Apr 12 2010
Yes, you read that right.
Britney wants more followers in her quest to the be the most followed person on Twitter. So instead of buying billboards or doing a PR blitz a la Asthon Kucher, she used her most effective channel: her email list. (Why am I on Britney Spears’ email list? We’ll save that for a different post.)
Here’s the creative (click to enlarge):
Published in Email Marketing Strategy, Email Subject Lines, Facebook & Email Marketing, Keep It Simple, Missed Opportunites, Social Media Strategy
Mar 30 2010
Here it is, your April Email Marketing Calendar. April is an interesting month. From April Fools to Tax Day to Earth Day, the emotions run the gamut.
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in April and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year you have free reign to play practical jokes and pranks on family, friends, coworkers, and most importantly your email subscribers. I will warn you, this is very dependent on your product or service. If your content is heavy and serious, you will want to consider whether a joke is appropriate. On the other hand, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to loosen up your tie and connect with subscribers on a different level.
The nice thing about Easter is that you have multiple angles you can work from a marketing standpoint. Easter bunny, Easter eggs, Easter basket, etc… One idea to consider is to add a hidden element to your email layout, which is essentially a hidden item that is only accessible by discovering a hidden link (known as an “Easter Egg”). Since users don’t typically spend a great deal of time with an email, you need to make sure the hover isn’t to difficult to locate – think 20x by 20x pixels instead of 5px by 5px.
Think of all the great products, services and locations that can be enjoyed instead of housework. Procrastinators world-wide will rejoice with your No Housework Day special!
Push your edgy content on Walk On Your Wild Side Day. Some fun creative of your staff or some of your more eccentric content will do the trick. Lou Reed approves.
For the procrastinators out there, April 15th might not be the day. It might be the 16th, after a good night of sleep and dreams of refund or less worry about payment just paid. If you want your subscribers to blow off some steam and celebrate, it might be interesting to A/B split the 15th & 16th and see what works best for future campaigns. Stay away from politics and focus on the value your content of offer provides.
National High Five Day originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the globe. Anything and everything can be high-fived, and gives a perfect opportunity to focus on the social/viral side. The official website gives some great ideas. Can you adapt them to your email?
The goal of this holiday is not to sit on a couch, it’s to educate communities about energy consumption. National Hanging Out Day was created to demonstrate how it is possible to save money and energy by using a clothesline. Can you come up with a list of ways to save energy with your product or service? If not, maybe just in general?
This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, and a chance to provide the tools and structure for individuals and organizations to organize around environmental issues. The official website offers ideas and tips to take action.
We all know how important the administrative professional is, don’t we? Celebrate them, empower them, reward them, or spoof them (in a fun way). Think about your list…how many of them consider themselves “Administrative Professionals”?
You can find the official date for your state here. Continuing on the environmental kick in April, how do you reward your subscribers for planting a tree? How can we prove that they did it? Easy: through user-generated content on Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube, etc. Sounds like a perfect chance to seed a social campaign through email!
See you next month for the May Email Marketing Calendar… in April.
Published in Calculating Value, Customer Appreciation, Email Design, Email Marketing Strategy, Event Based Emails, Missed Opportunites, Tip Jar
Mar 22 2010
Professional email marketers know the ugly truth: 9.5 out of 10 website visitors aren’t actively looking to opt-in to your email list. We need to sell it. A simple “Email Newsletter Sign-Up” call out isn’t enough any more. We have to put on our ‘Billy Mays’ hats and sell it to users. We can give them discounts to sign up, or promise them the world with a opt-in. Or, we can just be more aggressive in getting the option in front of them.
When laying out website strategy, we preach that you need to have the opt-in box in the UI of a website – on every page. That might not be enough anymore. A lot of sites are being more aggressive and pushing a modal window with an opt-in – on entry, mid-visit, or exit – to get you to sign up for those great emails you’re missing out on. In this post I want to highlight this modal window opt-in technique so you can test this out and see if it increases new email sign-ups and/or engagement.
“In user interface design, a modal window is a child window that requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application, thus preventing the workflow on the application main window. Modal windows are often called heavy windows or modal dialogs because the window is often used to display a dialog box.
Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to command user awareness and to display emergency states. In the web, they are often used to show images in detail”
(Wikipedia)
Facebook has been a huge driver of the modal window on the web, forcing you to make a decision – yes or no – before moving forward. Developers may refer to the modal window as a LightBox, ColorBox, FaceBox, etc… commonly implemented with jQuery.
The honest answer is no, as long as you give a clear “No Thanks” or “Close” dialog. They will choose yes or no to signing up and continue on their way.
A website that I feel does a great job of Forcing the Issue is Bleacher Report. They are serious about getting you to sign up for each team’s personalized email list. Take these examples below, if you don’t sign up for their email list, it wasn’t because you couldn’t find it:
Bleacher Report UI Header
Bleacher Report UI Sidebar
Modal Window Opt-In
Signing up for an email list on a website can be very disruptive to their original purpose of visiting your site. If they are taken to a thank you page and then asked to check their inbox for confirmation, you may traded one goal with another. The modal window opt-in can make things very quick and easy for them, allowing your user to quickly get back to the business of browsing, and hopefully converting.
Also adding pervasive call outs on every page of your website as Bleacher Report has done in their UI will only increase opportunities for new subscribers
Test it out and see if you can grow your email list!
Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter
Published in Email Marketing Strategy, Email Marketing Testing, Opt-In and Opt-Out, Tip Jar
Mar 15 2010
I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called Putting Analytics to Work.
The event will feature a discussion of advanced analytics tools and techniques, social media analytics, what’s working today and what’s in store for the near future. The event will also feature an interactive Q and A with the panel at the end of the session.
Make sure to say hello, I might just buy you a pint.
Putting Analytics to Work
Thursday, April 8, 2010
5:30pm-7:00pm
Kell’s Irish Restaurant
112 SW 2nd Ave Portland, OR 97204
Panelists
Adam Ware, Managing Partner, SwellPath
Alex Williams, Sales and Strategy, eROI
Justin Garrity, Director of User Experience, Webtrends
Moderator
Hallie Janssen, Vice President, Anvil Media, Inc.
Feb 25 2010
Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?
I’m sure there quite a few things you have in mind for your subscribers to do, don’t you? This day is also used as a celebration of goal achievement.
Lots of folks getting together on this Sunday night, if your site or product or location can enhance their experience, get out in front of it.
A perfect opportunity to ask and engage your loyal audience to refer you to their friends, write a review, or send a gift to a friend from your store or site. Make sure to make the process easy using forms or social sites. The official hashtag on Twitter for the week is #marw10.
Green Email. ‘Nuff said. Read the rest of this entry »
Published in Customer Appreciation, Email Design, Email Marketing Strategy, Event Based Emails, Missed Opportunites, Tip Jar
Jan 21 2010
In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. If you really want to plan a successful campaign, and avoid “blasting”, you need to give your self some time to create content, creative, landing pages and the like.
That is why we are starting a new series of posts this year called the Email Marketing Calendar. Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in February you can utilize to develop a timely and relevant email campaign. We will post this list a week or two ahead of the next month.
If a groundhog fails to see its shadow, winter will soon end. If the groundhog sees its shadow, winter will continue for six more weeks. This would be a great theme to use for consumer campaigns, from apparel retailers to ski resorts to restaurants. If weather is a driving factor in your business, more winter or less winter is most likely something to take advantage of.
Due strictly enforced trademark infringement, you can’t use the words “NFL,” “Super Bowl,” or “Super Sunday” in your marketing campaigns. However, you can use colloquialisms such as “The Big Game,” or other generic descriptions for Super Bowl XLIV. Aside from the game itself, you also have the commercials and the half time show which have a lot of cultural currency as well.
A tounge-in-cheek brand might be able to get something out of boy scout day – Scouts Honor!
You are free to create unique artwork of a US President’s likeness, but you are not allowed to use anything that has “authorship”. Abe Lincoln has one of the most iconic and trustworthy brands in American history. How can you buddy up to Honest Abe?
If this is a big day for your company, hopefully you already have a plan. If you are B2B, here’s an idea: “Will you be our Valentine?” with a link to update their profile or take a survey. Maybe you can use Cupid’s spell to clean up your subscriber data or ask a few questions without having to give something away. Or you could play against Valentine’s Day and ask a subscriber to be selfish and by something for themselves.
First off, it’s spelled “Presidents Day” not “President’s Day”. This is a federal holiday and many are off work. It is also known as much for big sales at stores as it is for honoring US Presidents. Creatively, you can really use iconic American symbols and imagery. But make sure to work on your subject lines and copy, as their will be considerable activity.
Here’s a day you could really have some fun. Mardi Gras is a great day to have an event or a sale. The opportunities for fun creative don’t get better than this. From a charitable side, you could also send your subscribers to donate to the Katrina reconstruction efforts.
Random Act’s Of Kindness Day is an unofficial holiday in order to encourage acts of kindness. This is an opportunity to give something back to your loyal audience of readers. Maybe it’s just to say thanks. Maybe it is a no strings attached coupon for something free or at cost. Don’t send your same old 20% coupon, do something original and kind. Your subscribers won’t forget it, and it could really work to lift your next few emails.
This one may be a stretch, but here me out. We are always looking to humanize our companies. How about you send out a link to a flickr gallery or blog post of all of the employees pets? Or, offer a link to the local humane society to adopt or volunteer. We all love our pets, don’t we? This may be a connection you never knew you had with your subscribers.
This one I am leaving up to you guys, aside from companies that sell children’s products or dentists, I got nothing. Give us an idea in the comments section.
Good luck and happy emailing! Stay tuned for the March Email Marketing Calendar…in February.
Published in Customer Appreciation, Email Marketing Strategy, Event Based Emails, Frequency, Holiday Email Campaigns, Missed Opportunites
Dec 31 2009
For the last Tip Jar Podcast of 2009, I had the pleasure of talking with Dave Delaney, Social Media Coordinator of Griffin Technology (the company that makes those killer gadgets your iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, Stereo, etc…).
I met Dave at SXSW last year and jumped on all of Griffin’s social media streams. I have been really impressed with how they run their Social Media efforts, so I thought having Dave on the Tip Jar would be a good opportunity to take a look inside how a Consumer Product company like Griffin got into Social Media and how Dave keeps up with and manages the community and voice of the company on the web. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Griffin is on the road to CES right now in a bright Orange VW bus for their CES Bound campaign. Keep an eye out!
You can follow Dave on Twitter at @griffintech
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Published in Podcasts, Social Media Strategy, Tip Jar
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