Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

How to combine and empower twitter with email marketing

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

During the last couple of moths it looks like in every conversation that involves internet, marketing or both, there is always a common denominator, something everybody is talking about, that has become the hottest thing: twitter. It is almost impossible that a day passes without me reading a story or post talking about a new feature of twitter, new desktop application for twitter, a new iPhone app for twitter, some curious story about twitter, etc.

For me, twitter is a new way of communication, therefore, a new marketing channel through which I can engage with my customers and give them extra value. The fact that is new doesn’t mean that it replaces established marketing channels. That is the reason I wanted to write this post, and explain different ways to combine twitter and email marketing, and how they are more powerful together:

1. Add a link to your company twitter account in every email communication

Add a link in the footer of your newsletter or autorresponder to let your subscribers know that they can follow your company in twitter. You can also add a link to your company twitter account in your signature for transactional emails.

2. Link to your newsletter subscription landing page from your twitter account

It is also important that all your twitter followers know that they can subscribe to your newsletter to receive more quality content from you. So, from time to time, add links to your newsletter subscription form landing page. This way you are converting your twitter followers in your opted-in email subscribers.

3. Post links to your newsletter articles in twitter

Instead of only including one twtit that says: “Check out the latest newsletter”, try to send links to the individual articles of your newsletter over a period of time (a week for example). With a tool like Hootsuite you can schedule all the twits in advanced. This way you give more importance to each article.

4. Add a link in your newsletter articles so that your subscribers can easily “tweet” about them

The same way is important that you add a link in your newsletter to make easy for your readers to forward your message and increase virality, you should add a link that makes easy to your subscribers to twit about the articles in your newsletter. You just have to add a link like this one http://twitter.com/home?status=, and after the “=” you write your under 140 characters message. For example: http://twitter.com/home?status=How to combine and empower twitter with email marketing  http://ow.ly/5nOJ

5. Use twitter as a source of information to write better articles in your newsletter

Twitter is a great way to know in real time what your clients or subscribers think about your product or service, and also a channel to solve different problems and questions. Use this information to write articles in your newsletter with better information to solve those problems and questions and therefore giving more value to your subscribers with your newsletter.

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Posted in How to, Newsletter, email marketing, social media | 1 Comment »

9 ways to add more value to your newsletter

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

During the past decades, companies have relied on traditional advertising like radio catchy jingles, TV commercials, Press advertising, telemarketing, etc. The technique is to interrupt the radio listener, tv viewer, newspaper reader, with an attention grabbing ad to convince him to buy our product.

However, the consumer is getting immune to this traditional advertising, just completely ignoring the ads or blocking them with technologies like TiVo or DVR. Every day gets tougher to get the consumer’s attention, and the best way is adding value to the message.

The value – attention axiom works perfectly in email marketing. To build a solid permission –based subscribers list you must provide value, either by producing great content or through big discounts or offers in products that the subscribers are really interested in.

It is this perfect combination of value+permission what makes email marketing get great conversion rates and be a way to strengthen the relationship with your subscribers, getting your casual clients into loyal clients and loyal clients into evangelizers of your products.

Once the importance of value+permission is clear, here you have some tips on how to add more value to your newsletters:

1. Establish the right expectations

The subscription process is the first step of your strategy to get news subscribers. It is very important that you set at this point the right expectations about the content that the subscriber is going to get and the value that it contains for the reader. Also provide links to past issues of your newsletter so that subscribers can see exactly what to expect.

2. Have a Personality

The fact that you are producing a corporate newsletter doesn’t mean it can’t have a personality. You want the reader to feel that there is a real person on the other end of the newsletter. Establish someone as the editorial face and allow him to give it a more informal language, so that he gets closer to your subscribers.

3. Tricks, Tips and Best Practices

B2B newsletter readers love tips. No matter what profession, workers are always interested in receiving practical ideas and best practices that they can really use.

4. Statistics and Benchmarking

Your subscribers want to know how they are doing compared with other companies in their market. Providing Benchmarking information and industry statistics will keep your subscribers attention.

5. FAQ / Ask the expert

Articles devoted to answer questions are a great way to generate the interest of your subscribers and to establish yourself and your company as an expert in your field.

6. Case of study

Readers never get tired of practical examples of success stories and strategies, and they always want more and more.

7. Use your Click-Through Rate (CTR) data

Monitoring which articles are giving you the most click help you to refine your topics and write more about the most interesting for your subscribers.

8. Use surveys

Send surveys a few times a year asking directly to your subscribers which content they prefer.

9. Partners, clients and experts

Solicit articles from your clients, partners and industry experts.

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Posted in Lists, Restaurants, Segmentation, Subject Lines, Uncategorized, mistakes, social media | 3 Comments »

Email Marketing for Hotels and Resorts

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Inspiring myself in this great post of Johana Cavalcanti about email marketing for hotels and resorts, I decided to write a series of post of the best practices of email marketing for different markets and sectors. All the business around tourism could generate great brand equity, more sales, more loyalty from existing customers and also get news customers, with a good email marketing program.

These are the few things you should know to start a successful email marketing program:

Create and build your own list:

It is very important that you build your list organically with the permission of all your prospects to send them de campaigns in order to get the best results out of your email marketing. The first step to start getting email addresses is having a clear subscriber form in every page of your website. To improve the subscription rate:

•    The subscription form should not be long. Not more than 5 fields. If it takes too much time to fill out no one will submit it.
•    You must clearly specify the benefits of been part of your list: better offers, special discounts, special information, etc.
•    You could encourage people to sign up by offering an extra gift like a travel guide or by entering a draw to win a price like a digital camera.

