Tag Archive for: Email Marketing

Facebook is Testing Becoming an Email Service

, , , ,

Facebook is testing the idea of adding an entirely new type of service to its already large umbrella – email. Several small-to-medium businesses are seeing a new set of tools on the site which make it possible to send marketing emails to your customers. 

With the tools, businesses could not only compose and send emails directly through Facebook, but track their performance with detailed analytics as well. 

In a statement to AdWeek, Facebook confirmed the test, saying it will be limited to a small number of businesses:

“We’re testing new email marketing tools with a small number of businesses to help them more efficiently notify their customers of changes to their services and operations.

We’re evaluating whether these tools are beneficial for people and businesses before deciding whether to expand it further.”

Of course, if the feature is well received, it is likely to be implemented into the main Facebook system and made available to everyone. 

How To Send Marketing Emails Via Facebook

Facebook Email creator

While I personally haven’t been able to find the tool, those who have been given access are being alerted via a pop-up message near the left sidebar menu. 

Once you have clicked the Marketing Emails tab, you are directed to a prompt to confirm your new Facebook email address:

“Reconnect with your email subscribers using marketing emails. Select your audience, customize your design, and track performance all in one place. Confirm your Page’s email address to get started.”

After your email address has been confirmed, you will then be able to begin adding email contacts to your list. This can be done individually or in bulk using a spreadsheet. 

During this process, you will be asked to confirm that you have received permission to send promotional messages to these contacts.

Facebook email permissions

With this process complete and your contacts uploaded, you can now start composing and sending email messages using the Pages app. 

Facebook email creator

A Free Solution For Businesses Without Email

For businesses that currently do not have a professional email account established, the tool could provide a potentially powerful way to craft and send messages that look more professional than what can be achieved through other free clients like Gmail. 

However, it is unclear whether the tool will allow businesses to receive email responses, raising questions about its usefulness outside of sales promotions or fliers. 

For now, this is a test to keep an eye on as more people get the chance to try it for themselves.

/0 Comments

Enhance your email with AMP for Gmail

, , ,

Google is bringing its super-fast Accelerated Mobile Pages to email the company announced this week. During its conference in email, the company unveiled that developers can now take advantage of the mobile-friendly AMP framework when developing emails for Gmail.

The decision gives people the ability to create faster, sleeker emails with a higher level of interaction than typically possible.

Among the many things you can do by incorporating AMP into Gmail, Google recommends:

  • Creating content that is kept up-to-date in real-time
  • The ability for recipients to browse and interact with content
  • Users getting more done in less time without having to leave email.

From the announcement:

For example, say an external contractor wants to schedule a meeting with you but can’t see your calendar, so they send an email to get information on which dates and times you’re available. Within the email is a form to coordinate details. Thanks to AMP for Email, you can respond interactively through the form without having to click a link and redirect to another webpage. AMP for Email could also help you get more done in less time by allowing you to quickly RSVP to events, browse and interact with listings and campaigns, or fill out a questionnaire without ever leaving email.

Google also provided a few examples of what you can accomplish with AMP in Gmail:

AMP for Email does require a higher level of expertise to use, since it takes knowledge of coding to build emails with. Still, with a bit of work and some knowledge, the incorporation of AMP into email opens the door to many exciting possibilities for email.

/0 Comments

How To Make Your Email Outreach Standout [Infographic]

, ,

It can be easy to be distracted by the flash and excitement of new marketing mediums and strategies, but there’s a reason some old staples don’t seem to ever go away. Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to boost sales and connect with your audience. If you want to see true success with your email outreach, you have to break above the noise.

How many unread emails do you have in your inbox right now? According to some estimates, the average businessperson receives 91 emails every single day, and that number is only going up. That means you have to make your emails worthy of your customer’s time and exciting enough to get their attention.

So how do you make sure your emails get opened instead of shipped off to the spam folder or left unread in inbox purgatory? Online Course Report broke down what makes a successful email outreach campaign and put together a handy infographic that details everything you need to know, from what day and time is best to send to how to craft the perfect subject lines.

