I’ve just come back from a branding conference in town and find this all time best quote that I think puts branding in its place.
I found it on the new Brian R Richards Web site, check them out here. And while you are there subscribe to the newsletter here, it promises to be a good read.
Back from an Easter break and I can confirm that 38% of the email messages I received while I was on my break were SPAM. Yep over a third that made it down to New Zealand were a waste of the traffic expended getting them there.
However this stat is nothing compare to my letterbox. While clearing this space early this morning I note that 100% of the paper contents were the physical SPAM, not a proper letter in there at all.
But I suppose we are conditioned to accept this now?
I hate SPAM as much as the next person, but where’s the legislation to stop all the unwanted physical stuff arriving? The waste of a few bytes is small fry when compared to the paper rubbish that just keeps on coming.
The “From” address is one of the key areas you can test to increase both your open and click through response rates.
How you decide on what to put in this box relies on finding out if it is a person or the company itself that your customers have the strongest relationship with. This takes some research but as you will see it is time well spent.
For instance in one recent scenario a customer of Permission increased their click through rates by over 300% by finding the “hot spot” of where their customers wanted their email messages to come from. And when you crunch the numbers in yesterday’s calculator that increase corelates to a sizable reduction in the cost per click of the campaign.
So next time you are planning your next campaign, ask yourself (and even better your customers themselves) the question of where they see the connection point that best binds their relationships with your business? You may be surprised in their response.
Here’s a very simple interactive calculator I have produced to help you see the financial side of email marketing. Have fun.
This post is in both text and as a short video here.
I am working on a few online lead generation projects at the moment. Part of this process is brainstorming out what pieces of content could really help propects with their decision process and therefore provide enough value to become lead generation winners.
These sessions are all about taking away what we know of the product or service we are working on and replacing this with a strong understanding of how the prospect will decide what to buy and what this decision will mean in the grand schemes of what they want to achieve.
A great friend of my recently reminded me that during this process we shouldn’t forget that usually a product or service can be just a small part of the solution a customer is wanting to achieve. And therefore some of the best content pieces are not just to do with how your product can be used but perhaps something that represents part of the whole solution.
For instance, say you sell software to help design furniture. The obvious content area for this is a white paper that lists out what such software needs to include. However designing furniture in the most efficient way using a package like this is just part of the process of producing a winning product. You could offer lead generation content that offers ways to run brain-storming meetings to start the design process off? Or even how to survey your customers to find out what needs to be included in the proposed design makeover?
Each of these two pieces show to your prospect that you understand the full process they need to go through to achieve their ideal result, not just your product piece of the pie. And achieving any emphathy like this goes a long way in online marketing.
It has been a long time between posts but I have to comment on this one.
When a local press release is titled “Permission Email Marketing Gathers Pace” I’m all ears, this has to be good news for online marketing.
Well it is BUT I’m not sure about the headline. Here’s why.
As far as I can see this describes how you can rent a list of people that have chosen to receive offers from companies like yours. They do this because they can build up their own loyalty points that they can later redeem for prizes.
As a marketer you don’t know who these people are. You can, however, buy the right to send them messages about your product or service.
Yes it’s not spam – they have opted in to receive the offers – but is it Permission Email Marketing?
I always thought there was more to Permission Marketing then just not being seen as SPAM.
The Seth Godin theory had people joining your list and you nurturing them through various stages of Permision as they began to become more likely to either buy for the first time or keep buying if they are already a customer.
Two things of note here. First, it’s a multi-staged approach. Second they need to be on your list for it all to work out.
So well done to the guys for giving us access to a list of people we can correctly use for lead generation. It’s a great resource for those wanting to bolster their own Permission Email Marketing plan with a few likely prospects.
One of the recent clients of Permission is the University of Auckland, External Relations Department. This team is responsible for keeping in touch with the thousands of graduates spread around the globe. Here’s a copy of their latest newsletter that was released last month. Are you a graduate that wants to remain in touch? You can sign up here.
Text and HTML which formats do you need to publish and how are they both delivered successfully?
This whirlwind whiteboard session explains in just over 2.5 mins how most email production systems deploy both and the way in which each manages to be viewed with a reasonable level of success by your subscribers. Have fun.
Improving your own email marketing is not always about the big changes you make. New tools, better designs and even a re-designed web site are all fine and dandy but these take time to implement.
It could, however, be just as easy as altering the lead in paragraph to your welcome message. Or maybe taking a bit more time developing the content you intend to send out in your next message. This great article on slow cooked success talks about musicians but the theory works well for those in online marketing.
Improving your efforts by just a percentage point each day can be much easier than working towards those big wins.