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Digital Marketing - 5 trends to watch in 2011

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Published on Tuesday, 22 March 2011 01:19

There's no doubt about it - the digital marketing space is ever changing. We don't expect things to slow down for the rest of 2011. Here's our list of the 5 key trends that will impact your email marketing this year.

1. Mobile devices change the way we access content

With the launch of the iPad2 and a flood of competitor tablets in 2011, and the ubiquity of smartphones in the marketplace, mobile content will continue to expand. From email’s perspective, we can't deliver just for the desktop anymore.

Many mobile devices have become the user’s main access point to the internet and email. So it's essential that your email content is compatible for mobile devices. This should become a core consideration for your email strategy and design. Viewing an email on a phone or a tablet is much different than on a desktop. You’ll need to consider this when designing your email marketing offer and message.

With access to the internet anywhere and everywhere, location based marketing is also going to be a hot topic this year. Check-ins via Facebook Places and Foursquare, combined with local-offer services like Groupon will add a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for marketers. And look out for the rise in QR codes, as a way for marketers to promote themselves - anywhere and everywhere.

And let's not forget SMS here. SMS marketing continues to be an affective and affordable marketing channel, and will continue to be this year.

2. Email and Social Media - Two peas in a pod

Social Media isn't the "Next Big Thing". Facebook is approaching 600 million users and Twitter 150 million. Social Media is here and now.

What is new is the way that business are using social media marketing. In 2011 we will continue to see more brands integrating social media into their marketing plans. And providing innovative social media offerings to remain competitive. 2010 was a huge year for businesses using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their customers. 2011 won't be any different.

So what does this mean for email marketing?

It means that you really need to consider the social channel, and how to integrate with your existing email marketing. Think about incorporating Facebook ‘like’ and Twitter ‘retweet’ functionality into your content. Think about how your social channels can become a source for building your email marketing list. Together, Email and Social Media are a formidable duo.

But don’t let the shiny new tools get in the way of what’s really important. Whether it’s email, social media or traditional offline marketing, your business or brand needs to create a strong relationship reason with your customer.

Now more than ever, marketing is no longer a one-way street. Gone are the days of marketing as a broadcast mechanism. It’s a cliche, but marketing is about the conversation with your customer. So whether it’s email, facebook, twitter, or the next big thing - you need to be there for your customers when they need you.

3. Marketing Automation and 'Triggered' Campaigns

Triggered-based marketing — where a message triggered by an event or action, and sent to a specific person for a specific reason - is where the real power lies.  This can happen via email, SMS or MMS, and paves the way for automated one-to-one marketing.

Triggered messages can be anything from a simple 'welcome email', to a sophisticated follow-up campaign based on abandoned shopping-carts.

Automated triggered email can higher open and click-through rates, and up to 3 times the conversion rate of broadcast email. And the technology is now here to make triggered campaigns and “the right message at the right-time” a reality.

4. Message Deliverability won’t get easier

You could say that email deliverability challenges are a trend every year. 2011 is no different.

Email authentication has become increasingly important over the past five years, and this emphasis will continue in 2011. Authentication methods like DKIM will become universal, so expect to hear more about this.

We’ve also seen recent innovations, such as Gmail’s “Priority Inbox”, where ISPs are using metrics, like time spent viewing an email, and 2-way communication flow, to determine engagement, and ultimately delivery.

What does all this mean for you?

Unfortunately means that it’s harder than ever to send email. So you need an email provider that can handle the complexities of email marketing delivery.

It also means that you can’t rely on the “email blast” mentality anymore. Your content needs to be relevant and engaging, or you’re in danger of being penalised by the ISPs.

5.  Everything Changes. Yet Nothing Changes

Our last point isn't a trend per se. It’s more a reminder of that, despite the constantly changing digital marketing environment, many things stay the same.

Demand for our attention expands exponentially. So it’s even more important that our marketing message cuts-through the clutter. But to do this, there are tried and tested marketing principles that you can continue to rely on. Here are just a few:

Segmenting your audience – Segmenting your customer database is essential to being relevant. If you’re not doing some sort of customer segmentation already, 2011 is definitely the year to make a start.

