Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Here it is, your May Email Marketing Idea Calendar. May is interesting month for marketers. The sun is coming out, people are starting to plan vacations and think about having fun. What a perfect time to establish a good season-long relationship with your subscribers. Time to brighten things up in your emails and have some fun with campaign ideas and creative.

Below is a list of holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in May and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Saturday May 1st – Kentucky Derby

The “Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.”  Talk about an event rich in tradition! Roses, Mint Juleps, fancy hats, bottles of milk – the list goes on and on.

Tuesday May 4th – National Teacher Day

On National Teacher Day, thousands of communities take time to honor their local educators and acknowledge the crucial role teachers play in our society. Giving a discount code or special for teachers would be a nice touch. Or perhaps a gift campaign to allow your subscribers to purchase something for the teacher in their life.

Wednesday May 5th – Cinco De Mayo

If you sell goods or services, think buy 5 get one free, $5.00 off, 10% off all products that end in 5… you see what I am getting at. If you are a destination, Americans are always looking for a reason to go out and party. Why not celebrate Cinco de Mayo at your establishment or event. Make sure you get it on their radar a few days in advance, then send a reminder early on Monday.

Thursday May 6th – International No Diet Day

KFC, there has never been a better day to promote the “Double Down“!

Sunday May 9th – Mother’s Day

A holiday that needs no explanation, it’s for Mom. But how do you stand out in a crowded inbox? (more…)

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.

Thursday April 1st – April Fool’s Day

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.

Sunday, April 4th – Easter Sunday

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.

Wednesday, April 7th – No Housework Day

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!

Monday, April 12th – Walk On Your Wild Side Day

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.

Thursday, April 15th – Tax Day

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.

Friday, April 16th – High Five Day

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?

Monday, April 19th – National Hanging Out Day

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?

Thursday, April 22nd – Earth Day

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.

Wednesday, April 21st – Administrative Professionals Day

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”?

Last Friday in April - National Arbor Day

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.

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.

Tuesday, March 2nd: Read Across America Day – Dr. Seuss’ Birthday

It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?

Thursday March 4th: March Forth – Do Something Day

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.

Sunday March 7th: The Academy Awards aka The Oscars

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.

Monday March 8-12: National Make a Referral Week

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.

Wednesday, March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

Green Email. ‘Nuff said. (more…)

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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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.

Follow @AlexCWilliams on Twitter

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

I wanted to do a quick post on a great email in my inbox today from Lucky Brand. I found this to be a very effective example to promote your Facebook Page in an email.

I found this effective for 2 reasons:

1. Top Right Placement: By placing this in the top right corner, it didn’t take away from the message of the email, but was still highly visible

2. Using the Facebook Font Color & Graphics: By using the Facebook font style and graphic, it was immediately clear and recognizable.  Large promotional banners for this can get lost in the overall layout.

One optimization I would add to this is to change “Add us on Facebook” to “Become a Fan on Facebook”, since that is the ideal action when the subscriber gets to Facebook.

What would you suggest?

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places. From December ‘07 through December ‘08, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million), according to the report.  What does this mean for Email Marketing? If two-thirds of your list is on Facebook, you need to give them tools in your email campaigns to share content so you can leverage the growing audience and gain more visibility for your content – and potentially more subscribers and conversions. (This is being referred to now as SWYN (Share with your Network), which is the worst acronym possibly ever.) Let’s take a look at how you can start to integrate Facebook into your campaigns.

Share Links from Email to Facebook

For your content to be shared on Facebook, you need to use the “Share” url they have created.  By using this, it will create a preview of the content, which can then be posted to a profile or sent as a direct message.

Copy and paste the following line of code into your email and replace <url> with the link you want to Share.

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>

Here is an example of the process from the Thrillist, an über-hip daily email.  Here is the social toolbar from the email, located below the content.

By clicking on the, you are directed to this page at Facebook, which creates a preview with optional image selections from the page URL provided, which in this case is the link to the post on the site, which is identical to the content from the email.

(more…)

I had the great privilege of speaking at the Ad Fed of Central Oregon’s monthly “AdBite” series.  The presentation focused on lead generation and retention marketing techniques in today’s economy.  The good folks at Pinnacle Media captured the presentation in a live stream on Ustream.tv. I had a great time and met a lot of really nice folks.  If you have never been to Bend, get there. It is an amazing city. Enjoy!

Unless you have been living in a cave with Bin Laden, you probably heard about Twitter in 2008. If you are still unsure on Twitter, there are great tutorials here and here. The buzz for Twitter is deserved, as it is becoming it’s own communication channel, mixing IM, SMS, Email, & Web into an addictive web 2.0 stew.

Last month I tried an experiment with Twitter that turned out some pretty interesting results, so I thought I would share them with you. I set up Twitter as an email marketing subscriber, posted an email campaign through a Tweet, and was able to track the results. Here’s how I did it, and you can too. (more…)