Posts Tagged ‘Email Marketing’

Buying “likes” on Facebook

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

facebook-like-buttonAccording to the Beatles, you “Can’t buy me love”. But companies are finding that you can buy “likes”. At least on Facebook.

I received this email from The Grove, a local “lifestyle” center in Los Angeles, offering to enter me into a $50 gift card drawing simply for “liking” them on Facebook. Picture 71I realized that over the past couple months, I’d been receiving similar emails with increased frequency.

Apparently, buying friends has now become an accepted strategy. And while our parents might scoff at the idea of purchasing relationships, it makes good business sense for a number of reasons.

  1. As marketers, buying leads is something we have been doing for generations. Long before the Internet and Facebook, we have purchased lists and given away trips as the price for getting people to listen to a timeshare pitch.
  2. Much of the time, the people you’re asking to “like” you are those with whom you already have a relationship. Take The Grove example; I’m already on their email list. So, since I’m open to receiving messages from The Grove, I’m a good candidate for “liking” them.
  3. It’s an inexpensive way to augment your social media presence and strengthen your online reputation. One or two $50 gift cards is a small price to pay to add hundreds of new people to your Facebook community.

So regardless of what the Beatles and  your parents told you, it might be time to consider offering an incentive to get prospects to like you on Facebook.

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Posted in Business, E-commerce, General, Marketing/Advertising, Social Media, Trends | 1 Comment »

Email subject lines – size matters

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Email in InboxExcuse the bawdy reference, but it does the job. It gets attention while using the fewest characters possible. Which is the approach to take with email subject lines. A no-brainer? Perhaps. But if you look at your own in-box, whether it’s on Outlook, Mail, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, you’ll quickly see how some subject lines render more completely than others. Some will manage to get the whole message across while others get truncated, leaving off critical pieces of information. This can be due to the email client/provider, in which subject line character limits may range between 40-50 characters.  Or it can be due to the the size of the user’s screen.

Consider this 72-character subject line, and see what happens as it begins to get truncated.

New herbal fresh soap available at special price at your  local Harry’s (full length)

New herbal fresh soap available at special price a (50 characters)

New herbal fresh soap available at speci (40 characters)

Also, be sure to place as much critical information at the beginning of your subject line, rather than at the end as a hedge against important content being truncated. In the examples above, the name of the retailer gets chopped off, as does the “special price” reference in the 40-character version. Those are pretty important pieces of information that the marketer surely would want front and center.

In a recent  Email Marketing Reports post, Mark Brownlow offers up this free Excel spreadsheet that shows you how your subject line looks at any length between 10 and 125 characters. It’s a great tool that’s definitely worth downloading.

Bottom Line

  1. When writing email subject lines, keep character count limitations in mind.
  2. Put the most important information up front.


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Posted in Business, Email Marketing, General, Marketing/Advertising | No Comments »

Email marketing suicide; a step-by-step guide

Friday, October 9th, 2009

gravestoneOh sure, anyone can implement an effective email marketing campaign that offers great ROI. But what if you’re looking to tank your email campaign? Not so easy, is it? Don’t worry, Andrew Kordek from Deliverability.com has outlined nine basic steps guaranteed to sink your campaign. In a nutshell:

  1. Boast to your subscribers about your prowess in email marketing. And do it often. They really care about this.
  2. Forget about what your subscribers want; you’re in this to generate revenue. So, be sure to send them an email everyday and eventually they’re bound to buy something. Or opt out.
  3. Remember, you’re not really sending emails or communications, your sending “blasts” and all that the name implies. Get those subscribers in your sights and blast and blast away.
  4. You know all those white papers, articles and blogs that cover email marketing best practices? Print them out and turn them into paper airplanes. C’mon, no one knows better than you anyway.
  5. People signed up for your email so they must obviously want it. They crave it. That said, don’t spend too much time thinking about what you send, they’ll be happy to get anything. They’re so needy.
  6. Don’t waste money on an email expert to run your program since any bozo can do the job. No bozos around?  Grab someone from the mail room; they’re experts with the mail, right?
  7. Choose an email service provider based on the following criteria: A) they can send email, and B) they are the cheapest ones around. Don’t be bothered with trivial things like does their user interface and service support suck.
  8. Never grow your list organically when you can buy a list with 4 million opt-in names for just $99. Hey, who doesn’t love a bargain?
  9. And finally, be sure to let your CMO or president tell you how to run the show. Just because he or she does not fully understand what you do, that’s no reason to think they can’t do it better.

