The Whitelist

Reaching Your Subscriber Through Social Media Integration

It’s here to stay, and it’s growing by the day. You know what’s coming, don’t you? Of course you do: It’s social media! But even as social media continues to grow in popularity and effectiveness, email marketing can play along! In fact, as the social sphere expands, so too should your email marketing best practices. There are many ways to expand your email marketing best practices to incorporate social media within your email marketing campaigns, and we’ve written about five of them.

But today, I was revisiting a MarketingSherpa article on ways to leverage the influence of social reinforcement within email marketing, as I am still not seeing it used very much in the email marketing messages that populate my inbox. I have to wonder why, since there are so many interesting and even exciting ways to integrate social into email marketing.

But by enhancing your email marketing messages using interactive technology, your email campaigns can become a new addition to the social media landscape, not to mention a stand out from the rest of the email marketing messages out there.

The MarketingSherpa article discusses several new and innovative tactics for leveraging social media within email. Three of these that especially resonate with us, when considering how to best integrate social media into an effective email marketing campaign, are the following:

1) Choose an appropriate goal: While social reinforcement doesn’t make sense for every campaign or product, it can be quite powerful for the right goal, for example: you want to complement and grow your social media efforts.

2) Become a participant in the conversation: As an email marketer, you’re undoubtedly used to controlling the conversation. But when you’ve decided to include social reinforcement to your email marketing mix, you’ve also chosen to become more transparent. And, as MarketingSherpa says, “with transparency comes risk.” It’s time to shift the focus from control to participation. As a participant, you want to understand what’s being said about your brand or product.  And that can only lead to better email marketing campaigns, and ultimately, better email ROI. Because you’re essentially gathering data when you increase transparency and encourage conversation from your subscribers.

3) Choose the method of social reinforcement: Interactivity lets you dynamically update emails with responses from your audience, or those who influence them. Whether you integrate Facebook contacts, incorporate live feeds from Twitter or blogs, or dynamically update emails with responses, you’re increasing the interactivity and dynamic nature of your email marketing messages significantly. Integrating Facebook contacts is a truly innovative way to leverage the power of social influence into your email marketing campaigns. As MarketingSherpa puts it, “You can include code that allows recipients to see which of their Facebook friends have purchased the deal. Each time recipients open the email, they can view the latest updates.” And we are all learning the power of social influence: the more our friends “like” something and share about it, the more inclined we are to also “like” or purchase the same thing.

For more on how to integrate social into your email marketing campaign, or otherwise design dynamic messages, call on ClickMail!

The Value of Email in the Social Sphere

Even while social is getting all of the love, and there are endless discussions, newsletters, e-books, blog posts, and consultants that revolve around maximizing your social engagement impact on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, email manages to remain more relevant than ever.  As an email marketer, don’t be disheartened: never lose sight of the value of email.

Just remember: it’s actually because of social media that email marketing holds its power. While the purpose of social media is to engage and connect through conversation, email marketing takes it one step further: to conversion. A person’s email inbox is infinitely more personal than any social site they may be frequenting, and smart email marketers who follow email marketing best practices know this.

Even after discounting the volume of email messages that are made up by spam, email is used far more than Facebook and Twitter combined. How much more? Daily activity for Facebook is pegged at 60 million updates. Twitter sees about 140 million tweets per day. Email? 188 billion messages. Yes, that’s right: billion.

Smart email marketers can tap just a few of those billions of email messages as the most direct way to a sale. Email marketing best practices starts with good content, followed by an opportunity for conversation.

To see at a glance how valuable email is, check out this great infographic. Because nothing screams “email marketing is valuable!” better than this visual.

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/09/the-value-of-email-infographic.php

Five New Ways to Integrate Social Sharing Into Your Email Marketing Campaign

People are more social and sharing more than ever these days, and we’re not talking about online dating. Social media has gone from the fun and quirky time waster your college-age nephew holed up with instead of writing term papers to one of the most important communication strategies every company from your favorite local mom and pop shop to market-dominating multinational corporation now integrates into their marketing platform. And the social media sites abound: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr…the list of social networks goes on and on! But email marketing programs shouldn’t be left out in the social onslaught. Only with an email opt-in do you have permission to send the kind of highly-targeted, relevant messages that help turn prospects into customers. In fact, 75% of social media users still said that email is the best way for brands to communicate with them, according to a MarketingSherpa survey.

