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…
How NOT to use social media to communicate
It's confession time. At some stage or other I have probably committed most of these crimes while posting to social media. Some I still do on a nearly daily basis, although am trying to unlearn them. How do you score?
1. Using social media as a one-way broadcast communication medium. Not listening, engaging or responding.
2. Endlessly discussing what you had for breakfast and other minutiae. It gives social media a bad name.
3. Not having a profile pic. Signals newbie, spammer or Grandad.
4. Not thinking twice before you post/tweet. It's there forever. Ditto posting when drunk.
5. Jumping into conversations where you're unknown rather than listening first. Especially if your first contribution is to recommend your own product.
6. Blatant selling.
7. Emoticons. How old are you?
8. Posting a link with no explanatory text. Do you really want people to click on it or are you a spammer?
9.…
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…
6 key questions to ask about how a brand uses social media
I work in the travel industry which, most of the time, seems like a great place to be for a digital marketer. It lends itself to rich, original content and has allowed the pioneering (but not always dominant) brands to develop online in ways never before possible with traditional media (think of brands such as Travel Zoo and Trip Advisor).
On the other hand the travel industry is being squeezed from all sides, (costs are rising almost everywhere let alone in travel) whilst the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and even more competitive. It’s also an industry which has had the way it does business entirely turned on its head thanks to the wide scale adoption of the internet.
In this post, I share my experiences from our initial work with social…
Three examples where absolute email marketing truth is...relative
As the original "killer app", email marketing has accumulated a lot of truths and best practices through its long history.
Some of those survive because they remain relevant, but some persist simply through the power of repetition and tradition. A constant challenge is working out what's really true in email.
What's a genuine best practice? What's a recommended practice for most (but not all) cases? What apparent truths are no longer relevant or accurate in an ever-changing online business environment?
Here are three examples of commonly-heard generalities about email marketing that are grounded in truth, but where the devil is in the details...
1. Email is about relationships
I'm not going to deny that. After all, in my previous column I argued that more attention should be given to the subtle, indirect and relationship impacts of a regular stream of emails passing across the inbox of your prospect…
This time next year it will be the 30th anniversary of Email. This is a great infographic (see full interactive version) reminding us of how email has grown in importance for consumers and marketers and the challenges of managing it such as deliverability and rendering across different email readers.
Email use is still on the rise. Did you know that the number of email accounts grew from 1.8 billion to 3.1 billion between 2009 and 2011?
…
Our interview with Jordie van Rijn of Email Vendor Selection
When I’m running training courses on email marketing, there are almost always marketers on the course who are dissatisfied with their current email provider or are just looking to move up from using Outlook to send emails.
I’m always happy to give recommendations on email services and encourage others on the course to share suppliers they’re happy with. The problem with just basing your decision on recommendations is, of course, that every business has different needs according to their size and how they want to use Email marketing. So the question becomes “how do we decide on the right email service provider for us?” As independent email marketing consultant and founder of the Email Vendor Selection, I thought Jordie van Rijn would be an excellent person to help answer this question.
Jordie specializes in email marketing and event-driven campaigns and his company…
5 areas of B2B email marketing to review
Email is in decline with the next generation of business professionals more likely to rely on SMS and social network messaging. Yet, most B2B companies still use email-based newsletters as a primary way of attempting to communicate with and engaging customers and prospects.
Email statistics
A recent Forrester report titled ‘How US Marketer’s use email’ heaped further concern on business use of email by summarizing:
6 in 10 B2B companies are keeping their marketing spend flat in 2011
71% use email to communicate with customers and prospects on a regular basis
33 % don’t routinely remove bad email addresses from databases
43% of B2B marketers think email will become more important to their marketing activity
(more…)…
Some of the best in digital marketing offer their social media advice
We're always cautious of rule-books - but when Eloqua team up with JESS3, Steve Rubel, David Armano and Scott Monty (amongst others) then it's certainly worth stopping to read. This ProBook is an evolution of the PlayBook that was created a year ago - having read both I'd say this latest piece is designed for people with some idea of social media marketing
The book is a corporate guide to organising a brand or business to succeed in social media marketing, it also doubles as a who, where and how of the social media landscape with fun features such as a 'day in the life'. The book seeks out to specifically answer:
How to optimise your Facebook newsfeed
How to scale a social media marketing programme
How to measure social media success beyond Likes
How to create infographics that wow
How to…
The use of Net Promoter® (NPS) score as a way to collect customer feedback has been available for years although it's perhaps better known and applied more widely in the US.
We're always interested to find more about new methods to better understand customers, so wanted to alert you to another tool. CustomerGauge, surveys customers continuously and provides the necessary reporting analytics to tie the feedback back to your process improvements.
At the same time, I thought it could be useful to explain some of the principles of NPS since it's not known so well in the UK.
Robert Kerner of Customer Gauge is in a good position to help here. Rob has worked in process improvement for the last 15 years in various business functions: finance, marketing and sales.
I…
