Archive for the ‘Email’ Category
Outlaw Email Best Practices
In the past few minutes I have received three promotional emails in my inbox. Companies are deploying more emails than ever, which creates heavy competition in the media world today. I constantly find myself over-thinking methods to counteract that competition. Continue reading Outlaw Email Best Practices
Genie Taps Optiem for Email Marketing Program
The Genie Company has selected Optiem, LLC, a leading Cleveland interactive marketing agency, to manage their email marketing initiatives.
David Osso, Brand Manager at Genie, said, “Optiem has a well-deserved reputation for delivering smart, engaging interactive work. We look forward to continuing to develop our relationship with Optiem and creating a dynamic email marketing program.” Continue reading Genie Taps Optiem for Email Marketing Program
Email Marketing May Be Transforming But Never Going Away
The Adcom Group’s Email Marketing Manager, Ken Holmes shares his insights on email marketing. Look for more posts from Ken as he will be one of our ongoing guest authors delivering the latest and greatest around email.
I am often asked as an email marketing professional if I see email marketing going away over time. The question is usually followed up with a statement as to where direct mail has fallen in the marketing funnel. Comparing direct mail with email however contains one major flaw, direct mail never allowed itself to become transcendent with time. Continue reading Email Marketing May Be Transforming But Never Going Away
Making an Analytics Choice
There is a saying that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. This tome is the foundation for online marketing analytics. If you don’t really know how your work is performing, do you really expect those efforts to do more for you?
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be writing about how to use analytics to help you measure and improve your online marketing efforts. From choosing an analytics tool, to setting goals and understanding how to make improvements, there are a lot of different aspects of analytics.
Let’s start from the beginning – the analytics tool. If you are not measuring, start now. If you are measuring, make sure you can get enough detail to make decisions. There are several analytics packages available with multitude of price ranges and complexities. Avanish Kaushik, the current Google Analytics Evangalist, put together a great web analytics tool comparison.
If you are just starting out, I would recommend Google Analytics as a solution. Google does not charge you for an account, you only need to have an gmail account to sign up.
One of the benefits of the Google Analytics platform is that is gives you a good view of basic information out of the box, but it allows you to build a high level of complexity as you want to get deeper into the data of your online marketing campaigns.
Contrary to popular thinking, analytics is not only for your website. It can be attached to any of your online marketing in order to measure campaign effectiveness. For example, you can add parameters to the end of the URLS in your email, online display or paid search ads.
In my next post, I am going to cover how to set up Google Analytics on your website and configuring your profile. It isn’t a huge task, but it is one you want to do correctly.
Until then . . . keep measuring!
Social Media has buzz but Email delivers
There can be no debate that social media has captured the imagination of the online world. Companies are jumping headlong into the space in hopes of riding the conversational wave and reep the rewards of the ‘good vibrations’ on these social networks.
SocialTwist did a recent study on Social Media Sharing Trends for 2009. The study found that 59% of respondents preferred email as their channel for sharing. Making the 14% for social networks and 25% for IM pale in comparison.
Even more telling is a recent “Social Influence Benchmark Report” put out by StrongMail. The best platform converter for sharing online content is email. Strangely enough embedded badges came in a distant second with 20.5%. Facebook and Twitter were left in the dregs with only 3.2% and 0.4% respectively.
Can you blame people? Email is like your car. A private little space in the public world. I have friended far more people on facebook than I would EVER give me email address.
In 2009 and for 2010, it might be social media getting all the buzz, but email still delivers.
Getting Users to Scan Your Email
I have been receiving emails from SmartBrief for a couple of years. It is a great source for B2B news aggregation. In November, I signed up for their Entrepreneur email.
It wasn’t until today that I noticed a very clever tactic they are using to get me to read their entire email. You can view my screencast about it.
The subject line of the email is “What’s North Carolina’s Secret?” It peaked my interest, so I opened the email, then I had to scroll all the way to the bottom. The subject line of the email was for a story buried at the bottom of the articles. Note the two sections of the photo highlighted by green boxes (click image for larger view).
SmartBrief had been able to get me to scroll through their emails more than one time without really thinking about it. Generally, I ended up reading other stories along the way.
It is an interesting tactic to NOT lead with your best stuff – kind of like putting milk at the back of the grocery store.
The email also did a great job by providing a mobile version of the email – great targeting because entrepreneurs are on the go and tend to read on their mobile device. On the mobile version, they put an email feedback loop at the top of the page to encourage readers contact them with issue or suggestions. Overall, the email has great content, is using some interesting tactics to get you to read more and providing the target constituent with tools – such as a mobile version – to make it more readable.
Convergence and the Subscriber
Last week, I wrote a post about the new buzzword, convergence, that talks about a movement on the internet to the merging social media outlets. With the growth internet society, development companies have been coming at online tools from many directions. As matter of fact, David Mead mentioned in his VFW6th post about repurposing social networks. People use a lot of different networks, and the lines between them are blurring.
The emergence of these tools were created as an alternative to email. With all of the competition, you have to wonder when these social media networks will start to incorporate traditional technologies such as email to win. For example, when someone sends me an email message on Facebook, it goes to my hotmail account, but links me to my Facebook Inbox.
There is a great post on ExactTarget‘s blog about inbox inflation and how Social Networks are driving a great deal of that proliferation.
The post poses the question – will social networks become email providers. I quote Charles Darwin – “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adapable to change.“
People love their email. I don’t think Social Networks will replace email, but social networks will adopt the idea of convergence and maybe become email providers unto themselves. It won’t be this generation or users, but the Next generation of users who don’t have an email address yet. I am ridiculously loyal to all 3, yes 3, hotmail accounts that I have. That doesn’t include work or my gmail accounts. Forget about the amount of other online inboxes that I have no idea are lurking out there or twitter or the messages posted to me in Panaramio.
So the question is: will someone win? IMHO, people are loyal and will not be fast to let go of their current media habits. However, the next generation of users in 3-5 years are going to approach media consumption in a way we cannot even imagine now. The company that figures it out best (not necessarily first – see Darwin quote above) is going to come out at the end with a powerful victory.