There's more to social-email integration than share buttons
We know from what happens in 60 seconds in social media that we love to share on social networks. This amplification is what makes social media so powerful. We also know that with so many social updates, getting cut-through with social media can be difficult. Step forward email marketing which still offers reach and engagement. The obvious question; how can we integrate them - can they be "better together"? This was the topic for a recent presentation I gave at the eCircle Connect Europe 2012 event. The full presentation is available at the end of this post, but I thought I'd share some of the great examples of companies integrating social media into their email marketing. Thanks to Tim Watson for sharing some of these with me.
Start with who shares what?
Creating shareable content isn't quick, cheap or easy, you need to…
Ignoring customers will cost you revenue
Marketing emails from major and minor brands alike are often sent from a noreply email address - you will have seen them.
Either quite literally an address noreply@, or the email footer carries a statement like; "Please do not reply to this email, the account is not monitored, please contact customer support at ...". I think there's a lot more to them than meets the eye...
If a shop assistant failed to answer your questions you would shop elsewhere. So why are brands ignoring customers, in their millions, through email and social media communications?
Ignoring customers in social media
Interestingly, the social media marketing world is following the same approach as email marketing. This article notes that only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand.
The key to answering the…
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March 8, 2012
Video insights from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit
Just a few weeks ago, I attended the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas. I brought along my trusty camera and interviewed most of the speakers and several attendees. Needless to say, these interviews resulted in some great insight on a range of email marketing related topics.
GetResponse ran a contest encouraging our customers to arm me with questions to fire at the influencers at the event. Here I've selected four great (common) questions from average email marketers and four great answers from the videos. I've also created a transcript of the answers for you to scan.
You can view all of the videos here.
Does email still work?
John Caldwell of Red Pill Email answers the question: "Why lately are email marketing campaigns not working as well as they should?"
“It’s not…
A call-to-action at the wrong time in the wrong place?
How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?
When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer's inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.
“Register Now”
I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:
The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.
On the basis of this scant information I had a choice - register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.
Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond
Using "Learn More" instead of "Register Now" might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.
A landing page featuring in-depth information,…
Reviewing the six key areas to improve your email marketing
It's hard to plan a route from A to B if you are not clear where you are now and even harder if you're not sure exactly where B is anyway. As a consultant, I will often use an audit or benchmark as an early stage to improve email communications strategy for a company.
I created this email benchmarking spreadsheet in collaboration with Dave Chaffey, to provide a fast and systematic method of evaluating the use of email marketing within a company, to enable answering the question of where is A and B? It provides the key questions that need to be considered within your email marketing strategy, broken down into:
1. Objectives and value
2. Evaluation
3. Email Communications strategy
4. Copy and design
5. Deliverability and permission
6. Governance
The health check is aimed at Marketing Directors,…
Email campaigns we can learn from
“…the eye, tends to be impatient,
craves the novel and is bored by repetition”
W. H. Auden
Effective email marketing engages recipients, ultimately leading to more sales by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
Customers would rather see a beautifully crafted email appear in their inbox than a bad one.
Big brands can have a slightly easier email marketing task than smaller brands - an email from Amazon, Barclays, ASOS, or John Lewis already carries with it an expectation of what you will receive.
So, it's unforgivable for a big brand to take customers for granted.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s Christmas email campaign
Here’s a snap shot of my inbox showing all Abercrombie emails received over December and January:
You will notice the central subject line theme is “The Sale”
From…
My ideas on how to deal with unpredictability in email marketing in the year ahead
As your local Greek philosopher never tires of telling you, the only constant is change.
Many industry experts devote the occasional post or two in January to predicting how email marketing will develop this year.
Instead, I'd like to look at what we might do to better exploit or cope with the dynamic nature of the email and online marketing environment in 2012. Because change isn't always as predictable as we'd like it to be.
Please chime in with your own ideas!
1. Revisit the basics
Like every year, vendors and the media will regale us in 2012 with all sorts of clever things you can do with your email marketing. Clever things that can bring great results, such as shopping cart abandonment emails that pull in £250 in sales for each £1 invested.
Not everyone can access the necessary tools,…
A simple way to compare the engagement of customers on email and social networks
In 2009, Dave Chaffey wrote a blog post on Smart Insights in which he introduced the concept of the EFT Ratio.
EFT stands for Email: Facebook: Twitter Ratio and, as an example, he used ASOS. Dave was explaining that, at the time, it showed how email gave a capacity to reach many more customers with tailored messages. It also showed how ASOS used Email for a combination of engagement and driving sales as shown by their current email signup page:
ASOS EFT ratio
I thought it would be interesting to see how this looked today since ASOS has been very active in social media marketing. This is how it looks:
2009 ASOS EFT was 100 Email : 8 Facebook : 1 Twitter
This was calculated from a total of two million…
While attending Ad Tech in New York recently, I found myself cringing a number of times when some very smart email marketing professionals kept drawing a line between email and social. I shudder because I think it should be clear that anytime two or more humans interact, it’s social, regardless of the channel or channels they employ.
Every time we make this delineation of email and social we hurt ourselves and do a disservice to our clients and our brands.
If you are using the right email marketing service provider then ESP also stands for Extra Social Perception.
Of course we are all trying to “get our heads around social.” Everyone single person using social media is trying to get their heads around it. The very nature of it being a social channel means that it’s fluid and changing constantly. While the technology behind social media is cool, it’s the way people employ…
Examples of how to integrate social sharing into email designs
You will have noticed how many emails include "share to social" buttons as a limited form of integration. Often they are not so effective as this report on viral and community links in Emails from Chad White at Responsys shows. Oftentimes, the links are in the header or footer and get little traction.
In the report, Chad argues that since folks do like to share, creative can be designed to integrate social sharing and give it more emphasis. Here are some examples to inspire:
First, an example from the report. The social sharing is still fairly incidental, but it has got more prominence than many.
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