Digital Relevance

One of our media customers, who visitors to this site will already be familiar with, recently started requesting thought leadership articles. The idea was simply to add good content for their newsletter subscribers/website visitors and at the same time provide a forum for their loyal customers to position themselves as thought leaders in their industry.

In one instance the CEO of a Global Telco, through their marketing agency, took advantage of the opportunity.

The piece was a clicks hit in the newsletter and a traffic hit on the website, great for the publisher, agency and client. The client was sufficiently pleased with the results they posted the story at the top of their news section on the home page of their website.

The Publisher benefited, the agency benefited and the client was delighted, a win win win for all.

It made me think, why did the CEO of a world brand and probably busier than many of us make time to take advantage..?

Not sure but, his actions partly demonstrate perhaps why he is a leader, through deciding to make time to take action.

Seeing things from your visitors shoes

email marketing messages provide headline information to subscribers that have links to more in depth detail of that subject in websites. The purpose of email marketing is simply to position the sender as a valid provider of information on their subject. So given that both the statements above are correct surely the most effective way to deliver your information is to start from the point of your target site visitor’s perspective, seeing things from their shoes.

Marketers build their email subscriber lists through motivating visitors to their websites to subscribe to receive regular further information by email. To achieve this successfully relevance plays a key role at the point of communicating with the visitor. A commercial kitchen maintenance company we work with do this by providing their site visitors with tips and hints on how to maintain commercial kitchen equipment. At the top of the tips and hints page the tips and hints email newsletter subscription is there for all to see. One or more of the tips and hints can be read quickly by the visitor and then from judging the quality of the content and its relevance the visitor can sign up.

The content is very specific and the subscriber knows exactly what and why they have subscribed to receive. The relevance of the content is also very clear and allows the subscriber to build their own maintenance library in a folder within their email software or become a regular site visitor of this information that is valuable and relevant to them.

I signed up to receive email marketing from a site I recently found, which I thought demonstrated great design, look, feel and branding. A week later I received my first email, wow! All the elements that had been applied to make the site great had been abandoned in the email marketing and then some. The missed opportunity to further engage with visitors was significant and surprising as most actions required would simply take the re purposing of their web strategy. This led me to compose an email with some suggestions as detailed below. It would not be fair to name the site, so please don’t ask but today’s Friday fun is simply to request pointing us at similar brand gaffs. On a more serious note more suggestions on how web and email work effectively together would definitely be welcomed.

Regards

Denis

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Hi ‘xxx’,

A few ‘Top Tips’ on email marketing

1.   The subject line has an extra question mark in the wrong place, reducing open rates.
2.   As you are only sending in text you cannot see who opens, reducing the ability to target message content and segment accordingly.
3.   You present the whole message instead of using links, ‘xxx’ tips for example could be linked to on a web page, the clickers can then be segmented by type of dance tip.
4.   Not everyone who registers wants to learn to ‘xxx’, the message assumes this increasing unsubscribe rates.
5.   Punctuation is poor, this will matter to some people, if it is correct nobody will notice.
6.   The text is too big, so is received and interpreted as shouting, increasing unsubscribe rates.
7.   The fonts are mixed, just poor presentation.
8.   The subscriber options should be a link. This should link to an unsubscribe page that details features, advantages and benefits to staying on your email marketing list, reducing unsubscribe rates.
9.   HTML allows you to brand your emails, your website has a strong brand and you should reflect that brand as it will increase engagement with your brand. You have built a brand, maintain it.
10. Outsource to a specialist, the results will more than pay for themselves.

The best email information site out there is - http://www.clickz.com/experts/em_mkt Hope you find this useful.

Regards

Denis

The winners of the inaugural Marketing Week Engage Awards have been revealed amid a shower of champagne corks and streamers…

Jeanne Jennings in a ClicZ article looks at ‘Quick Tips for Successful E-mail Newsletters’ and starts with ‘It’s All About the Reader, Not You’.

Couldn’t agree with her more

Big Time Predictions From email Marketing Heavyweights

There are quite a few email newsletters giving advice on email marketing and one of my favourites is ClickZ. A recent issue gave predictions on what would shape email marketing in 2010 and my favourite was… ‘Relevance Trumps All’.

