Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Full Disclosure – I am a huge fan of Gist, a service that integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & SalesForce to aggregate, organize and prioritize emails, links, attachments, and related information (news, blogs, tweets, etc.) in a user’s email inbox or on their website &  iPhone app.  A must have tool for anyone in Sales, Marketing, PR, or Accounts.

I got together with Gist’s Director of Marketing, Robert Pease, to discuss their product and how social monitering tools impact marketers, how they are growing and fostering community, and what they have learned about organically growing buzz online. Enjoy!

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Email Marketing and Social Media have some inherent differences, namely the ability to provide unique content to each individual subscriber and track each activity of that individual. Will Social Media replace email down the road? The answer is no – not unless it can somehow provide that level of CRM, analytics, and personalization that email provides marketers. Can these 2 medium’s work together? Yes! But they need to be treated with an understanding of the content each user is receiving, and where this content is being shared and discussed. In this post, I’ll cover 5 ways each email marketer can make their email marketing campaigns more social – without devaluing the unique relationship you have already created with your subscribers.

1. Give Subscribers the Ability to Reply to your Email Marketing.

Something that is lost in the discussion of email marketing is that each email campaign comes from an email address. The ability to have a conversation is, and has been there all along. Somewhere along the way, Email Marketers pushed this away. “From” email addresses that start with “do_not_reply@” or some computer generated address that starts with something like “875QR00xza342@” are not the best way to start a conversation. They give the impression that not only will no one answer a return a reply to your campaign, but we don’t want to talk to you – we just want you to “Buy Now” or “Learn More”.

Obviously list size becomes a factor here, but isn’t answering an email from a subscriber a lot easier than handling requests on Twitter or the like? If you are trying to engage your audience, email is going to be the best method. You are not limited to constraints of 140 characters or privacy walls, and you can store this data and add information to subscriber profiles. “Do not reply” is the equivalent of “I’ll hang up an listen” in radio, except they never got a chance to call in. They’re just listening, and possibly tuning you out (changing the station).

How to change this is two-fold: use a real and friendly email address (ex. “feedback@”) and give copy in your emails to promote replies. Then designate your community manager or support teams to answer these requests. Once they believe you are listening, you will open up the doors to evangelists who will share content on other networks and provide positive word of mouth.

2. Avoid Redundant Content

You worked hard to get a user to subscribe to your email list and provide you with their information.  The last thing you want to do is give the impression that Tweets and Facebook Fan Page updates will lead them to the same messaging. Your ideal subscriber will be on your email list, a Twitter follower, as well as a Facebook fan – and have unqiue experiences with each. If your content strategy is to create one message and send it verbatim through each platform, they will turn at least 2, or maybe all – off. Use email for one-to-one marketing messages, Twitter for conversations and sharing, and Facebook for a light, personal, and friendly dialogue.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t market your product or service through each, just adjust the messaging and approach.

3. Stick to the Big 3: Twitter, Facebook, & LinkedIn

According to SmartBrief, MySpace is a “social-media ghetto”. From a business and consumer standpoint, it comes down to the big 3: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Whether your B2B or B2C, look at the Social Networks that drive the most traffic to your site and match your social sharing links accordingly.   Tweet it, Facebook Share It, or LinkedIn News it, your analytics will tell you this is the right move. Having a bar with 30 random social networking icons is going to get a lot less click through than “Share this on Facebook“.

4. Is it Actionable? Or is it Shareable?

The age old question with email – if there is one thing you want them to do – what is it?  Is it to click and purchase? Is it to read and share?  9 times out of 10, it’s not both.

Pick one.

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Today we are going to cover how to add a “View Mobile Version” to your email campaigns. All you will need to complete this is the ability to upload/FTP new HTML files to your hosting server. Nothing horribly complex here, and your web team/developer will yawn at this.

Before we get started, I want to show you an example of what we’re talking about from the Sony newsletter.  Below, you can see the header from their email newsletter, where I have highlighted the call out to “View mobile version“

After clicking through on this link, you are taken to the mobile version of the email in your mobile browser, which you can see below.

Why do I need a Mobile Version of my Emails?

The answer to that question, like most when it comes to email marketing, is “it depends”.  Due to the lack of standards of the mobile inbox and different technologies in play, there is simply no way to design a layout that will work across the landscape. For example, iPhone, Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm to some extent, will do an adequate job of rendering your email, albeit very small. However the top selling smart phone – the Blackberry Curve – will not. And since most people receive the exact same emails on their mobile device as they do in their desktop client, we can’t deliver a unique message to each – it’s all or nothing.  An analogy I like to use is Johnny Five from Short Circuit (filmed right here in Oregon). Just as Johnny Five thinks he is human, but is not, a mobile email client thinks it can read HTML, but can’t. So creating a link to a mobile version is going to be your best way to control the experience.  You will also be able to track the click through on this link to know how many mobile users you have and whether or not to dedicate more resources to this emerging channel.

Linking to the Mobile Version in your Creative

First off, we need some real estate in your email header. Ideally, this should be somewhere near the pre-header, Read the rest of this entry »

I got together with Chad White who runs The Retail Email Blog, a tactical daily guide to what’s going on in the world of retail email marketing.

In this podcast, Chad & I discuss his annual “Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season” for 2009. Our goal is to give you the tools that will help your email marketing program end the year with a bang!  Even if you aren’t a retailer, this guide gives great information on planning, trends, strategies and more.

