Archive for July, 2011
We should approach email in the same way we do social – encourage conversations
Yesterday I attended Figaro Digital’s Social Media Conference. We had the pleasure of having Carrie Longton Co-Founder of Mumsnet and head of PR at Xbox, Paul Fox on the day’s panel discussion about “Home Truths: what families want from brands online”. Carrie Longton gave some insight into what families are looking for from brands but her point really rang true for all audiences and consumers of today. Basically audiences of today have grown up reviewing things. We are the blogger generation and are used to sharing our opinions. We like to know that we have a voice and this is essentially what brands need to think about when they are thinking about how to approach audiences of today. They need to think about facilitating conversation with their audience. This really is what social media is about and really should be how we approach our communications with our audiences in email too. It was suggested in a later presentation that email is a “tired channel”. While it may be true that email is a mature channel, it still delivers ROI and provides a great push channel for communication. The fact that email came up in every presentation of the day and is often the channel of conversion in the social media model supports this. This got me thinking, perhaps it’s more marketers approach to email that is tired rather than the channel itself?
We need to approach email with the same attitude as social and make sure our audience doesn’t see it as a one-way conversation. Did you know that 80% of brand communication nowadays is done by the consumers! When you look at it this way and in light of what audiences want, brands need to change their approach to email. You need to encourage dialogue in emails in order to engage with today’s audience, providing them with a platform to leave comment and have social sharing links within your email.
The shady subject of measurement came up too. Shady because many people are unsure how they should approach their KPI’s for social. Is it number of likes, number of mentions? Here another significant stat was brought to light – 46% of consumers who “like” are not willing to receive promotional communications. The scope of reach has changed for social – and I feel this should be taken on board for email too. It is not about how many you reach – it is about how many of the right people you reach – quality not quantity.
Over all the day was very insightful and I just want to say a big thank you to everyone at Figaro and all the speakers. The above were my main takeaways and I’d like to leave you (in the vein of the above) with the opportunity to let me know what you think. What do you think audiences want from brands?
Serena Elston
Marketing Executive
Embrace failure – it’s a necessary part of email marketing
New MessageFocus testing feature enables marketers to focus on successful campaigns and improve every time
Only with an ongoing testing strategy can email marketers identify failures and successes specific to their dataset, and then focus on the successes to improve response. Yet the Adestra and Econsultancy Email Marketing Census 2011 shows only a third of UK companies (32%) carry out regular testing for email marketing – which means most are broadcasting emails to their database, blindly accepting that they could be failing, with little scope to improve response rates.
The research also shows most testing that is carried out is around subject lines and spam testing, while only 40% carry out any A/B split testing. The importance of testing must not be downplayed – nothing is as effective at improving campaign metrics and ROI as testing. Testing email marketing means users can work out what works best for their audience, brand and organisation.
Henry Hyder-Smith, Managing Director at Adestra says: “Testing should be a part of every email programme and it’s our job as an ESP to make the process as easy as possible for our clients. Each email campaign is an opportunity to learn and improve. In a simple A/B split-test, identifying which dataset has the higher response rate, and which is a failure (with the lower response rate), can lift ROI with every single email campaign.”
With this is mind, Adestra has improved its split-testing feature as part of its new MessageFocus email marketing platform. Now marketers can easily incorporate testing with every campaign via an easy-to-use interface, in addition to seeing results in real-time as recipients react.
Complete email testing options with MessageFocus:
The MessageFocus split testing feature provides users with flexible options for testing different campaign variations. Tests can be as simple as a subject line A/B split test, or more complex multi-variant testing of the email content itself. This flexible feature allows users to send to all or a proportion of a list, with the option to automatically send the best performing variation to the rest of the list.
For more information, please contact press@adestra.com
SIPA annual congress 2011 – “Content remains king”
I attended the 17TH Annual SIPA congress yesterday (thank you to SIPA for a very interesting and insightful day) and it was so nice to see so many faces and hear about the challenges that many of our clients are facing.
David Gilbertson, the former chief executive of B2B publisher Emap, started the day by with a very clear message: “marketing is the way to monetise products. News is fine, but it has to change to be genuinely useful.” News and content is now available anytime, anywhere on many different media and the market has moved to giving content away for free, sharing and linking to rivals in a live stream of useful information to satisfy that need.
Susanna Kempe, CEO of the Emap-owned fashion trend forecaster WGSN followed this by saying,
“The interesting thing in today’s world is that the place for news is online and it’s breaking news. I don’t think there is a place for news to be provided on a weekly basis – news should be now, otherwise it’s not news!”
The conversations and presentations then focussed on the changing role of marketing, and the relationship between the marketing department and the editorial teams. The key to maintaining the relationship described by David Shepherd (Reed Business Information) is to work together to build that knowledge of readers and users.
However, with the enormous amount of knowledge we can gain about customers with complex profiling and segmentation, are we in the direct marketing dream or nightmare? It is marketing’s role to discover user interests and preferences using the information available, helping editorial to then refine messages and content based on this knowledge. This refined content will then generate deeper user engagement allowing the marketer to gain even more knowledge on the user. Thus leading to a long lasting relationship with the user and providing them with relevant information. With improved data comes endless possibilities.
Email has a key part to play as the main channel for delivering this content to users. Although sometimes the load and blast method is suitable, relevant content delivered in communications sent at the “right time” will deliver optimum results. Whether that is for acquisition or relationship building purposes, email is still the best way to reach users. Advances in email technology easily allows publishers to do this.
My key take away from the day was that “content is still king” and that email is still a key channel in delivering that content to subscribers, but it must be relevant and interesting to your target market for interaction to increase. If this happens, then marketing the product comes naturally.
Also, congratulations to all the SIPA UK 2011 award winners!
