Tag Archive for 'social media'

What Social Media Can Do For Your Email Marketing

Published on January 27, 2012 in Best Practices, Internet marketing and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing campaigns, newsletter, social media.

Before the rise of social media, email marketing was the only way to reach people who had shown enough of an interest in a business to visit the website but weren’t yet interested enough to make a purchase. Persuade those people to leave behind an email address and the company could return to them with a special offer or news of a product release and pull them back through the door.
Since social media?
Well, all of those things are still true.

Social media’s strength is that it allows marketers to access prospects all the time. It lets them respond to their comments and posts, entering into the kind of dialogue that email marketing just can’t replicate. Lists (on Twitter and Facebook) and Circles (on Google+) let them target their messages, and social media has a much greater potential to send a brand viral than email marketing.

But those messages are often overlooked. While an email sits in an inbox until it’s opened, a tweet quickly disappears down a stream.
And while a Facebook page can generate lots of likes, the number of fans they collect is often smaller (and harder to convert) than the number of email addresses the company is able to collect.

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The Death of Email or Premature Mourning?

Published on June 29, 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: email dead, email marketing, social media.

Email is dead. Swamped by spam, afraid of phishing, and distracted by the latest social media gimmicks, internet users have abandoned email in favor of instant messaging, Facebook, and Twitter. Or so some websites would have you believe.

A WSJ article back in 2009 went so far as to say that email itself was dead.

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” – Jessica Vascellaro on WSJ

More recently, OracleDigital made a better case for the death of email marketing with statistics. The claim is that Social Media is rapidly displacing email marketing from its throne. To put it bluntly, email marketing is now a waste of resources, because statistics say so.

“…the average open rate of emails in the USA dropped from 14% in half 2 of 2007 to a humble 11.2% in half 2 of 2009.” – Clint Maher on OracleDigital

Statistics do not lie, surely. Or do they? Let’s find out.

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Has Social Media Replaced Email Marketing?

Published on June 22, 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: email marketing, email surveys, social media.

Do you worry about lagging behind other companies in the rush toward the social media marketing revolution? Or do you spend so long updating your status, posting, and tweeting that you have little time left to run your business? If we are to believe the hype, email marketing is outdated and a successful marketing campaign revolves around your company’s social media presence. But how true is that for the average business?

Only 5% of visitors to retail websites identify social media as their primary influence, according to a survey published in February 2011 by ForeSee Results, a global leader in technology-driven customer satisfaction analytics. Contrast that with 19% of visitors reporting promotional emails as their primary influence, second only to familiarity with the brand (38%).

Perhaps this should not surprise us when we consider consumer preferences. In a study published in April 2011, AOL and Neilsen identified that 66% of content is shared via email, compared with 28% on social networks. In the ForeSee Results survey, 8% of online shoppers identified social media as their preferred way to interact with a retailer. Promotional emails came out on top with 64%.

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Put the Right Content in the Right Channels

Published on May 3, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: newsletters, rss, social media.

The biggest advantage that email newsletters bring to businesses is the steady contact with leads. Every week, a potential customer who has expressed an interest in the service you supply is reminded that you’re still there, still offering that service and still available for them.
It’s a method that can be hugely effective. Provided those leads read what you’re sending them.

But email isn’t the only way that businesses stay in touch with leads. They also write blog posts which they distribute through RSS. And they chat on Facebook and Twitter, a channel that allows for two-way communication and instant feedback.

All of those channels are useful but they also raise the risk that by the time the lead receives your newsletter, he will already have read your content when he clicked a link in Twitter or saw the post in his RSS reader.
In a recent newsletter, MarketingProfs, a marketing training company, described how sales firm The Loud Few raises its open and clickthrough rates above the industry average in part by ensuring that its newsletters contain exclusive content. “If blog visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and email subscribers all get the same information, a customer has little incentive to interact with you in every channel,” warns MarketingProfs.

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3 Ways to Deepen Your Reader Relationship

Published on March 22, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, newsletter, social media.

The effectiveness of an email campaign is usually measured in open rates, click rates, and eventually, sales numbers. But there’s one factor that affects those rates more than any other. It’s not shown on any stats page and it can’t be represented in numbers. But the depth of your relationship with your subscribers has a direct influence on their willingness to read your messages, click your links and buy your products.

Here are three ways to encourage your subscribers to welcome your emails:

Social Media/Email Interaction

Social media marketing and email marketing tend to be seen as two separate sales channels. The first is for brand-building and occasional link promotions. The second gives regular bursts of sales to carefully-maintained lists of leads.

But the two are connected. The friends and followers reading your tweets and Facebook posts are also the subscribers reading your emails.

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We are excited to annunce a new series of guest posts that will be authored by popular bloggers and internet business consultants.
Today's guest post is written by Dean Shanson, a professional writer and a regular contributor to some of the Web’s leading marketing blogs.

Guest Post: Put the Personal Power of Social Media in Your Email Messages

Published on March 15, 2010 in General and Guest Post. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, Guest Post, social media.

One of the changes that social media has brought to marketing is that it’s made selling personal. Because tweets and even Facebook pages are created by individuals who display their photos and share personal details, they allow the entrepreneur behind the business to form a personal relationship with members of his or her market. Leads become friends as a way of turning them into customers.

That’s a powerful change. People usually do business with people they know, like and trust, so the ability to create personal relationships, even shallow ones, can create the kind of long-term connections that businesses need for reliable sales. That’s why the most successful commercial Twitter streams are those that allow the twitterer to mix personal comments with professional announcements. Starbucks do it well, and so do Zappos.

And email marketers can do it too.

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No-reply@ = No conversations

Published on October 7, 2009 in General and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email addresses, social media.

What contradiction! Many companies keep using a no-reply email address for their email marketing campaigns and then ask you to “Get Social” on Facebook and Twitter.

The no-reply@ addresses represent an old (and rude) practice that should be abandoned. Email marketing is, first of all, an effective way to build a relationship with your customers. So, if you have a no-reply address, it means that you really don’t want to talk to your subscribers (and potential clients). It’s a matter of credibility!

The best solution is to use your valid email address. If you do not want to receive the replies to your personal account, then use rules to filter out those messages or set up a new inbox and check it regularly.

We are living the age of Social Media. You should create response and help move the customer from awareness to interest and get them ready to hand over to sales.