Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

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.

What Else?

We would love to hear your ideas on the topic, keep this list going in the comments section below!

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

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…)