Pearls, indeed.

Click here for Andrew Kordek’s complete post.

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Posted in Blogging, Business, E-commerce, Email Marketing, Fun, Marketing/Advertising | 1 Comment »

Don’t argue with your database

Monday, August 17th, 2009
Image courtesy of Instructables.com

Image courtesy of Intructables.com

Common sense, right? If one of your email subscribers requests to be removed from your list, and even mentions that they never signed up in the first place, you remove them promptly with no questions asked. Perhaps you even add an apology for any misunderstanding.

You and I know this, but apparently, not all companies do. Read on.

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Posted in Business, Email Marketing, Marketing/Advertising, News | 2 Comments »

Testing, testing: The case for A/B email testing

Thursday, August 13th, 2009
Image courtesy of Creative Commons

Image courtesy of smoothtransitionslawblog.com

We’re all aware that email marketing is one of the most cost efficient and effective ways to reach your target audience. But if you’re not conducting A/B tests, you could be short changing your open rates, click-through rates and conversions. Creating two different versions (A and B) of your email and sending each to a different half of your database allows you to easily see what resonates with your target and what doesn’t.

Treat it like science
A/B testing provides an objective way of evaluating message effectiveness in what is traditionally an intuitive creative process. As such, it’s important to approach your tests like a true science experiment. First, send out a well executed eblast that will serve as your benchmark, against which you’ll measure the results of your A/B test.

The next step is to optimize/modify two new versions of the eblast to see how the change impacts the results. For example, you may want to experiment with two different subject lines, the placement of a button, the call to action, or simply the background color. What’s important to remember here is that for a true A/B test, you should only test one change at a time. That way you can clearly determine which change is influencing the target’s behavior.

See what pulls
Once you have these two new and different versions, deploy each to one half of your database and see how the results compare to your benchmark figures. Look at how many people opened each email, clicked through and converted across the call to action. This analysis will help you identify fallout points which influence where and what you should focus on for subsequent A/B tests. From there, you can continue to modify the message or design in your quest for even better results. But remember, only one change at a time.

Broader application
A/B testing isn’t just for eblasts. You can apply the same techniques to landing pages, web banners, paid search ads and more.

The bottom line
A/B testing makes sense for a number of reasons. It allows you to prove a point that may not have been supported by empirical data in the past, e.g. this headline will pull better than that one. Plus, it adds a level of accountability to the process which may, eventually, help you build a bigger interactive marketing budget. And who couldn’t use that?

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Posted in Business, Email Marketing, General, Marketing/Advertising, Technology | 2 Comments »

The decline of direct mail and the rise of social media

Monday, June 29th, 2009

No surprise here, as social media commands more marketing focus and funds, resources dedicated to direct mail are in decline. In a recent Email Insider post, Chad White discusses this shift and its many impacts.

The current recession has accelerated the shift to digital media and marketing. Recently, Borrell Associates predicted that advertising revenue from direct mail is expected to plunge 39% by 2013. Email was singled out as the key beneficiary of direct mail’s decline

Read the entire article here.

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Posted in Business, Email Marketing, Marketing/Advertising, Social Media, Technology, Trends | No Comments »

Streaming video in your email

Monday, June 29th, 2009

It’s perhaps the last frontier on the email front; messages with streaming video directly embedded. And with developers already testing systems, it isn’t far off. Below are excerpts from recent MediaPost article by Elie Ashery highlighting the advances of two developers:

Gmail recently announced a new “Labs” feature allowing users to preview YouTube videos in emails. This technology is currently only for Gmail users, and is limited to YouTube videos, but it stands as significant progress in the move towards true video embedding.  Many marketers are experimenting with Gmail-only campaigns, segmenting their lists for gmail.com subscribers and embedding short video clips as part of the campaign.

GoodMail Systems has also found a way to insert and play videos from email messages. The CertifiedVideo platform enables qualified senders to incorporate rich video and audio content directly in email messaging, without additional mouse clicks and pop-ups.  CertifiedVideo is based on GoodMail’s core CertifiedEmail technology with the addition of a new CertifiedVideo tokenclass. Senders’ messages are delivered directly to the inbox and ISP restrictions are lifted, enabling video to be instantly viewed by recipients. CertifiedVideo supports streaming and progressive download of .SWF and .FLV files, playable in Adobe Flash Player. If you qualify for GoodMail services, you should definitely take a look at CertifiedVideo.

Read the full text of the article here.

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Posted in Email Marketing, Marketing/Advertising, News, Technology | No Comments »