It’s because of this that email marketing best practices dictate that integration of social media into your email marketing messages is a necessity, not an option, for a successful marketing campaign.

Here are five new ways to start integrating social media into your email marketing campaigns:

1) Incorporate social sharing in all email communications: Give your subscribers every opportunity to share your email messages with their social network. An email without social media sharing options is essentially an island, seen only by the eyes that scan their inbox. But with social sharing possibilities, the content in your email marketing has much better potential to be shared. Just think of email-social integration as extending the reach of your email marketing: with more shares, you’ll see more leads, subscribers, and friends and followers – altogether, more opportunities to increase awareness of your brand.

2) Create an email sign up page on your company’s Facebook page: This is a simple but effective way to tap into the power of Facebook by allowing new email subscribers to sign up easily, without having to go to your website.

3) Grow your email list by enabling a newsletter signup everywhere: Using social media to emphasize and publicize your targeted email newsletter will provide your prospects, current followers and customers with easy ways to sign up for emails, whether they find you via your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, or any other social media outlet that supports sign-ups. Providing an email signup link everywhere you have a social presence is the easiest way to collect new subscribers and followers.

4) Incorporate “share to social” and tracking functionality from your ESP: Different ESPs take different approaches to social media marketing and the sharing tools they offer as part of their ESP platform. Ensure that yours has a network share function that works with your email marketing goals.

If your social marketing initiative is simply a “Like” button integrated into your email design, your needs are less than a business that has identified several different social networks they want people to be able to post to. Instead, ensure that your offerings match your consumers’ needs and usage and that you have a plan for tracking social sharing and measuring its effectiveness, which is something most ESPs should be able to provide for you.

5) Cross-channel marketing with repurposed content: If you aren’t yet integrating your blogging, social media, content marketing and email programs, you’re probably not making the most of all of the effort you’re putting into creating content. Post your emails to blogs. Repurpose your newsletters as articles. Link to your blog from your Facebook page. Make your emails share-worthy.  For more specific tips on how, see our post on creating effective, multi-pronged content.

By allowing your recipients to distribute your emailed content to their social networks, you’ll be leveraging the power of your email list and the reach beyond it. Incorporating social elements into email messages makes consumers even more engaged with their email inbox, and makes each of your subscribers a potential asset in your marketing campaigns.

Keeping Email Marketing Relevant Amidst the Social Sphere

Lately, buzz isn’t buzz unless it contains the word “social.” Social media, social sharing, and social sites are getting all the attention while email marketing is ignored.  But is email marketing fast going the way of the pony express (which is to say, down the road to extinction)? Absolutely not.

In fact, thanks to social media and all of other social sites proliferating daily, email marketing is more powerful than ever. The purpose of email marketing is different to the purpose of social media, and this small but important fact is getting lost in the “social” hubbub. Social media is about conversation and connection, and email marketing takes that conversation one step further: to conversion. A person’s email inbox is infinitely more personal than any social site they may be frequenting, and smart email marketers know this.

Savvy email marketers understand what makes email marketing the most direct line of communication to a sale, and how to utilize it in the most cost effective way. They understand that effective email marketing is all about good content, followed closely by an opportunity for conversation.

Your subscribers initially signed up with you because they wanted something from you. They believe you have something of value to them, whether that’s a great product, useful information, excellent deals, or leading industry news. In a show of trust, they provided their email address to you, for a true value-exchange. Reinforcing this message through a consistent and effective multi-pronged content strategy will strengthen their trust in you.

But what do we mean by multi-pronged content?

• Effective subject line writing: Many don’t consider subject lines when they think about “content” but subject lines are content too! Furthermore, it’s important content. This content is what leads to increased email open rates. For the “magic” subject line words that almost always lead to an opened email, see our recent blog post.
• Your stylistic flair: Is your email easy to scan? Is it optimized for both web-based email and mobile viewing? For more on how the overall look of your email can help – or hurt –your email campaign see our recent blog post on Typography.
• A unique voice: The overall readability of your content should be consistent and unique. Does it flow well? Is it concise, witty, smart, and/or snappy? It doesn’t have to be ALL of these things, but your content should carry a unique and identifiable voice, and ideally, the voice should be accessible to all of your readers.
• Quality content: What are you communicating? Your content should be niche-specific, and interesting. The better quality content you provide, the more click-throughs, forwards, and social shares (yes, we’re back to social!) you’ll receive, which all serves to reinforce your effective email marketing campaign!

