Internet Marketing

As you can see I know what its like to sweat over the keys as you are just about to send out your latest email marketing campaign.

Within a few minutes tens of thousands of customers are going to see all your efforts climbing into their Inbox. Good or bad, the process of getting the message from you to them will be done and dusted in a few minutes rarely allowing you enough time to alter things mid-course if there is a problem.

A while ago I put together this check list as start that I follow when pushing out a campaign. Have a look and let me know if there needs to have more added in.

Earlier on in the year my company, Permission, helped Teltherm Instruments get up and running with email marketing. Last week I asked Michael McLean, the person responsible there for working on this project, to summarize the benefits the project has delivered on.

These are his comments:

“We now have the ability to reach and inform our clients more regularly both here and in Australia. Plus online marketing has enabled us to increase and maintain our profile as a manufacturer and distributor in the market place allowing us to easily produce campaigns to cross sell to our existing client base.”

Here’s a link to their latest newsletter

Webinar tomorrow: Avoid the six most common mistakes in email marketing to be held on Tuesday Feb 22 @ 2.00pm New Zealand time

Here’s a link to a FREE 30 minute webinar I will be running tomorrow afternoon for those wanting to come along.

Just use your name as the username. (It may pay to check that you can get in OK prior to us kicking off tomorrow at 2.00pm.)

This webinar is based on the six most common mistakes I see people make in their email marketing - and how to avoid them.

It costs nothing to attend and could help you avoid making a mess in your customer’s Inbox.

There is space for just 10 attendees. You will need speakers and an Internet connection to join us in this session.

All the best,

Chris

—Thanks for all those that managed to come along it was a fun session—

Bill McCloskey, Media Post, recently published an article concerning his experiment on trying to sign up for 246 different brands emails in the apparel and accessories market sector. There’s a lot in the article about the non use of email and how just 1% went the double opt in way but the bit I liked was the automaton voice that seemed common across mostly all of the welcome messages.

Here’s a snapshot of his comments.

“Thank you for registering with (brand name)! Your email address: (email address) The next time you visit www.(brandname).com, simply click on “log in” to use your registered features. ”
What does this e-mail tell me about the brand I just signed up to receive updates on? What does it tell me about the relationship this brand wants to establish with me?
Here is a perfect opportunity wasted. I have the opportunity to communicate one-on-one with a customer and I’m pretty much guaranteed they are going to read it since they just left my site. And how do I take advantage of this direct contact? I do nothing. I blow the opportunity. I waste a great brand-building moment.

Yep I think he’s right on the money. How well does your welcome note welcome people to the brand????

“It’s a lot more complicated that I thought”

I frequently hear this statement from marketers just kicking off with their own email marketing. Well I’m sorry to say but it’s getting more complicated by the day. For instance the issue of improving your chance of your email messages being successfully delivered involves a bucket of more complication.

And if you wondered why this is worth any more of your brain power then check out this comment.

“The main hurdle e-mail marketers face in the next 12 months is e-mail delivery,” from a Dec. 23, 2004, report from JupiterResearch. In a recent executive survey, “57 percent of e-mail marketers said it would be their biggest challenge during the coming year.”

Here’s two articles to help you pick up the basics on the main concepts floating around the web on technologies being used by ISP’s when they are determining how to treat your messages. Both written by Jeanne Jennings hosted on Click Z

Part one : SPF

Part two: Sender ID

Have fun

You see I’m struggling to deal with the present norms of traditional advertising.

This rather obvious insight came to me after being force fed my third same TV advertisement from a global fast food giant that told me why I should be interested in knowing that they now use 100% vegetable oil in their cooking.

Every time it came to a break there was the ad – repeating the same message – trying to drum the message home into my rather tired subconscious mind.

While it became a pain, the program it interrupted was worth watching so the pain was worth suffering just one more time. Even though it was probably just 45 seconds long, on the third take the ad felt like an eternity.

So let me just hit out with four points that show how this message would fail when turned “as is” to email, and then I’ll wrap up with how it could have worked so much better when re-crafted and dropped into a willing Inbox: -

• Firstly the obvious one. It was broadcasted to many luckless souls that had no chance to filter it out – in email land we know the four letter word that this is now thought of, SP__

• Secondly it repeated the same point. It repeated the same point. It repeated th___. See how there is no room for repetition in email communications? Yes you should make your point clearly but don’t continue to make it again and again. Subscribers get bored and bored subscribers turn off.

