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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Key features and three ideas for effective winback subject lines
Last week I was presenting at the DMA Email Customer Lifecycle Win-back breakfast seminar and I also enjoyed the related discussion on Smart Insights around Dela Quist's post on how to treat inactive email subscribers. I wrote up the seminar on the Email Vision blog, but here I thought it may interesting for Smart Insights readers to see a summary, since it relates to the inactives issue we were discussing.
What makes for an effective winback subject line?
In a moment, I'll share examples from the seminar, but first it's worth thinking through the key features to make these subject lines. The rules are different for inactives. Incentive and benefit based subject lines maybe just right for active customers. However the tone and voice must reflect the current state of relationship to the person you are communicating. So for disengaged customers, a…
Why inactive email subscribers may be too good to dismiss
Conventional marketing wisdom tells us removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list is good practice - but is it? Here, we turn that wisdom on its head. I'll show why inactive subscribers are still valuable to your business and explore how you can reactivate them. First, I'm going to tell a story of how I was recently shunned for all the wrong reasons and then give some ideas on a structured approach to make the most from inactive subscribers.
It's simple really, I was recently removed from Dell's mailing list despite spending around $40,000 a year with them online for the past few years.
In Dell's eyes however, I was inactive. I hadn't opened any of their emails for some time and so their marketing department had purged me from the list.
But the fact a customer hasn't opened your emails…
Design and campaign ideas for the holiday season
Any self-respecting article on holiday email marketing needs an obligatory comment about the number of shopping days left. Or some reference to sleighs and deliverability.
Done.
It's tough thinking of new things to say about Christmas email campaigns.
It's also tough coming up with ideas to help your Christmas emails stand out from everyone else's. Sprinkling a few stars and stockings around your weekly promotion may not be enough.
Fortunately, help is at hand...here, for example, are six sets of sources to provide design and campaign inspiration for the coming weeks.
Christmas email design galleries, subject line help, campaign inspiration
1. CampaignMonitor runs an annual Christmas email design competition. See the winning designs for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005.
2. Beautiful Email Newsletters feature ten Christmas campaign designs, while the Email Institute's Email Gallery has another 26. Also check the…
The key issues to consider when you switch email service provider
Email marketing is at the core of many transactional businesses and drives substantial amounts of revenue. The email marketing solution is quite simply a mission critical system and a break in operation can’t be afforded. Yet it's fairly common to move between Email service providers (ESPs) to gain a better deal, features or service. If you do this, there are a lot of potential issues to consider, so Dave Chaffey and I thought it would be helpful to cover these in case you're considering a change. We've called them headaches, since they may well be, particularly if they aren't considered.
Any contemplated move to a new ESP needs to be planned and executed with the mission critical nature of the system taken into account, as any false moves will directly impact revenue.
When moving to a new ESP there are many moving…
Presented to eDialog Europe Aspire conference, November 2011
In this presentation I took a look at what I see as six of the email marketing techniques that will matter most in 2012.
In each area I looked at the key questions to ask to review strategies to improve. Plus I also looked at stats of adoption of mobile and social and lots of creative examples of how companies are responding to these challenges, particularly for mobile marketing.
1 Engagement
2 Mobile Email
3 Email contact strategies
4 Channel integration
5 Social-email marketing
6 Email marketing optimisation
Email marketing tactics 2012
View more presentations from Dave Chaffey
I also recommend taking a look at the other keynote from Dave Wieneke on the future of email marketing and messaging.…
For more than 35 years, journalists have been kicking around numbers of “impressions/advertisements” a person is exposed to in one day … “1,500,” “2,000,” and “up to 3,000.”
Ad “impression” level indicates each individual receiving approximately 3000 advertising “impressions” daily. This was certainly a compendium of all marketing/advertising channels – TV commercials, billboards, ad-serving, banner ads, newspaper and magazine ads, email – personal and marketing - to name a few.
Picture this: The infamous Times Square “Naked Cowboy” is an impression in this sea. He sells something. One moment here for you here means hundreds of impressions. Overload! Cereal Island in the grocery store!
This study was prior to major online adoption by most channels; no big social forces were in play (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, cable top box bursts, pre/post roll ads on videos, etc.). So what is that daily impression volume now? It is vast; it is staggering. Too staggering to…
Use content and data to connect with customers
With companies like Silverpop, Genius and Office Autopilot, it's become much easier to develop a serious semi-automated approach to email marketing - and one that can dove-tail with a much wider content marketing or social strategy without draining all of your time. We noticed that Silverpop pulled together this presentation, embedded below, this is also worth look.
Here's the Silverpop take-aways…
It's easier than ever to leverage data, and there's more than you might first think:
Inferred Customer Data - learn by listening
Implicit - monitoring blogs, social networks and customer communities
Explicit - or Behavioural Data - learn by measuring
You know the old adage: Sell the sizzle, not the steak. There's a new rule: Educate with grilling tips, recipes and wine pairing
Appreciate the link between social and email, the sharing and re-purposing of content. Arguably those that interact and open your email are the most likely…
Using symbols to engage your email subscribers
Getting the email subject line to standout in the inbox is a continual challenge. Here I'll show you how you can experiment with a technique you don't see discussed much in email marketing. It's about the potential of symbols, such as snowmen and hearts, to achieve this. I say "potential" deliberately - do you think it's a useful technique - would you use it and when?
Email clients have been improving their support for world languages and this has meant also support for the many symbols that are defined in the world character set, known as Unicode.
I decided to try a few symbols and see just how well email clients did in correctly showing them. The subject line I tested with was this:
The webmail clients for Gmail,…