If you need help developing an effective email marketing strategy, give ClickMail a shout: this is what we do. We love talking content and email marketing strategy, and we love to help!

Win More Follower and Fans With This Webinar

If your company is like most, you spend a lot of time and money encouraging people to become email subscribers, Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers. These aren’t simply numbers. You don’t make more money just because you have more subscribers or fans. You should! But there’s no guarantee.

The difference is in the relationships, and looking at these people who say “yes” to you as people to build relationships with, not numbers to tout. This has always been true of email marketing best practices. Now it’s true of social media best practices too.

On March 15th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, ExactTarget will delve into this very topic. This webinar is your chance to learn:

*         How and why consumers engage–and disengage–with brands online

*         Strategies for maximizing the unique strengths of Email, Facebook, and Twitter

*         The classic mistakes marketers make with Email, Facebook, and Twitter

Plus you’ll get infographics from ExactTarget’s latest consumer survey…exclusive infographics no one else will have access to.

ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series is “a groundbreaking body of work that sets aside theories, assumptions, and widely-held beliefs to find out the truth about how consumers engage-and disengage-with brands across Email, Facebook, and Twitter.” This critical webinar is part of this groundbreaking work.

It’s offered by leaders in the email and email best practices space and it’s free. There’s no reason not to listen in on this webinar…and countless reasons to do so!

Register at http://pages.exacttarget.com/sff8-webinar?SourceID=CLICKMAIL.

Email Use Going Strong, Just Changing, So Keep Up!

Everyone loves drama (hence the popularity of reality TV!), so I don’t think the cries of email’s demise are going to end any time soon.

Therefore it will remain our job as email marketing vendor to watch for the signs that prove otherwise. eMarketer just published more numbers that disprove the naysayers who keep sounding the death knell for email.

Although web-based email use might have declined, that doesn’t mean email use itself has declined. Keep in mind the continued growth in smart phone use and the numbers of people checking email on a handheld device.

And the numbers prove it. Email use isn’t declining but holding steady, according to the article:

“According to research from customer relationship marketing agency Merkle, 87% of internet users checked personal email daily in 2010, a number that has changed little since 2007. Among those with a separate email account for commercial email, 60% checked daily, down just 1 percentage point since 2008.” (Emphasis mine.)

Based on these numbers, email use has stayed pretty darn consistent! For over three years! That doesn’t look like a decline in use to me. How about you?

eMarketer also reports that social media users check their email more often, not less. Which makes sense when you remember that plenty of social media notifications are delivered via (gasp!) email.

Like I said, the cries of demise are likely to continue because bad news is more fun to report on than good news. But we email marketers can disregard the hand-wringing. Our job is to look at how email use is changing, not declining. Our email marketing best practices simply must adjust to things like mobile marketing and social media sharing.

Email use is going strong, even if it looks a little different. And email marketing best practices will ensure we continue to succeed as marketers, no matter these changes. We just have to keep up, not give up.

When It Comes to Metrics and Measuring ROI, Email Marketing Wins Over Social Media

For all the talk of email is dead and social media is the new marketing marvel, there’s one way email is still a far better marketing tool than social: the ability to measure ROI!

Try searching for information on how to measure social media ROI and your head will spin. First you have to be clear on what you mean by social media. Facebook? YouTube? Blogs? Then try and sort out the ROI and it’s hard! There are a lot of different ideas out there on what and how to measure, but nothing clear cut.

And it’s not just the ROI that email does better. Email marketing serves up all kinds of metrics you can act on. Plus when you combine those metrics with your web analytics, you can compile a treasure trove of data that will enable you to segment more, target better, and deliver even more email marketing ROI.

Plus being more mature, email marketing best practices have been refined, from email deliverability best practices to subject line best practices. You don’t need to fumble around or start from scratch. All the insight is there for you to draw from and implement, for better email marketing practices from day one.

As email marketing vendors, we are also fans of social media and encourage our clients to integrate their social media and email marketing programs. But when it comes to facts and numbers, and being able to tweak, test and target for better results, email marketing still wins over social media.