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Howdy folks, and welcome back.  Today we are going to attempt to increase the amount of people signing up for your email list through a little bit of testing using Google’s amazingly intuitive (and free) Website Optimizer. To execute this, you need a Google account, and you must be able to both make visual changes to your site and add code to your HTML. If you have an internal web team, work with an interactive agency (like us), or a freelancer, the changes shouldn’t be too difficult to for them to execute.

A/B Experiment Checklist

There are many elements of an opt-in form that can dramatically affect the conversion rate. For sake of this post, we will choose placement on the home page of the opt-in box. The theory is that if you give more promance to your email opt-in, you will get more sign ups. Following thse steps will allow you to find out if this is true for your audience.

• Choose the page you would like to test
• Create alternate versions of your test page
• Identify your conversion page

To test our thoery, create an alternate version of your exisiting home page, with the opt-in box in a different location. For the page variation, use a name like site.com/index2.html. The page will not be accessible to users unless it is served up by the page loader script.

The conversion page is very important in the process, as this is the validation of a successful visitor. You want to make sure that your thank you page is strictly for your email marketing and not also used by other forms.  Also, if you have a double opt-in process, make sure that you idenitfy the first confirmation page as your conversion page, not the page a vistitor goes to from the confirmation link in an email.  Getting them to opt-in is the point, not email confirmation.

Installing and validating JavaScript tags

This is where things stop getting polite and start getting real technical.  If you are unsure about adding code to your website, forward this link to your web team and they should be able to do it in minutes.

There are 2 scripts, - a control script and a tracking script. The control script should appear immediately after the opening <head> tag of the original page.This is the script that communicates with Google’s servers to retrieve alternative page information, and ensures that individual users are tracked properly, by showing them the same variation each time, and by not double-counting their visits should they come back to the page at a later time.

The tracking script is pasted on all 3 pages directly before each page’s closing </body> tag.  This script sends pageview information to Google, so that visits will be recorded in your reports.  The nice thing about this tool is that it validate the scripts before activating the test and also gives you links to send instructions directly to your web team.

May the Most Conversions Win

One thing I love about testing is that no one is right or wrong until the results are in.  You can best practice and benchmark your site to death. But you will never innovate until you test your theories. If you have an idea and a web designer tells you it’s no good – Test it! If you think a different color button will get clicked on more – Test it!  It’s really fun to watch the results come rolling in. The Google Website Optimizer will declare a winner, but it needs at least 100 conversions, so if you don’t get a ton of traffic, you may need to leave it up for a few weeks.

Testing placement is just one area to test.  The goal here is for conversions.  Anything that relates to getting information or purchases from users is on the table.  Do you have any elements you have tested that provided big results?  Let’s hear about them in a comment below!

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Alright, the first episode of my new podcast is here.  The show is called “The Tip Jar” and the goal is to provide marketers with actionable information they can use to improve their online marketing programs.  We have lined up some of the brightest minds in online marketing for future episodes, so grab the RSS feed or follow @The_TipJar on Twitter to be the first to know about new episodes.  We will be live in iTunes soon as well.  If you have topics that you would like to see covered or would like to be a guest, please comment below.

Our first guest is George Bilbrey (@gbilbrey), President of Return Path.  Return Path helps commercial email senders get more email delivered to the inbox.

We got together to discuss Return Path’s 2009 Deliverability Benchmark Report and their new relationship with MySpace.

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I had the pleasure of speaking to an energetic AMA audience yesterday with David Veneski from Intel (@dveneski) at an event called “Tweetshop”.

The event gave all levels of Twitter users some perspective from both a client-side marketer and an agency marketer. With a topic as expansive as Twitter, an hour was tough to meet everyone’s expectations.  We probably could have spent all day!

Here are David’s slides from the event. (download) He covers a lot of good points here, including demographic and usage stats, suggested apps and tools, and corporate social media strategy. Intel has 850 social media practitioners representing the brand – enough said!

I have also curated a list of what I believe are great Twitter resources for marketers of all levels:

Start Reading – Mashable’s Twitter Lists, Resources & How-Tos

Mashable is a Social Media blog that is definitely on every social media marketer’s radar.  If you are just getting started on Twitter, this site is your first stop.

Start Listening – Twitter Search

The first step in a Social Media Strategy is to start listening to the people.  What are they saying about your Company?  If they aren’t talking about your company, you can search for your product types or services.  You can also search for your competitors and gain valuable insight.

Start Following – We Follow & ExecTweets

We Follow is a directory of Twitter users organized by keyword.  If you are looking to follow top users to follow on certain topics, this will be a great resource. Another site to check out is ExecTweets, which allows you to find and follow top business execs on Twitter. You can also locate your network by searching your email contacts.  If you mainly use Outlook, a good tip is to export your contact list, then import it into a Gmail account. Once you have done that, you can enter your Gmail credentials and locate those users.

Start Engaging - 50 Content Ideas that Create Buzz

There is great post by Valeria Maltoni on the Coversation Agent blog to give you content ideas.  That are a lot of good posts here on Twitter as well, I recommend you check them out.

And one last note, just be a real person.  They call it “social” media for a reason. Don’t be afraid to let people know a little more about you.  It will go a long way towards building real relationships.

UPDATE: Oregon Business posted a recap of the event: On the Scene – Businesses take flight with Twitter