A great video can change the world

A combination of the right stories, the right visuals and the right music can be powerful enough to bring the masses on board with a cause. This is a great tool for marketers who are using video every day to win their audiences over. However, video technology is now in the hands of the many, rather than the few, and the underdog has a fighting chance which can cause BIG damage to existing brands as the first example shows. The balance of power has shifted and the big brands need to be wary… their best weapon can quite easily become their biggest enemy.

Here are five great examples of videos that have been made to bring about some kind of social change – from simply highlighting an injustice, to big calls to action for a specific cause.

1. Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless

[youtubevideoembedder…

How to create a mobile friendly email

In May we shared the second infographic in this post from Email Monks which summarises the importance of creating mobile responsive Email designs.

In September Litmus published another infographic on responsive email design. We thought this was well worth sharing also since it adds to the first with a technical explanation of  How to Create a responsive email design with a code sample.  

Email Monks infographic on Mobile Friendly Emails will walk you through the importance of adapting responsive mobile email design techniques in 2013. 

With 43% of the people now reading and responding to emails through mobiles and 97% just viewing their emails once, it is high time marketers should use responsive mobile email design and coding techniques to stop providing bad experience to more than 50% of the email subscribers.

Email Monks code mobile friendly responsive…

Customer satisfaction measurement approaches from BT and Henley Business School

Customer effort score may be the new kid on the block, but just like other loyalty measurement tools such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT), it sharply divides opinion. In this article I review my discussion with Professor Moira Clark from Henley Business School and BT's Dr Nicola Millard asking whether customer effort score is help or hype? First emerging in 2008, the team behind the research, the US Corporate Executive Board (CEB), challenged the notion that companies must ‘delight’ customers and argued instead that what customers really want is to simply be given a satisfactory solution to their service issue. Additionally, the research claimed that excessive levels of customer service (such as offering free products or services) will only make customers slightly more loyal to…

Selecting the most relevant Social Customer Care metrics

As I read through the different types of social media care metrics, how they should be interpreted, and how they relate to ROI, I was struck by one thought: who do these measures benefit? So, I put together a quick table drawing the different metrics, categories and ROI together. The image is a bit blurry, but if you click on the table you can see where I take the different metrics, categories and ROI from the original article.

The next column is ‘Company benefit’, followed by ‘Customer benefit’, followed lastly by ‘Will this resolve the customer’s issue’. My two observations are: 1. Quality is one of the categories that Walter Van Norden (Telus) proposes. Interestingly, there are no metrics for Quality. 2. It is obvious from the last three columns…

Keep calm and keep mailing...

[caption id="attachment_29574" align="alignright" width="269"] Webmail clients from Email Client Market Share (Litmus)[/caption]

Like a lot of people of a certain age and disposition, I draw my wisdom from the novels of Douglas Adams.

For example, the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has practical advice for many marketing situations. It says:

"Don't panic"

This comes to mind whenever one of the webmail services changes something.

Each such change brings forward a host of virtual "the end is nigh" placards, with posts and articles proclaiming the Hotmail sweep feature, Gmail's priority inbox, Gmail's tabs might be the meteor that sends email marketing into extinction.

Realise the sky (probably) isn't falling

None of the numerous historical changes to webmail interfaces have significantly hurt the long-term success of email marketing.

Email marketing is in a very healthy state right now: the last…

Implications of the changes to Facebook’s promotions rules

Importance to Facebook marketers: [rating=4] Recommended link: PDF download of new promotion rules

To the surprise of many Facebook marketers, this week saw the release of updated Facebook competition rules,  removing the requirement for businesses to run competitions and promotions through a app on their brand's timeline. "We’ve updated our Pages Terms in order to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook." Until now, it has been against Facebook regulations to run any promotion outside of a third-party app. For example, running a competition that required users to 'like' or 'share' a post for the chance to win. This new change, now allows businesses to: Collect competition entries by users posting on the Page or comment and/or liking a Page post Collect entries through users…

Using Big Data to optimise engagement with your customers 

How to use big data to create better relationships with your customers as individuals instead of as a generic demographic

Enhancing consumer engagement and promoting loyalty is one of marketing’s key goals. But as technology advances, processes are changing. To boost engagement and loyalty, brands must use data to understand how multichannel consumers choose to engage; learn who your consumers are and what they want, and you can adapt to match.

Most organisations are well aware of this data advantage. But data analysis is not simple. The increasing availability of options from channels to devices means opportunities for consumer engagement are expanding, leading to an incredible increase in data generation. This volume and velocity can be difficult for organisations to manage in house initially so they invest in data experts to develop a solution to collate, curate and utilise data in the…

LinkedIn launches University Pages to help career-minded students find the right college

LinkedIn, the network that aims to link professionals with potential employers just launched its University Pages. These new pages are meant to help prospective students find the college or university that fits those best. Connecting with those institutions, their alumni, current students or even prospective students are some of the features students will be able to use starting September 12. Additionally, LinkedIn has brought down student limit age from 18 to 14 in the US and Canada to help grow its base of professionals networking on its platform. Two hundreds colleges and universities got the beta University Page. Among them, a few Canadian universities, including York University, McGill University and the University of British Columbia. Thousands of additional schools are expected get access to University Pages in the coming weeks. …

Ideas for using Social Media to support marketing events

Eventility have created an infographic which we thought could be useful to B2B marketers who plan events (or consumer events) now that social media is a key digital event marketing tool alongside email marketing.

The 4 key streams where social media can help event management

The infographic is built around social media can be integrated throughout the plan for the lifecycle of an event.

1.  Organising an event: collect information on RSVPs by integrating sign up with social media and enables pre and post event follow-up by email. Share and collect ideas to build up affinity throughout the planning; asking for votes of favourite speakers, ideas etc.

2. Promoting an event: provides strong presence when people are searching for the event, so listing on search engines is key as well as encouraging social media sharing.

3. Engagement during the event: Creating online buzz on the day through sharing videos, photos…

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…