Does Your Vendor Just Stare When You Ask About Multi-Channel Marketing? Find a New Vendor

Walking around the DMA show last week, we were struck by all the social media companies and the marketing companies adding social media capabilities to their offerings.

Now is definitely the time to figure out your social media strategy, before it’s too late. If you’re an email marketer, ask your vendors about their social media integration and offerings. If they don’t have anything yet, ask about their roadmap.

If they give you a blank deer-in-the-headlights stare, find another vendor.

This is something you need to act on. Now. It wasn’t just social media getting all the focus at the DMA show, however. We witnessed plenty of multi-channel interest in offline marketing and SMS as well, which means marketers are being smart about making sure they’re tapping into every possible means of reaching their prospects and customers.

Because it’s not just segmenting and targeting to deliver relevant messages. How you deliver them must be relevant too, meaning the person who prefers email gets email, the one who prefers direct mail gets direct mail, the one who wants text gets that and so on.

We would never say email marketing best practices mean stick to email! Because relevancy is tops among email marketing best practices, and if that means a tweet or a text is going to be more relevant to a prospect, we’re all for it.

If you need help moving your marketing beyond email, let us know.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Integrate Email With Blog for More Impact

You might describe these days as days of social media mayhem. It’s literally everywhere. We’re reading about it, talking about it, worrying about it…

And we absolutely positively must be using it. Wisely.

Integrating with email is one easy way to tap into social media marketing. If you’re reading this email marketing blog, you’re probably already using email marketing for your business. So you’re halfway there. The next step is to combine your email marketing and social marketing efforts, by integrating your email program with your blogging program.

That’s the topic we take up in the latest ClickMail Marketer, your email marketing newsletter for actionable advice that helps improve your email marketing ROI.

This newsletter is the first of three on this kind of email integration. In the next two issues, we’ll give you ideas for combining your email marketing program with social networking sites, and then with traditional marketing. Subscribe today to make sure you don’t miss out on those valuable topics!

Learn how to integrate your email marketing and your blog for better email marketing ROI.

People Prefer Sharing Via Email Over Facebook: Long Live Email Marketing ROI!

A couple of years ago at a social media conference, I heard someone explain social media vs. email like this: “My boss emails me. My friends contact me through Facebook.”

That statement has stuck with me ever since, but I have wondered if that was a widespread attitude. I prefer email, still, and not just because I work for an email marketing vendor. Most of my friends and family still seem to prefer email over Facebook for communicating as well. They are all on Facebook. But they still use email for communicating more than they use Facebook for communicating.

So, are my friends and family an anomaly? Not according to eMarketer’s article titled “Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch.”

The eMarketer article says three-quarters of web users are likely to share content with friends and family, but most people still prefer to use email to do so, not social networking sites like Facebook.

Now, this is age specific. Not everyone prefers email to Facebook. But eMarketer says, “Only 18- to 24-year-olds use the social networking site more than email for passing items on.” Even that difference is small, with 76% using Facebook to share and 70% email. And my friends and family are older than that. Much.

This matters for email marketing ROI for two reasons. First off, it’s one more argument for compelling content. Almost three quarters (72%) said they shared content because they thought it was “interesting or amusing.” One more reason for timely, relevant content served up to segmented and targeted audiences! What we as the marketers think is interesting is far less important than what our recipients think!

Second, when someone does share your relevant, targeted content, those who do so via email are more likely to be targeted too:

“Sharing via social networks like Facebook, by contrast, typically involves feeding items to an entire friends list. The youngest users, who care the least about whether the recipients of their content actually want to see it, are also most likely to disseminate the information to the widest group. And the seniors and older boomers who find the recipients’ needs more important dramatically favor email for sharing, suggesting they are sending relevant items to only those who will want them.”

That means you get less quantity but more quality: Your email content is shared with fewer people, but those people are more likely to be interested in the content, which can only help your email marketing ROI.

Maybe all those claiming the end of email, and the “email is dead” journalists fall into that under 25 age group. In their world, Facebook is the communication vehicle of choice.

But for another 10 or 20 years, at least, their world is not ours. In our world, email is alive and well and thriving…for sharing among friends and family, for marketing to customers, and for assignments from the boss.

Long live email…and email marketing ROI!