Reena Mistry
Marketing Director
We should approach email in the same way we do social – encourage conversations
Yesterday I attended Figaro Digital’s Social Media Conference. We had the pleasure of having Carrie Longton Co-Founder of Mumsnet and head of PR at Xbox, Paul Fox on the day’s panel discussion about “Home Truths: what families want from brands online”. Carrie Longton gave some insight into what families are looking for from brands but her point really rang true for all audiences and consumers of today. Basically audiences of today have grown up reviewing things. We are the blogger generation and are used to sharing our opinions. We like to know that we have a voice and this is essentially what brands need to think about when they are thinking about how to approach audiences of today. They need to think about facilitating conversation with their audience. This really is what social media is about and really should be how we approach our communications with our audiences in email too. It was suggested in a later presentation that email is a “tired channel”. While it may be true that email is a mature channel, it still delivers ROI and provides a great push channel for communication. The fact that email came up in every presentation of the day and is often the channel of conversion in the social media model supports this. This got me thinking, perhaps it’s more marketers approach to email that is tired rather than the channel itself?
We need to approach email with the same attitude as social and make sure our audience doesn’t see it as a one-way conversation. Did you know that 80% of brand communication nowadays is done by the consumers! When you look at it this way and in light of what audiences want, brands need to change their approach to email. You need to encourage dialogue in emails in order to engage with today’s audience, providing them with a platform to leave comment and have social sharing links within your email.
The shady subject of measurement came up too. Shady because many people are unsure how they should approach their KPI’s for social. Is it number of likes, number of mentions? Here another significant stat was brought to light – 46% of consumers who “like” are not willing to receive promotional communications. The scope of reach has changed for social – and I feel this should be taken on board for email too. It is not about how many you reach – it is about how many of the right people you reach – quality not quantity.
Over all the day was very insightful and I just want to say a big thank you to everyone at Figaro and all the speakers. The above were my main takeaways and I’d like to leave you (in the vein of the above) with the opportunity to let me know what you think. What do you think audiences want from brands?
Serena Elston
Marketing Executive
Embrace failure – it’s a necessary part of email marketing
New MessageFocus testing feature enables marketers to focus on successful campaigns and improve every time
Only with an ongoing testing strategy can email marketers identify failures and successes specific to their dataset, and then focus on the successes to improve response. Yet the Adestra and Econsultancy Email Marketing Census 2011 shows only a third of UK companies (32%) carry out regular testing for email marketing – which means most are broadcasting emails to their database, blindly accepting that they could be failing, with little scope to improve response rates.
The research also shows most testing that is carried out is around subject lines and spam testing, while only 40% carry out any A/B split testing. The importance of testing must not be downplayed – nothing is as effective at improving campaign metrics and ROI as testing. Testing email marketing means users can work out what works best for their audience, brand and organisation.
Henry Hyder-Smith, Managing Director at Adestra says: “Testing should be a part of every email programme and it’s our job as an ESP to make the process as easy as possible for our clients. Each email campaign is an opportunity to learn and improve. In a simple A/B split-test, identifying which dataset has the higher response rate, and which is a failure (with the lower response rate), can lift ROI with every single email campaign.”
With this is mind, Adestra has improved its split-testing feature as part of its new MessageFocus email marketing platform. Now marketers can easily incorporate testing with every campaign via an easy-to-use interface, in addition to seeing results in real-time as recipients react.
Complete email testing options with MessageFocus:
The MessageFocus split testing feature provides users with flexible options for testing different campaign variations. Tests can be as simple as a subject line A/B split test, or more complex multi-variant testing of the email content itself. This flexible feature allows users to send to all or a proportion of a list, with the option to automatically send the best performing variation to the rest of the list.
For more information, please contact press@adestra.com
SIPA annual congress 2011 – “Content remains king”
I attended the 17TH Annual SIPA congress yesterday (thank you to SIPA for a very interesting and insightful day) and it was so nice to see so many faces and hear about the challenges that many of our clients are facing.
David Gilbertson, the former chief executive of B2B publisher Emap, started the day by with a very clear message: “marketing is the way to monetise products. News is fine, but it has to change to be genuinely useful.” News and content is now available anytime, anywhere on many different media and the market has moved to giving content away for free, sharing and linking to rivals in a live stream of useful information to satisfy that need.
Susanna Kempe, CEO of the Emap-owned fashion trend forecaster WGSN followed this by saying,
“The interesting thing in today’s world is that the place for news is online and it’s breaking news. I don’t think there is a place for news to be provided on a weekly basis – news should be now, otherwise it’s not news!”
The conversations and presentations then focussed on the changing role of marketing, and the relationship between the marketing department and the editorial teams. The key to maintaining the relationship described by David Shepherd (Reed Business Information) is to work together to build that knowledge of readers and users.
However, with the enormous amount of knowledge we can gain about customers with complex profiling and segmentation, are we in the direct marketing dream or nightmare? It is marketing’s role to discover user interests and preferences using the information available, helping editorial to then refine messages and content based on this knowledge. This refined content will then generate deeper user engagement allowing the marketer to gain even more knowledge on the user. Thus leading to a long lasting relationship with the user and providing them with relevant information. With improved data comes endless possibilities.
Email has a key part to play as the main channel for delivering this content to users. Although sometimes the load and blast method is suitable, relevant content delivered in communications sent at the “right time” will deliver optimum results. Whether that is for acquisition or relationship building purposes, email is still the best way to reach users. Advances in email technology easily allows publishers to do this.
My key take away from the day was that “content is still king” and that email is still a key channel in delivering that content to subscribers, but it must be relevant and interesting to your target market for interaction to increase. If this happens, then marketing the product comes naturally.
Also, congratulations to all the SIPA UK 2011 award winners!
Reena Mistry
Marketing Director