Having Good Content - Content has been ‘King’ for a while now. But content strategy became a hot topic in 2010, as marketers realised that great content is key to online marketing – not only to engage your customers, but to improve your SEO and social media efforts as well.

Testing and Optimising - The real benefit of online marketing is that you can continually improve your results by testing and refining your campaigns.

Whether its email, mobile or social media marketing, make sure that you are tapping into the wealth of data available – so that each campaign works better than the last one. A/B split testing, and other testing techniques will become more common. Expect to hear more about these in 2011.

Being Human - When it comes to marketing, it's important to show your human side. Don’t forget to be personable. You’re not a faceless company, so speak with a human voice and don’t take yourself too seriously.

What’s New with Insermo?

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Published on Thursday, 10 March 2011 03:23

Insermo is just over one year old. 2010 was all about bedding down the basic feature set, improving product usability, performance and stability – and a few bug fixes along the way. In 2011 we have some exciting plans. Here's an overview of some new features, and a preview of our product roadmap for the year.

New features

The year has certainly gotten off to a busy start, as we've been working on handful of exciting new features, including:

• Signup forms

We've just launched our Form tool, which will allow you to create sign-up forms, and other forms and place them on your website, your facebook page, or anywhere else. You’ll then be able to use these forms to capture new signups for your email or mobile marketing campaigns. Stay tuned to the blog over the next week for some more detail on how you can use forms.

• Global Unsubscribe

Released last week, Global Unsubscribe will help you manage your unsubscribes across all lists in your insermo account.

• Triggered Campaigns
  

If you're keen to take your email marketing to a new level this year, you might want to consider our new Triggered Campaigns - which allow you to send automated emails, SMS and MMS thorugh 'triggers' from your website, or replies from your customers.

We haven't released this to everyone right now, but we will be giving you more information soon about how triggered campaigns could work for you. If you are interested in speaking to us triggered campaigns, please feel free to contact us.

What's Next?

Right now, we're completing List Merge, a much needed feature that lets you merge your lists, and add new data to existing contact lists - and generally keep your customer database more clean and up to date.

We’re also building our Billing and Accounts tool, to allow you to purchase email and SMS credits within insermo. You’ll be able to upgrade or downgrade your account, buy more credits, and manage your account more easily.

And then?

Our roadmap for the rest of the year includes the following enhancements to insermo:

• Product Usability

Usability is something that we’re constantly working on. We ran some usability testing sessions at the end of last year, and gained a lot of valuable feedback. We’re making enhancements on an ongoing basis, to improve the overall user experience for you.

• Easy Content Creation

In the second quarter, we’re going to be focussing on the content creation side of things. As you know, email HTML is a difficult beast, and we want to make it easier for our users to create email content without the hassle of getting your hands dirty in HTML code. That’s why we’re looking at building a new email template tool. We also have plans to improve the Media Library, and give you the ability to test your emails across each major email client - all from within insermo itself.

• Advanced Features

Of course, we realise that there are a whole range of additional features that will give the advanced marketers out there more power. Here are some of the things that we’re planning to implement:

• Advanced list segmentation
• Advanced Reporting - including click-overlay reporting, and the ability to compare multiple campaigns.
• Campaign Optimization – using A/B split testing and other testing methods, you’ll be able to test and optimise your campaigns in realtime.
• Social Media - In 2011, digital marketing will be increasingly about the intersection of email and social media.  We want to build insermo’s feature set to play in this exciting area.

Custom Projects.

On top of all this, we like working on custom projects with our customers. Whether it’s an integration with your CRM or CMS, or some other custom functionality within insermo. If that’s something you might be interested in, please contact us.

5 proven tactics to stand out in the inbox

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Published on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 02:37

With so many incoming emails into our inbox, it's easy for yours to get lost in the crowd.

Using a few simple tactics, you can improve your email campaigns so that they capture the attention they deserve.

Your Subject Line is Your Life Line

Your subject line may be your first and only interaction with your customer. It's often the difference between your customers opening your email, or deleting it. So make it shine.

Descriptive subject lines are more likely to engage your recipients. Before reading your email, they’ll ask themselves, ‘What’s in it for me?’. With a descriptive subject line, you can provide them with a reason to read on.

