply. Standard procedure, right?
In January, I blogged about how an auto-responder email I received from Conde Nast missed the mark in three critical areas. The good news is, my example today is quite the opposite.
GroupCard's Auto-Responder Has Spunk!
Using Email To Remarket To Customers
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Email is a superior channel to drive sales, but it can also help you capture the next sale, the sale after that -- and even the sale that didn't happen.
Remarketing to customers is one of the benefits that email delivers once you begin to use the channel for more than sending yet another untargeted discount or free-shipping offer.
The emails you send in a remarketing program are highly personalized messages, which generate significantly higher response and conversion rates than broadcast emails.
Inbox Insider: Video Inches Its Way Into Email
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Video in email is a hot topic on the e-mail vendor side, but I haven't seen a ton of messages from brands with videos in them. The trend is starting slowly.
Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation used video in its emails to boost traffic on its Web site by 30%. The retailer spent 2008 revamping its email program. The company's “Heavy Duty News” emails feature new product information, exclusive offers and how-to videos.
Eye-tracking Proves Real-Time Search Not Useful
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OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter).
Mobile Email: It Ain't What It Used To Be!
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Over the past two years we've been asked by almost every client, "Do we need a mobile version of our emails?" As an interim solution, most major brands host a text version of their email -- and occasionally you'll see some light html formatting or a thumbnail of the email creative, like this.
SWYN Vs. FTF: Does Social Sharing Remove Too Much Friction?
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A lot of ESPs are now offering share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality, and I can attest first-hand that inside the email industry we're pretty excited about the email-social media integration that SWYN affords. "It's like forward-to-a-friend on steroids," we (collectively) say. Instead of subscribers passing your message on to a friend or a handful of department colleagues, they can now push it out to their 350 Facebook friends or 1200 Twitter followers. What a huge lift for your readership and ROI metrics, right?
ShareThis Makes it Simpler to Find, Monetize Content
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We're talking a lot about social marketing this week, in part because the social space is such a high-profile area for both marketers and consumers. As more consumers create accounts more marketers come into the social space. The problem with this is that the social space is now becoming cluttered with a lot of content and many messages are getting lost in the shuffle. How can you, as marketers, still be heard?
Tips for Better Integrated Marketing Campaigns
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Today Jason Peck, Manager of Social Media with eWayDirect is sharing his ideas about better integrating online campaigns. To start, Jason insists that all content - meaning all messages - must have a strategy.
4 B2B Social Media Lessons from Tweeting Twitterer
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Last week Alex Ford, a Twitter engineer, posted an update on the social network expressing his enthusiasm about an internal only version of the Twitter website. He told his followers that this new feature would make them stop using desktop clients to access Twitter. One of the things that contributed to Twitter’s early growth was the open access to their data, in the form of an api, which created a whole ecosystem of developers that built applications that allowed users to read tweets, send updates and search messages without ever going to Twitter.com.
8 Common Mistakes in B2B Social Media Marketing
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You've seen the statistics. Over 90% of B2B decision makers use social media somewhere in their buying process. Two-thirds of B2B marketers have caught on, using social media in their marketing mix. Social media has a direct impact on brand search. Social media is mainstream.
And yet, many B2B companies struggle to show results. Part of the problem is that it's difficult to measure ROI with any precision, and part of it is confusion over whether social media is a marketing or PR activity (or something else, like customer service).