Couldn’t agree with this commentator more! If you take a look at the predictions please post your views, especially those that disagree with mine

Digital marketing specialist Econsultancy has announced that they have filled the first January intake for their market-leading MSc in Digital Marketing Communications, having launched the new intake date at the end of last year due to exceptionally high demand for places during 2009.

MSc in Digital Marketing Communications

Public speaking comparisons with email marketing

Over the years I have attended many business events including conferences, seminars and awards evenings. One critical element of such events is the keynote speaker’s ability to set the tone of the event. The best host of an awards evening I have attended is Jonathan Ross and one of the best key note speakers is Michael Portillo. The Bracknell Chamber of Commerce is launching a new series of business events throughout 2010 and the launch event at Ascot Racecourse will see guest speaker Michael Portillo sharing his views on the UK economy. If you are interested in the economy, enjoy listening to good speakers and are within travelling distance of Ascot next Friday 5th Feb here’s the full details

The event is being videoed and I will post a link after the event. I will then in a follow up post compare the art of good public speaking with good email marketing. A speaker needs to engage with her/his audience and so does effective email marketing, so are there lessons we can learn and apply..?

As always any visitors that want to start the ball rolling



In a meeting today I was asked, what is the single most important part of email marketing? A nice simple question, not, and just what you need to test you in front of three decision makers looking for a new email service provider My answer went along the lines of…

If I had to state my number one it would be a cultural one, and that is simply that the best and most effective email marketing is done when the focus of all activity is customer/subscriber based. We all have sales and marketing strategies but with email marketing you achieve your objectives by looking at it by stepping into our target audience’s shoes (my favourite book is ‘to kill a mockingbird’) before we do anything. What information will our current subscribers and target future subscribers find relevant to their information wants and needs? Only by understanding this and delivering the relevant match of information can we hope to develop engagement with and ultimately loyalty to our brand. Website visitors and email newsletter subscribers are in total control of where they choose to go for information and losing sight of this simple fact dilutes the effectiveness of our online marketing.

This initial reply was accepted but I was then pressed on the question from a tactical point of view.

I don’t believe you can say that any one tactical element of email marketing is the single most important as without a good data capture strategy for example you won’t have many subscribers to talk with. Also without a well designed email template reflecting the brand of the campaign owner, however relevant and well written the copy, the delivery envelope will not do the message justice. So pretty much impossible I feel to name one element of email marketing as the single most important. Any readers of this blog that feel they can I would love to read your view.

I did though set out what I thought the key fundamentals of email marketing are in order of data capture, campaign activity, campaign measurement, relevance of content and segmentation. The list of elements to consider in developing a truly effective subscriber focused email marketing campaign warrant far more time than I have right now on a Thursday evening, when it’s time to be getting ready for a pretty hectic Friday. So I would more than welcome a top 10 ‘ELEMENTS OF eMAIL MARKETING’ post from visitors to this email marketing blog who feel they can set the agenda.

After sending a campaign, our customers always ask for reports of activity. Now this is fairly straight forward; “You sent 1000 emails, 100 people clicked on these 10 links.” Not really enough information for most people and certainly not enough to be of any use from a positioning point of view.

Google Analytics (on the website)

By installing Google Analytics on the website you are directing people to, you will have a wealth of information available to you about your web visitors. This includes things like “Average time on site”, “Bounce rate”, “Search Engine keywords” to mention a few.

Email Marketing & Google Analytics

By including a little “code” to the end of every link in an Email Marketing Campaign, we can see how many people click on an email and what happened when they get to the website. This can be broken down by Campaign and is fully integrated into Google Analytics.

This allows us to go from the statement at the top of this post to “You had 100 people visit your website and the average time on the website was 5 minutes for the New Product A Campaign”.

Google Goals

And lastly, if you setup Goals in Google Analytics you can specify activities that you are particularly interested in – this could be from Event Registration to Ordering Online.

This allows use to arrive at “You had 100 people visit your website and the average time on the website was 5 minutes for the New Product A Campaign. The 100 bought a total to £300.00 worth of products and registered for 5 Events.”