E-Mail Marketing: Best Practices
It’s a fact. 2,000 online marketing professionals recently surveyed by Datran Media indicated that 82% plan on increasing their use of e-mail marketing in 2008. And why not? 79% say they expect e-mail to drive sales, 67% say they’ll use e-mail to upsell or cross sell products and services, and 71% plan to enhance their relationship with customers via e-mail marketing.
What’s a smart marketer to do?
Here are three best practices to consider — and implement — with your online marketing agency:
1. Tailor the length of the message to what you’re selling. In general, the more expensive the product or service, the more you’ll have to explain why a consumer should buy it. However, the longer the text copy in your e-mail, the greater the chance you’ll lose the reader’s interest. Provide just enough details to pique interest — and get the reader to respond, asking for more.
2. Keep options to a minimum. Readers have short attention spans, especially with e-mail. If you want a positive response, ask the reader to do only one thing. Asking them to click or call or fax or visit and you’ll get one response — nothing.
3. Review the process. Think through how your typical marketing e-mail recipient receives, reads and reacts to the e-mail. Is a landing page needed and does it truly convey more information? Are you asking for the bare minimum information on a contact or sign-up form? Is the entire process effortless and transparent for the consumer? Do you say “thank you” after the transaction or interaction?
These are all simple and obvious points, for sure. But considering the coming deluge of e-mails destined to hit the typical consumer’s Inbox, perhaps now is the time to get back to the basics.
Smarter Marketers Look for Innovation During a Recession
As of mid-March 2008, fully 75% of all Americans think the U.S. economy is in a recession, according to a national poll by CNN/Opinion Research Corp. And the report, “Communications Industry Forecast & Report 2004″ from the research firm, VSS, stated that the last recession in 2001 saw a drop of 9% in overall advertising compared to the previous year, with online advertising spending dropping 27% over two years before recovering. Certainly, these are dark times for advertising.
Or are they?
What can marketers using the Internet, interactive and communications technology expect this time around? Well, you might be inclined to say “more of the same,” but you’d likely be wrong.
In a down market, promoting a brand is a challenge as consumers find it harder to go from “I know that product” to “I’m buying that product” when they’re worried about cash flow, job security and the buying power of their dollar.
But advanced media programs target the decision to buy rather than building brand awareness. Increasing engagement with consumers is much more likely to generate sales than simple brand reinforcement. And it’s social marketing that incorporates community-building and other social behaviors that are cost-effective, much more results-driven and have a measurable impact on consumers early in the purchasing cycle.
Strategies to consider in this dire economic situation include:
Embrace e-mail marketing. If you’re not already communicating via e-mail on a frequent and consistent schedule, now is the time to champion this low-cost and highly customizable media. And e-mail marketing often targets existing customers and prospects familiar with your brand. These market segments are much more likely to listen to your message in a recession than new prospects.
Don’t give up the search game. In fact, since search-based advertising is so targeted and specific, this is one arena where you can expect to find more competition. If your search strategies don’t include negative keyword buys, zip code targeting and A/B testing, it’s time to call in an expert.
Shift to economical alternatives. If your branding message was dependent on high-cost traditional media such as television, radio and display advertising such as newspaper and magazine ads, consider shifting to online video and Flash ads. You’ll get at least the same visual impact — if not more — at a more economical cost and the added benefit of more targeted presentation.
The “killer app” of recession marketing.
We’ve presented three great marketing strategies you may already be familiar with and deploying. But there’s one concept that almost everyone knows about but few know how to implement effectively — social marketing.
Social networks utilize the inherent trust and interaction of groups with common interests. While this method of marketing tends to be counter to the CPM model of banner advertising and search marketing, it also depends on an abundant resource — groups of consumers — rather than one that is more scarce — advertising dollars.
And in a recession, social marketing programs that feature a measurable, results-driven strategy are effective because:
- they leverage the voice of individual consumers interacting with others who share common interests,
- they target consumers in the middle of the buying process more effectively and
- they are cheap to run (in relation to more “new” media and certainly traditional media sources).
So, what’s the next step?
As fate would have it, DC Interactive has a rather unique strategy in development that utilizes many of the ideas presented in this article. In fact, we’ve shown you barely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Contact us today to learn more about our innovative Advanced Media Marketing Program and never fear recessions — and other scary economic situations — again.
