Part 1. How ISPs spot spam in the suspect email line-up

As this is my first post on SmartInsights I’d like to start with a hello; I hope you find this first post helpful! I’ve long been a reader of the SmartInsights blogs and I’m delighted to be a new regular SmartInsights contributor. I will be writing about best practice to get better results from your email marketing through optimisation of creative and targeting and deliverability. Let’s kick off with deliverability. In the line-up of suspect emails, ISPs aim to can the spam and let the innocent go free. To understand the forensics that ISPs use to spot the guilty, you need to understand the habits of the guilty. In this post I look at the tell-tell signs of a spammer and how you can avoid looking like…

Dave's talk at TradeDoubler UK 2011 Digital Marketing Summit

The title of this talk is natural since presentation was for a "performance marketing" audience who use TradeDoubler for affiliate and search management. I hope it's particularly helpful for folks running transactional site marketing - the examples are from retail, financial services and travel. But I hope the case study on mobile marketing, suggestions on strategy and the 10 tips on Google Analytics are helpful for other digital marketing folks. Maximizing Online Performance by Dave ChaffeyView more presentations from Dave Chaffey.…

A useful report from Exact Target who have not only researched what consumers value from digital marketers, but also applied sound thinking to suggest what to do next, a mini guide of sorts. We've taken our spin on the report below.

1. In a multi-channel world, consumers still value email

Though of course Exact Target would say that, their research with 1,500 consumers helps them to justify it. Even logically, email communications remain the easiest way to receive updates from brands whereas social channels are not (yet) achieving the same levels of reach for most of us. So what's the advice? The most important advice here is to have a clear purpose for each channel - why should the consumer connect on Facebook, follow you on Twitter or subscribe for email…

Though one of the worst designed infographics in the world, yet there's some very interesting food for thought here from Focus in regard to: Budgeting and planning resources for running social media marketing, it does of course cost! Interestingly no cost of content on here, which I find very odd as what's fueling social media marketing otherwise? Finding ways to understand the value and deliver ROI from that investment - the idea that a Facebook fan or Twitter follower is worth more is fascinating to go quantify in your business Be clear on the benefits, I am not surprised at all as to the order of perceived benefits and how low down lead generation is Make sure that you click to enlarge it!

…

Have you reviewed the importance of Google Blended results recently?

When considering traffic acquisition tactics and specifically Google as a channel to getting traffic it is easy to get caught up in optimizing web pages & “link building”. Opportunities with Google extend much further through the blended or universal search. Looking down the left navigation bar "codenamed Jazz" on a search results page its easy to see that to reach people looking for different sorts of content in Google you should be: Creating news daily Writing blog posts Producing videos Publishing your product feed Active in forum and Q&A discussions Active in Facebook and Twitter for Realtime Each of the areas above have their own section in Google and can often appear on results pages instead of webpages. In this post I am focussing on the Google product service, which is shown in the search results as "Shopping", but…

Our interview with Claire Rollinson of AlchemyWorx

I've been in touch with Claire Rollinson for a while swapping ideas on Email marketing via the social networks and through IDM Digital courses. Initially Claire worked out as a marketing comms manager at different charities and more recently as head of campaign management at specialist Email marketing agency Alchemy Worx. This gives her great experience of campaigns across a range of sectors and brands. As always, in our interview series, I encourage the marketers I interview to share tips which prompt the question "Can we try that? Should we be doing this? Should we use this tool?". I hope you find Claire's recommendations useful. As she suggests, getting email marketing right is important because "every single message you send can have an incremental – and if you do…

Some still don't get the potential of digital media

A friend of mine who works for a brand development agency, made a comment the other day, which summed it up for me. He suggested that digital agencies don’t really need to understand about brand as digital marketing is not really about strategy is it, but about execution, right? I find this idea both short-sighted and dangerous. The idea that to develop digital communications you don’t need to understand the longer-term objectives and goals of a business just doesn’t stack up. Digital can no longer be (and should never have been) considered a ‘tactic’, but demands the same level of strategic planning and direction as any other communication. So in my first post for Smart Insights, I thought it would be useful to look at approaches we can use to harness the power of digital media to build brands.

Why branding should be at the…

5 rules to live by for your social content strategy

I picked up a copy of the new "Social CRM for Dummies" at the Adobe/Omniture Summit last week and thought I would share some of the ideas from it and alert you to it since it's available as a free download (registration required).

About the guide

You'll know the yellow "Dummies" guides. This isn't a full guide, but a free, short 50 odd page guide created for lead-generation/customers by EmailVision. I think it's still worth scanning, particularly if it's early days in developing your social CRM strategy.

Content generation and distribution strategy

I thought the guidelines on this topic were useful, so I would expand on them. The authors of the guide say that "content generation should be proactive, persistent, multichannel, relevant, high quality and two way. Here is my guidance, prompted by these ideas, these are the 5 rules to live by when defining and…

The only marketing left

"Content is the only marketing left", suggests Seth Godin. I think that statement has never been truer, if marketing is about respecting and teaching your customers to believe in you over other brands. I'd say it is, these days. Seth has argued for years that this is the basis of new marketing, a wave of other thought leaders have backed this too - David Meerman-Scott and Gary Vaynerchuck being just two of them. Someone becomes a fan, follower, lead or customer because you help them feel better about their world, it makes more sense and they are able to make decisions about something.

So, where are the marketers?

Thinking how we can apply this to our businesses, I wonder where exactly have the marketers gone, then! All we hear these days is how to leverage communications channels like email or social media, or exploit SEO… as if there's a…

New report compares desktop to mobile advertising showing rapid growth, CTR X 2.7, 60% of CPC costs, but lower conversion

Over the last few years (largely thanks to the rise of the Smartphone and texting) mobiles have become a much larger part of everyday living. Their success is in making a lot of tasks easier & providing entertainment / connectivity while on the go. Predictions of global use of the Mobile Internet such as the one on right all point it to exceeding desktop use by 2015. But it seems that while businesses have started to "experiment" with mobile marketing there are few who have a clear strategy. Instead, mobile-based marketing  tends to be through applications, some recent examples that caught my eye are: Lynx Stream App My Starbucks Tesco Grocery App

New data on mobile search usage in the…