• There was no WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) message in the content. 100% vegetable oil. So what!! Such a lacking of WIIFM would normally produce an email message that bombs.

• And finally there is no compelling “program” to sandwich these types of messages between.

If you were a marketer with a list of those wanting to hear of news from Global Giant fast food then a tweaked email message could have hit the mark so much better.

Then you have the space to really expose the lacking WIIFM and tell the real story on why 100% vegetable oil is such a good thing. (The TV ad failed to point this out – making the unknowing like me wonder what all the news was about.)

All the work done in making the TV ad mildly amusing ( so that it could be consumed repeatedly without driving you insane) would have been ditched and in its place some good hard facts and research could have been uncovered on why vegetable oil is such a good thing to have around your fast food.

The message would have replaced humour with reasoning and logic.

And by doing so subscribers would have thought that Global Giant fast food was a business that cared about their health instead of one that just plain annoyed them again and again with their TV ads (now there’s a bit of advertising brand affect worth thinking about).

Nuff said.

Feedburner has this neat application that lets you add a live scrolling image to your email signature that somehow polls your RSS feed and displays the most recent headlines. Look below to see it in action.

It’s neat and lets all the work you do posting spread out to those in email land.

I wrote this article a while back to further discuss the problems that browsers bring with them as they arrive on your web site. The other day it was published in the XtraMSN business section.

Here’s an audio post (2.44 mins) on why I think this is worthy of a read

My second video post after a ton of lessons learned. Here are some links to the tools I discuss. Find Camtasia Studio here and Sorenson Squeeze on this page.

Just click on the logo below, wait a few seconds and all should be revealed. (Just click again to pause.)

The February edition of our email newsletter has just been sent. Things have been busy and this is a good week late but here goes. Most of the content links back to specific articles on the blog BUT there is a short note on the webinar planned for later on in the month.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra has just published their latest email marketing newsletter. Permission joined forces with their own marketing team to help them harness the power of email and multimedia production. You can check out the second edition here. (Follow the left hand margin down and listen into some relaxing Debussy.)

The importance of testing the “From” address for your own email marketing is well known but surprisingly few marketers actually transform intention into action.

For those needing a prod in the right direction Chris Baggott’s post here explains some great reasons why perhaps your next email should be seen to come from the person your customer deals with the most rather than the name of the business they are buying from.

No surprise here, people buy from people not companies.

And yes this may mean a bit more work in the production of the campaign (merging multiple From addresses based on the profile of your subscriber) but in the drive to increase response rates it may be one of the few small things you can do to improve results.

Things are getting better with the video production. Below is my eldest saying hello to here class, without the hum that we have had before.

Not to be out done here’s her youngest sister with a similar message. Yes she looks cute but don’t be fooled - this one has a temper you wouldn’t believe…

The quality is a bit furry, probably due to the low connection speed at home - I’ll put some more up tomorrow to see if it improves.

How does your email marketing make use of the Golden Hyperlink?

As much as you may want people to click on all the links you litter through your own email marketing there is a very high chance that they will choose just one. (Some of my recent research shows that up to 80% take the one click choice.)

So if they were to click just once, what should it be? By thinking this through you tend to focus in your message to one or two key points and for those subscribers with little time to digest your message (think all of them) this can only be a good thing.

When you have a list of two links (or ideally one) then make it a simple, easy to see option for subscribers to take. How to make it stand out? Blue text, underlined in the same color may be as old as the hills and I would drop it as quickly as I could if it didn’t work so well.

So why not look at all the links in your next newsletter, pick the top two and then make taking them an easy to follow action.

And when you are thinking about why you are trimming down the copy in your message remember back to the last email newsletter you yourself sent to the printer. It could have been a while ago.

I have been through this presentation from Clayton Christian time and time again and on each hearing I pick up something new on product innovation. It runs at a steady, informative and engaging pace, and worth a download to your ipod or similar.

So what has this got to do with email marketing??

Well as you can well imagine based on the value of this particular piece of content when the IT Conversations email drops into my inbox it receives a lot of attention. White papers, articles and webinars have all been used before to bolster up content but what about presentations from like luminaries that your prospects and / or customers may want to learn from??

I’ve been playing around interviewing people I find interesting, most of these are able to be accessed from this blog.

Perhaps some sort of audio content could be your next winning, attention grabbing piece to attract either new subscribers or convince those “sleeping”on the list to open and read your communications with a revised vigor.