Email Marketing: Thoughts on Getting People to Open Your Emails and Permission
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The title of this post might seem a bit silly but with an increasing amount of emails sent, ever more email clients (remember Facebook’s plans), the need to focus on relevant content to avoid unsubscribes (and get your emails delivered) and lots of email clients blocking images, it is certainly a topic email marketers are concerned with. On top of that, with the changing policies of ISPs regarding deliverability (where content, interaction and open rates become increasingly important), you can’t talk about it enough.
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...
Three Trends to Watch in Email Marketing
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Nineteen percent of online marketing budgets are now allocated to email, according MarketingSherpa, and 54% of marketers plan to increase their email budgets this year. Given that, what adjustments should email marketers be considering only two months into the year? Check out these trends, which are heating already in 2010.
What is the Difference Between Social Programs and Socialized Email?
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As marketers continue to evolve their social networking strategies, it is important to remember that email remains one of the most cost-effective and, if executed properly, the most beneficial tools within their marketing tool boxes. Marketers can use email to increase the effectiveness of their social channels and as a way to identify their most engaged and vocal customers and recipients. Combining the reach of email with the power of social networking helps to achieve that marketing “sweet spot”—the right offer to the right individual at the right time.
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.
A Three-Step Plan for Continual Email-List Growth and Engagement (Part 1 of 3)
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Since the infancy of direct-response marketing, a targeted and captive audience has been the key to success. It didn't take long for "the list" to become king.
Though your list may remain the most powerful pillar of your direct-response effort, you also need strong, motivating offers and spot-on creative to go with it. Still, without the ability to reach the right people, the most enticing offers and the most exceptional creative take you nowhere.
Marketers Buzz About ROI
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US marketing executives were much more optimistic about the economic outlook in February 2010 than they were the year before, when the recession was in full swing, and many were planning to increase budgets, according to the “Marketing Trends Report 2010” from Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). But they have become even more focused on getting a good return on their marketing investments.
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).
Should B2B Social Media Profiles Feature Product or Company?
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As B2B companies develop social media strategies, one question that comes up, usually late in the process, is should they focus on the company or individual products. This is one of those core social media questions that relates back to the marketing plan. Social media does not exist in a vacuum and must support the existing marketing initiatives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, market share, drive leads, or respond to customers? Only you can answer that question, but here are some broad categories to choose one approach over another.
EMAIL-VILLE: Social Gaming Companies Set to Take Plunge into Email CRM
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Tired of getting notifications about lost black sheep from distant cousins and ex-girlfriends from high school on Facebook? Don’t even trip. All notifications will be going away (both app-to-user and user-to-user) within the next month as Facebook revamps its platform.
The Social Sphere of Students: College Kids Can Reach 671 Consumers
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A few weeks ago, MediaPost wrote about a new "University of Media" study, conducted by Mindshare's Business Planning group in partnership with Alloy Media + Marketing and Brainjuicer. The study found that an average US college student has exactly 87 email contacts, 146 cell phone contacts, and 438 friends on social networks. The study aimed at finding out the consumer behavior and media exposure among college students aged between 18 and 24.
