Email Marketing: A pillar in the foundation of social media, a 43-to-1 ROI channel, a conversion heavy interactive medium, and the reason this blog is here.
I love infographics as much as the next geek, but an infographic on Google’s 2011 revenue is a must have. Check out this infographic created via Wordstream at http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2012/01/how-does-google-make-money-2011-revenue-infographic.html
Want to learn about video email? Come see Justin Foster, Luke Glasner, and myself chat and teach about putting video in your emails. Get versed on the pros and cons of video email and how you can leverage it within your lists.
Here’s the registration link.
http://events.linkedin.com/eec-Webinar-Video-Email-Why-When-How/pub/777053
I’m going to start writing an email marketing ebook. I’d love to get some ideas, issues, perspectives, and conversations going with the email marketing and non email marketing community for the book in order to help all understand and leverage email.
This was my very first post for the Email Experience Counsel last month. I think it one of my better posts.
What do you think?
Video-in-email is a rarity; it’s an unconventional, tricky to apply, ultra-personal online channel that’s a bit hard for everyday marketers to adopt. But, why? Resources and education. The current issue with marketers and businesses with adopting email – ability. Very few companies have staff on-hand or vendors readily available for video production and editing. Whilst this won’t always be the problem, it’s been my opinion that this is the biggest roadblock thus far.
Through my career history I’ve been privileged to be a part of many different sides of the online marketing world. I’ve wandered through; agency work, independent consulting, corporate marketing manager (email marketing), Director of Marketing for an ESP (email service provider) as well as running a small web business with a few employees (Start-up). During this time I’ve noticed a big change in the way marketing departments have given attention to the online medium – by hiring SEO’s, email marketers, statisticians, social marketers, etc. But, it’s been intermittent with the hiring and fostering of the video marketing positions.
But why?
In my opinion, the adoption of previous technologies are still in cycle and the noise of social media has taken precedence in regard to the channel preference for video dispersion. Businesses and companies are still learning how to create successful email marketing campaigns, measure the data from the campaigns (as well as learning about web analytics programs), leverage social media channels, and conversion inspired web design. There’s no room for another item on the marketers plate or better yet, the business owner. Video-in-email will be adopted and is going to be a fantastic channel for high ROI campaigns and elevated consumer engagement rates. Marketers right now are experimenting more-and-more with the video-email infusion and it’s effects on the bottom line. (Thrillist.com just recently sent out a video within their email newsletter)
Until, the level of video educated online marketers rises or the usability and functionality of video marketing software becomes more intuitive – video for small to mid-sized businesses will be sparse.
I still believe in the marriage between email and video, but they’re still working on getting the date on the calendar. Until the ISP’s and email clients RSVP for the big event, these two fated love birds will just have to focus on getting an easy-to-use product ready for the honeymoon in the Bay of Consumer Engagement.
Viva la Email.
Today I posed the question to my Twitter peers, “Is #emailmarketing really a world with no absolutes? How many “it depends” answers does it take to make an #email guru?” A slew of activity started flying at me regarding the idea; some jovial, some serious and some were inspiring. Most of the replies and conversation ended up here (slightly revised) – http://www.retailemailblog.com/2010/10/bird-watching-best-practices-vs-it.html Big thanks to Chad White (@RetailEmailBlog) for posting this and opening up the topic to more viewers. I think it’s very prevalent right now within the email marketing space .
Too many marketers believe wholeheartedly that email practices in general “depend” on the company using the channel. While I agree with this in some form or fashion. It’s not entirely true. There are aspects of the email channel that are only applicable to that specific company and mostly irrelevant to other businesses, but the fundamentals (best practices) are the same. This is where the issue seemed to come about. The quantification of ‘best practice’ seemed to vary incredibly throughout the conversation. It bothered me that there was no common ground to defining a best practice and where the label best practice applies. Hell, even Wikipedia didn’t like the answer it had … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice . Then there’s definitions like this - http://www.walden3d.com/best_practices/bp_FCP_definition.html .
A recent MediaPost article by @DjWaldow addressed best practices as, ‘Practices that are best for you.‘
I don’t agree – at all.
I tend to view best practices as proven fundamental approaches or techniques within a certain arena. Not just what works for one company. One of the tweets to follow the conversation today said this, ‘“Universal best practices” are like sports fundamentals … all the pro’s worked hard at them. Nike batting gloves are not fundamental.’ I don’t believe what’s specifically good for one company can be called a best practice, or insinuated that it’s applicable for all. Players will wear all types of batting gloves – not essential to the game. What is essential to the game is the way they swing the bat. Most professional baseball players mimic the same swing mechanics regardless of stance, position in batters box or pre-batting ritual. Thus, creating a batting ‘fundamental’ or in my opinion ‘best practice’.
How do you view ‘best practices’? Love to hear your comments.
Viva la Email.
I love email marketing. The only thing I’d rather do would be a photographer for National Geographic, but that’s not happening. Taking photos of wild animals in foreign countries, sunsets on tropical islands, close-ups of historical artifacts in Japan or pictures of the World Cup while on the sidelines are all things I dream about. While, I don’t do it every day, I do go out and spend time taking pictures. This allows me to try different things, learn about the craft and experience different types of perspectives. See where I’m going?
As an email marketer I need to leverage this approach to my profession as well. It helps me look at everything differently and not continue doing the same thing. The definition of insanity: Doing the exact same action repetitively, expecting a different result each time. Changing things up also opens the opportunity to find out what works best for me – ensuring that I improve and produce quality pictures for my work. Otherwise there’s no value to my efforts.
Every email marketing channel is different. Perspective is needed to make each one work, not all are created equal by any means. Understanding voice, real-time email applications, design, content, lifetime value of email addresses and engagement analytics are all valuable in measuring success. In the same way using different lenses, apertures, contrasts, time-of-day and focus can be used in photography. Are you still with me?
There isn’t a metric that solely gives you a comprehensive view of the health of the email marketing program. Sure, revenue is great – profit even better, but that’s a result of many variants being successful and identified. The lens alone does not make the photo a masterpiece; it’s a multi-variant combination of efforts. Don’t believe that value can only be attained by getting your open rate elevated. Also, keep in mind; every email program is different. Variants will have fluctuating values, prioritized by goals set for the email channel.
The argument has been raised so many times regarding opens vs. clicks and what metric is more valuable. The answer: neither. They both need the other for each individually to become successful. The overall picture should be viewed by prioritizing metrics – identifying which ones apply most appropriately to the goals set in place for the email channel. Opens may be number one for a certain business due to an advertising model in their emails. Clicks are typically used for measuring ‘engagement’ within the list and mentioned for reporting success up the food chain. These both don’t matter to me unless the conversion rate on the landing page is equally as successful.
Providing value is the key to anything in business, right? Measuring value isn’t as easy as picking a single variant and gauging all the efforts in that channel by that number. Measuring multiple variants congruently exposes road blocks and bottlenecks within the campaign for optimization. Urging you to analyze your data and optimize accordingly is easier said than done, but none-the-less is a step in the right direction for building a solid email channel.
Anybody can be trained to pull reports with no insight, but a passionate marketer will align efforts, measure impact, identify areas of improvement and create reports with visibility and value into the channel for peers and higher-ups to garner actionable data from. You are the value-maker.
Viva la email.