The Digg Effect: Welcomed or Dreaded?
This week, we’re talking about a web marketing concept that a lot of readers may have heard of, but aren’t exactly sure how it is used or what the practical applications are. Well, that’s where we come in!
Many of you may know about Digg and its close competitor (and, in some ways, complementary technology/site), del.icio.us. First a primer on what exactly these are to bring the rest of the class up to speed:
Digg (located at Digg.com, but also a technology that can be incorporated into a separate web site) allows web surfers to vote (called “digging”) on the popularity of specific content (like a blog article, news release or other news-type information).
Articles can be submitted to Digg.com where they are posted, (hopefully) read by Digg members and then voted upon for popularity. Members can also “bury” an article (the opposite of “digging” and often resulting in a submitted article going down in popularity), comment on it, share it with their social network of friends or associates or even embed it into their own blog.
Conversely, you can include the Digg badge on your site’s content, encouraging registered Digg users to digg your content, thus increasing its popularity. Articles are classified under certain topics and those that reach a certain level of popularity (around 40 or more diggs, but this is a somewhat ambiguous number) reach the home page as well as topic-related pages.
Del.icio.us (also this site’s web address!), is slightly different from Digg. With del.icio.us, readers can tag an article they like and then bookmark it for others to see, called social bookmarking. Both sites tend to share some common features like sharing and commenting, and many think the two sites are fairly interchangeable.
But why should I care about Digg and Del.icio.us?
To begin with, there are an estimated 3 million registered Digg users. Seeing as Digg officially announced their one-millionth registered user one year ago in March of 2007, this chart shows a current growth rate of about 110,000 users a month.
Del.icio.us also boasts a high number of registered users, over 1 million as of September 2007, though it stated at the time that that number was three times as high as it was just nine months before (so, we would surmise del.icio.us’ user base to be at least 1.6 million as of March 2008.
OK, they’ve got the readers, what else?
Here are some interesting insights into what has been commonly called the “Digg Effect” from the popular blog, See One, Do One, Teach One (based on their experience of having their articled digged):
- The Digg Effect brings in a moderate amount of traffic to your web site.The relevancy and popularity of content published or referenced by Digg of course affects how many people, but the article’s author said he experienced anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 visitors per day which tapered off within a week.
- Expect some subscriptions and interest, but not overwhelming. The study found an uptick in inquiries and other interactions when content on a site gets Digg attention, but don’t expect 5,000 to 10,000 new prospects or customers every day.
- Comments on your content tend to occur back on Digg.com. There’s a commenting feature built into Digg (and del.icio.us), so a smart marketer monitors those discussions and makes sure their side of the story (if a comment is negative) or their kudos back to the commenter (if it’s positive) are stated.
- The Digg Effect tends to drop on the weekends. Which is good because a sudden influx in traffic to your site can severely tax a web server that isn’t used to that type of volume.
- Your Google page rank can be affected by the Digg Effect. Or not. Sometimes it’s the article teaser back on Digg.com that gets the higher page rank even though your site contains the entire article. Yet another good reason why it’s important to be a part of Digg community and monitor posts relevant to you.
- Once an article is Digged, it shows up elsewhere. This is where del.icio.us comes into play. Presumably, if people like your content, they share it with others. So think “penetration” — using Digg and its brethren can gain you exposure on a much wider scale for a much longer period of time.
The practical stuff.
OK, so you have an inkling of what Digg does — it’s a way to bring awareness to content on your web site. And you can see there are potentially millions of people who will at least have some exposure to your content’s teaser if placed on Digg.com (and there are plenty of other competitor sites as well) itself. We’ve shown a few of the benefits, if even some aren’t 100% guaranteed.
The strategy to realize here is that content you publish has a much larger audience than the people who come to your web site. Social networking sites like these open you up to the world and if your content is well-received, you gain an untold number of advocates who recommend it to people presumably like them.
Add to the fact that sites like Yahoo and Google now employ Digg-like voting. Google especially seems to be experimenting with allowing searchers to vote on sites they list in search results, which Google then makes a record of and uses to adjust future search results for that searcher. Very Big Brotherish!
