Is the linking, embedding or animated GIF technique best given recent email client enhancements?

You can embed video in emails. But just because you can, does it mean you should?

For a long time the possibility of playing video directly within an email had such limited support it wasn’t an option worth considering. The classic approach has become to include a still image of the video and a play button, which when clicked takes you to a landing page. The video doesn’t play inside the email.

Smartphones and in particular iOS supports video within the native email client using standard HTML5. This plus the fact that 50% of all emails are read on mobile devices means the question of whether to use embedded video or just link to video from the email is once again relevant to…

How to review and improve the engagement of your Facebook fans and impact on your business

As the largest global social networking site, Facebook opens up a huge opportunity to engage with your customers and increase affinity with your brand. Engagement is the key indicator of a successful Facebook page, with high levels meaning that you are posting content that your fans find both relevant and interesting. More engaged fans are more likely to be converted into paying customers. The question is, how do you measure how engaged your fans are and what are the best tools around that can help you measure engagement on Facebook? Follow this step-by-step process to start measuring how engaged your Facebook fans are.

1. Start off – Define your KPIs

To make sure you have targets to work towards, set out some KPIs that you can use to measure your progress against. There are many metrics available online, for example:

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Will you be creating Showcase pages or...?

Importance (for B2B marketers): [rating=5]

Recommended link: Showcase Pages replacing 'Product and Services Tab' from Company Pages

In November, we alerted you to the new Showcase pages on LinkedIn where businesses can create a page for each brand, so Microsoft can create a separate Showcase page for each of Office and Windows, for example. 

Following on from this, LinkedIn have now announced that Showcase pages will become the only option for businesses to directly feature specific products and services via a page.

If you're a page admin you will likely have received an Email from LinkedIn alerting you to this, but if not...you need to be aware that although company pages are remaining, they are removing the 'Products and Services Tab' from…

What is responsive email design?

Responsive design is an approach for web and email designs that ensures the user has the best experience possible, regardless of whatever device they are viewing. Often you will find that a website viewed on a normal desktop PC will look a certain way, however once the same site is viewed on a tablet computer or mobile device it will look considerably different. Responsive design will re-arrange and streamline web and email content for these different devices and screen sizes. It helps to minimise resizing, panning and scrolling by the smartphone or tablet user. It may also involve enlarging smaller text as well as making links and buttons actionable and visible. This gives the user a much simpler experience enabling them to engage with the creative and offer in the email.

Examples of mobile responsive emails

Here is our first example showing the difference between a non-scaled email template on…

Brands place real-time marketing value firmly in relationships

In my previous article I wrote about the challenges of managing real-time marketing since processes are changed, focus is drawn to live data and content is being produced by the hour.

In this follow-up I will look at our research showing how marketers rate the benefits and some examples which show the value in real-time marketing (RTM).

Where is the value in real-time marketing?

There are blogs aplenty about Oreo’s ‘dunk in the dark’ real-time coup at the Super Bowl. Jerry Daykin from Mondelez (owners of Oreo) spoke at our Social Speakeasy event a few weeks ago. He made the point several times that although it achieved marketing success; it was engagement, not reach that made it successful.

So we surveyed brands for their perspective on real-time social. And the resulting benchmark…

Building the business case for more investment in Instagram marketing

Instagram recently announced that it now has 200 million monthly active users who between them, are sharing 60 million photos every day generating a mind-boggling 1.6 billion Likes. That's over 20 billion photos shared since its launch in 2010.

What's more, since releasing figures at the end of 2013, the platform is said to have added around 50 million users in the last six months - a staggering 170 million since its acquisition by Facebook for £1bn in April 2012.

If we compare it to the growth statistics for other social media platforms we can see that it is currently the fast growing social network in terms of active users.

So with this apparent unstoppable growth, what does this really mean for marketers, and should your brand be joining…

Gmail Promotions Tab Grid View: The Lowdown

Brace yourself, email marketers, Aaron Rothman, Product Manager at Google, recently announced some more major news on the Gmail blog which follows on from Gmail's move to default image display. The announcement explains that Google is testing a new feature for its email service, making the promotional tab more visual. With one click users can switch to a grid view and can see the pictures used in promotional newsletters straight away. You can see the visual impact from this mockup from Google (click for animation):

The thought behind this and what excites us most is that this will make it easy for Gmail subscribers to quickly scan through their promotional messages and find the ones that look interesting. And why do they look interesting? Because the content is engaging.…

Best practices for successful B2B corporate video campaigns

Online video marketing has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. What started out as secretly watching YouTube clips in your room or furtively sneaking a peek on your work computer has quickly developed into a practice suitable for the boardroom. In fact, a recent Forbes report stated that the majority of CEOs now prefer to watch a video than other types of content if both are on the same webpage. Consequently, there’s been an upward trend in video marketing for B2B businesses, in both effectiveness and popularity. However, B2B video marketing campaigns have been slow to shake off their boring, corporate image, which consists of them focusing solely on their product or service with stiff, emotionless campaigns. Here are 7 examples of companies where brands have added personality to corporate video, we particularly like the approaches that Intel…

Also adds Pages to Watch feature to enable competitor review

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Facebook - New Brand Page Layout change 26th March update: The new layout still hasn't rolled out for us yet, but Facebook has posted a blog answering some FAQ about the new brand page layout. This suggests that apps will be in left hand column so may be more prominent than the previous grabs below suggested, so maybe good news. Is anyone seeing the new version yet? This is big news since most brands now have a Facebook page which is a primary way of engaging with prospects and customers. Facebook have announced it will be changing the layout of the Facebook Brand Pages starting this week. Keep an eye out this week, as it is rolled out. So what will it give us and look…

Content for social media success

Micro content, I keep hearing this term and thought it’d be useful to explore what it means; why content marketing is evolving and diversifying and what the practical applications of micro content are for marketing.

Essentially, micro content is as it sounds - short form content. Typically low cost, high value content appropriate to social channels. To all intents and purpose it’s social media content.

It’s not that detailed articles or long form, rich content are any less important, it’s simply a case of being relevant to the social media platform in question, and accessible to an ever detached consumer who’s on the move with a low attention span for your brand.

Social and mobile are leading the change

As the world shifts towards mobile devices, and accessing information via social networks on a mobile, micro content becomes a more important and…