The hotels deal directly with the customer, what makes easy to get email addresses offline:

•    You can ask for email address during the check-in or check out
•    You can leave a welcome form in the room
•    You can leave a form on the table the first breakfast
•    You can have forms in the Gym, Spa, Golf, etc.

The trade shows are also a great place to collect email addresses offline.

Segmentation and Schedule

Setting the right frequency for your campaigns is key for the success of your email marketing program. Too many emails will get your subscribers tired of you, unsubscribing or even worse, flagging you as Spam. Sending a newsletter once a month is the best. You should schedule as well all the events, bank holydays, concerts, etc. in your area for special campaigns. You can also send a welcome message for the customers that are coming to the hotel in the following days and a thank you message a few days after they leave the hotel.

The segmentation of your list is also one of the most important things. Every campaign is not relevant or interesting for all your subscribers, that is why you have to segment your list by age, sex, interests, geographical area, etc.


The campaign creation

The sender and the subject of the campaign will be the first thing our subscribers will read, therefore the sender must be familiar to the subscriber and the subject must refer to the content in the campaign.

The layout of the campaign should be very similar to your web page, with the same logos and colors, and should at least have the next components:

•    Always send a text version of the email
•    Use the “alt” tag on every image
•    Always include a link to the campaign to be seen on the web
•    The main content should be in the top left corner
•    Always include a visible unsubscribe link
•    Include a “Forward to a friend” link

The Stats

Once the campaign is sent you have to check the next stats to know what’s happened:

•    Open Rate
•    CTR (Click Through Rate)
•    Conversion Rate
•    Unsubscribe Rate
•    Viral Rate
•    Bounced emails

All this data allow you to know what is more interesting for each of your subscribers, who is unsubscribing, who is forwarding your message, what is the best day and time to send the campaigns and much more in order to improve the campaigns, the content and also improve the segmentation of your list.

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Posted in Case of Study, Contacts management, Hotels and resorts, Lists, Segmentation, Vision and Purpose, email marketing, social media | 1 Comment »

How Apple could improve their email marketing

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I am a big Apple fan for a lot of reasons: the way they revolutionized the personal computer market, the way they revolutionized the Music industry, how they started a new revolution in the cell phone market, the design excellence of their products, the capacity to build a culture and a brand, and the list goes to the infinite.

Apparently Apple is a perfect marketing machine. However the last emails that I’ve received from them, shows me that they don’t get how email marketing has changed. They can improve a lot in this specific field. The last campaigns sent by Apple show an absolute lack of personalization and segmentation.  Let’s analyze the email I received from them during Christmas (it is in Spanish, I will translate):

The Subject: Equip yourself with Apple in 2009

I bought a MacBook from Apple store more than 2 years ago. Just taking this fact in account, the subject line would’ve been much more personal If they’ve written: Equip your MacBook for 2009 or Find the best accessories for your MacBook in 2009. Just this little of personalization of the subject line would’ve given a much better open rate, CTR and even conversion rate.

The Layout:

The first problem that everyone can see is that if you look at the email in your preview panel, with no images, the email looks empty. The main message is in a big image that doesn’t have an alternative text, so I cannot even intuit what is it about. The second big missing part is a link that allows me to see the message on the web in case my email reader cannot display the design properly. These two things can make your open rate drop.

Once we download the images of the email we can see a beautiful html design  (I don’t expect less from Apple), with a lot of  “call to action” elements that will lead me to the store.  However the design of the main message is more than 700 pixels wide, what will make me horizontal scroll to see the full message in most of the preview panels in email readers. That could be improved.

The Message

The thing that surprises me the most is the complete lack of personalization of the message. More than 70% of the email tells me about accessories for an iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch that I’ve never bought. Knowing that what I bought from them was a MacBook, they could’ve offered me the coolest, best sold, cheapest or whatever accessories for my already bought MacBook.   They could’ve even offered me to change my old MacBook for the new one.

That is not all. To the no personalization, I can add that the message had no value at all for me. They didn’t tell me about a special offer, a good discount or any valuable information for a MacBook user. They just blasted a publicity email with links to their online store, maybe to remind me that they have an online store. That doesn’t have any value. I know the online store is there. I’ve already bought stuff there.

Conclusion
I think Apple is taking advantage of their strong brand and is not taking care of the details like the one I just explained. Email marketing is an extremely powerful way to create and reinforce strong brands, establish relationships with the clients and in the end, increase sales. But you have to care about the details, care about your consumer base and care about your community, and this kind of impersonal email campaigns with no value are not the way.

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Posted in Case of Study, Contacts management, Segmentation, email marketing, social media | 2 Comments »

Email Marketing and Social Media, friends or enemies?

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

In the last year I have seen a big euphoria about the opportunity that social media is for companies as a marketing tool. There are a ton of articles and posts out there lately about how to use Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc, to build your brand, establish relationships with your users, and much more. Within that euphoria, I have heard voices claming that social media y the new king, and that email marketing is dead.

However, since the moment you need an email address to sign up for any social network, that is completely false. Email and social media are good friends and not enemies. Both of them have an important and different role within our online marketing strategy.

I see social networks as a party, where you meet a lot of people and get in a lot of conversations. That is a really good way to build a community and to find an audience. But, the people that really care about what you do, is the people who are going to sign up to your email list, and the people you are going to start a more direct and personalized relationship with, engaging them with the value given through your emails.

What do you think?

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Posted in email marketing, social media | 1 Comment »