3 examples of integrating social media and email lead generation from small and medium businesses

Many businesses are wondering what they’re really getting from the time they spend marketing on Facebook and, more importantly, how they can turn their hard-earned fans into customers. To support the integration between social media and email marketing, Constant Contact created a tool, Social Campaigns, specifically designed to make it easy to get measurable results from Facebook marketing. With Social Campaigns, businesses can offer current and potential fans something special, such as exclusive content like prize draws or discounts that help grow their fanbase and generate sales, leads, brand awareness, and social word-of-mouth. The tool integrates with email to help capture email leads too. Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights asked me to share the examples since they show how Social and Email marketing can be used for Permission Marketing today using our tool or others. Editor's…

Missing a moving target – The disparity between mobile device opens and clicks, and what you can do about it

Despite the increase in number of mobile devices, only half of marketers are designing email with mobile in mind, which shows that there is a massive disconnect between a bespoke mobile design and experience that people should be receiving versus the one which they are actually getting.

In our latest research we completed detailed analysis of over 35,000 emails sent by over 119 companies in 23 sectors. This post contains an overview of the insight we gained and how you can succeed in getting your campaigns opened on the desktop, smartphone and tablet. A key finding was that across different sectors smartphone and tablet are now significant, accounting for between a fifth and a third of all opens depending on sector:

Key findings from…

How many subscribers open and then click on your emails on different types of mobile devices?

The growth in mobile web access and the implications for mobile optimised web design is now well-known, but what about the implications for email marketers and email design? Some new research by Pure360 Missing a moving target: Mobile device opens and click through rates summarised in this infographic reviews the impact across different sectors. Litmus also have some great research on the popularity of accessing email over mobile - see their research at the end of this post. For me, this data point from the infographic had the biggest impact, how does your mobile unique click to open rate compare? 28% of Emails are Opened on mobile devices... but only 10% lead to clicks. This research is based on detailed analysis of over 35,000 different emails sent by over 119 companies in 23 sectors. The…

Video summary of three different mobile email design options

It's common now for marketers to ask the question, "will our emails work on mobile?". But it's not that simple unfortunately... there are several different ways to tackle this and each has its own jargon. So I created this video to help explain the different terminologies such as scalable, skinny and responsive email design. [arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxnkP03G3I8" /] Don't have time to view the video? Here's a transcript explaining the alternatives. 1. Fluid Design: The text always takes up 100% of the width of the window, so as you change the width of your email with your browser, it automatically reflows and fits in the window - whether it's for mobile, tablet, desktop etc. 2. Skinny design. No reflow here, so as you change the width of the window, nothing changes within the content.  Companies such as Coke tend to design their email narrow to…

12 Smart ways to capture customer data

Since email marketing is one of the most influential touch points in the online path to purchase, you’ll want to capture as many interested contacts as you can. Ideally you will also enrich these with profile data in order to develop a high segmentation methodology to enable you to target. It is not easy to make the most of the options to capture emails, but it's worthwhile reviewing all the touchpoints. Almost every interaction that your customers have online with any organisation - attempts to capture data, so you need to cut through that noise.

So let's break it down, how do you improve email capture and progressive profiling? This is best done in two ways:

1. Firstly, exchanging value in return for the data, such as more relevant content and products or offers exclusive to subscribers.2. Secondly, by capturing bits of data from multiple channels over…

Five key takeaways from new email marketing research

It's the Holy Grail of subject lines, the El Dorado of email marketing...the one word that tugs magically at the heartstrings, calling siren-like to the customer to claim that click. And it doesn't exist. The right word(s) for a subject line depend heavily on the unique context: what you send, to whom and to what purpose. That's why experts urge you to test for yourself. Intuition, experience and benchmark studies can only take you so far. But...subject line research does help give direction to your efforts. Adestra just released a fascinating study which looked at over 2 billion emails to find correlations between certain keywords in subject lines and campaign response rates. The infographic is below, followed by my key takeaways. Don't take the results at face value, of course. Context matters. But at the least, the study gives you ideas for what you might test. …

Review your Email creative against 60 leading brands

Value: [rating=4] Recommended link: DotMailer Email Marketing Intelligence Report.

Webcast

21 tactics to make your email templates more effective based on examples from the report were also featured in this webcast with Skip Fidura of dotMailer which we hosted. 21 Smart Email marketing Tactics from Smart Insights Free webcast 21 Smart Email Tactics You Can Use Today

Our commentary on the Email Marketing Intelligence Report

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To opt-in or double opt-in, that is the question

Should I use single or double opt-in when growing my email list? It's a question I'm frequently asked. However I don’t see it as a binary question of one or the other and I advocate using both. Sounds odd? I’ll explain. The common concern with double opt-in is that it requires the customer to perform the additional step of opening an email and clicking a link to confirm they want to opt-in. Double opt-in leaks That means there is leakage, not everyone completes the confirmation step. This could be because they don’t get the double opt-in confirmation email, don’t get around to reading and clicking the link in the email or have a change of mind. The leakage is significant, 20% is not uncommon and I’ve heard of brands with 40% of people signing-up failing to confirm opt-in. So there is no question that single opt-in will…

5 practical techniques to help get your message through...

Value: [rating=4] Recommended link: Research from Bit.ly Blog

Our commentary on online attention spans

I remember reading a while ago in Tim O’Reilly’s book on Twitter marketing that most people most responses or tweets happen within 5 minutes of the original tweet - scary! Much worse than Email marketing where at least you have responses for hours rather than minutes. I’m not sure companies using social networks realise this unless they’ve looked at specific social media marketing reporting tools like Bit.ly which give hourly reports. The reason is obvious, most people have so many sources they follow in their stream and if they don’t see the message while browsing their stream then it’s gone. Life is too short to browse your whole stream To show how big this challenge is URL shortening service Bit.ly published some interesting research across different media. It's useful too, since…

When to use specific subject lines (and when not)

The more people open your email, the better. So your subject line should go for maximum opens, right? Probably not, actually. Here's why...

First, take a look at your email list. Don't they look happy?

You're going to send out a standalone promotion for Widgets. The red people may want to buy one. The blue ones have no interest.

(The orange one is a competitor monitoring your emails. And the green one is an email marketer collecting creative for her swipe file.)

Should you use a specific or more general, inclusive subject line? Here's what others say:

Claude C. Hopkins wrote in Scientific Advertising in 1923 (yes, 1923!):

"Address the people you seek, and them only"

In their seminal 2008 study of subject line length Alchemy Worx concluded (my emphasis):

"Getting more people for whom the message is relevant to open the email requires a subject…