Next time you send an email campaign, think about the content. Does it revolve around a particular theme? Is there an article that you want to highlight, or a new product that’s available? If your email newsletter's subject line is ‘Newsletter’, now’s time to change it.

When writing your subject line, don't forget to:

• Make it irresistible! If your subject is dull, re-write it.
• Keep it to 60 characters or less, including spaces.
• Be descriptive. What will really be of interest to your reader?
• Avoid words/phrases that are commonly associated with spam - you know the words we mean!

Introduce yourself

You want your customers to instantly recognise you, right? That's where the email "From" line comes in handy.

What name do your customers know you by? Is it your brand/company name? If so, this would be the ideal choice for your from name. Or perhaps it's a member of staff that deals with your customers? Use their name, rather than your company or brand, if it means more to your reader.

It's important to keep your "from line" consistent, so that your customers become familiar with you as a sender.

And remember - every from line needs a valid "reply-to" email address. Marketing is a conversation, and your reply to address is an important customer touch point. Always use a valid email address, so that your customers can contact you for further information.

Design for the Preview Pane

When sending email, you can never tell if your customers are reading the entire message, or just what appears in the preview pane. A typical preview pane is 250 - 300px, so you must assume that your recipients only see this.

That means you need this preview area to work hard for you. There's no room for waffle here. The opportunity to capture your audience is brief. So make sure your headlines and copy get straight to the point.

Your most important content should be displayed here. Pick the the single most important thing that you want to tell - and use this space to tell it. If you are using a call to action, it needs to be here too. More to read below? Provide links to entice the recipient to read on.

Email width is also important. Your readers won't want to scroll horizontally - so make sure that your template is no wider than 650 pixels.

Include important information as TEXT

Many email clients will disable images by default. Which means your readers don't see the the images that you've painstakingly included in your campaign. Your recipients will often need to download your images first, before they see the email as you intended it to be seen.

This is one of the reasons why you should use text to convey important information in your email. Make sure your headlines are actually text, and not part of an image. If you have a call to action button, include text-based link too. If you must use images, make sure you include relevant ‘ALT’ tags to describe them.

The other reason to use text? SPAM FILTERS!. An email with large images - or too many images - may never make it to the inbox. Spam filters will send this type of email directly to Junk.

Choose Quality over Quantity

Most readers never take the time to read your email in full. Instead, they tend to scan any email quickly. And if there's too much text, readers will lose interest and move on. When designing your email content, you need to keep this in mind.

Keep your email content brief. Don't include full articles. Instead, provide a short summary of each article using a catchy headline and some pithy teaser text. If your customers do want to read more, entice them back to your website for further information. And hopefully complete that call to action.

Unsubscribes - We've Gone Global

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Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 06:30

One of the most important things to remember when managing an email marketing campaign is your unsubscibes. Doing this ensures that you email lists are clean, and that you're abiding by the SPAM act.

So we’ve just released a new feature, “Global Unsubscribe” that will help you manage your unsubscribes across all lists in your insermo account. With global unsubscribe activated in your account, each recipient that unsubscribes from any of your lists will automatically be unsubscribed from all lists.

To activate this "Global Unsubscribes":

• Go to your settings area - from the 'Go' menu
• Navigate to "List Management"
• tick the "Enable Global Unsubscribes" checkbox.

That's it!

Where do I see my Global Unsubscribes?

Once you've enabled Global Unsubscribe, you'll notice a new list in the Contacts Manager window. It's called - you guessed it - "Global Unsubscribes".

This list is made up of recipients accross all of your contact lists that have previously unsubscribed to an an email or mobile campaign.

If a recipient is in this list, it means they won't receive anything that you try send them.

Is "Global Unsubscribe" for me?

Generally, we'd recommend that you activate this feature in your account. But we've given you the ability to turn this feature on or off. There are situations where you may prefer not to unsubscribe recipients from all of your lists - for example, If you send email marketing campaigns across different brands or companies from the one account.

Can I over-write this setting?

Of course! There will be times when you may need to remove a recipient from the Global Unsubscribe list. You can do this by right clicking on an individual, and clicking on "Re-subscribe".

We think you'll like the new feature. It gives you the assurance that you're not sending any unsolicited email or mobile messages. And helps you sleep better at night.