Check it out below or over at Online Course Report.

 anatomy_of_email_outreach-1

/0 Comments

The Keys To A Successful Holiday Email Campaign [Infographic]

, , , ,

HolidayEmailHeader

Retailers across the country are preparing for the upcoming holiday season, but you never want to waste your efforts on marketing practices that won’t produce results.

According to a recent report from Campaigner, social integration, mobile optimization, list segmentation, and personalization are the keys to running a successful holiday email campaign this year. The report comes from a survey of 198 internet retailers conducted in August of this year.

Social integrations were the breakout star of the survey, with almost three-quarters (71%) of the respondents identifying these as the most important add-ons for your holiday email campaigns. Similarly, 70% predicted mobile sales would continue to rise this year.

Over half (57%) of the participants said they would be prioritizing email list segmentation this holiday season, with 40% planning to prioritize personalization.

The infographic below shares these insights and more from the Campaigner survey.

HolidayEmailInfographic

/0 Comments

New AdWords Feature Lets You Target Ads By Email Address

, , , , ,

 Bullseye

Over the weekend, Google announced a powerful new feature in AdWords that will allow advertisers to target their audience unlike ever before. Through Customer Match, a new feature rolling out in the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to target ads by email address.

After you upload a list of email addresses, Customer Match will pair them with the corresponding Google users who you can target ads to. Advertisers can also target ads to similar audiences who share similarities with the individuals in the email list.

Customer Match is capable of targeting ads to anyone signed-in to Google on Gmail, Search, and YouTube.

With the audience sets generated by Customer Match, you can craft ads specifically build around reaching them, such as in the example provided by Google:

“Let’s say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York.”

There are still no details about any security measures in place to protect customer email addresses uploaded to Customer Match, other than stating the process is conducted in a “secure and privacy-safe way.”

/0 Comments

Email and Social Media Marketing – Better Together [Infographic]

, , ,

On their own, individual marketing strategies like email marketing or focusing on social media can be very powerful in helping a brand grow, but too often companies forget that these strategies can be significantly more powerful on their own.

Email marketing and social media may not seem like the most compatible pair of marketing strategies to create marketing synergy, but in actuality the two go together like a horse and a carriage.  The key is doing it the right way.

The infographic below from ReachMail shows how integrating your email and social media marketing can produce great results and how to do it right.

email-social-media

/0 Comments

Mobile Devices are the Source of the Majority of Email Opens

, , , ,

SEO and online marketing have changed drastically over just the past couple years, especially with the rise of social media and huge changes to how search engines are able to analyze and rate websites for users. However, some things have stayed the same through it all, such as the importance of email marketing.

It could be easy to think that social media would usurp the place of email marketing in building a relationship between consumers and your brand by gradually letting potential customers see who you are and what you represent. However, you would be wrong as emails still hold their place by offering a direct line to interested users that even social media can’t match.

The majority of businesses realize this, judging by the continued prevalence of email signups and calls-to-action deliberately designed to get visitors onto an email list. What some of those companies may not understand is that they may be missing out on some of the potential of their email list by marketing to the wrong device.

A new report from Movable Ink’s Q1 2014 US Consumer Device Preference Report shows that email opens are continuing to migrate away from desktop to tablets and smartphones. At this point, desktop opens are actually the minority compared to mobile devices.

Screen-Shot-2014-05-09-at-6.22.28-AM

Greg Sterling has an analysis of the data from the report, but to me the findings show that a large amount of email marketing is missing the mark by targeting users sitting at a desktop computer browsing through a day’s worth of email. This may have been the norm a few years ago, but today the majority of emails are opened while out and about and emails should be designed to fit this purpose and be able to catch users’ attention from the smaller screen.

You can start making your email marketing strategy more mobile friendly by making your emails explicitly mobile friendly as well as the associated landing pages these emails direct to. In a day-and-age when the majority of people are checking their emails and doing browsing from smartphones there is no excuse to be sending users emails they can’t easily view or sending users to landing pages that require non-iPhone friendly Flash plug-ins.

/0 Comments

How Not To Do Email Marketing

,

Email marketing is considered one of the old standards for online marketing. It has existed since the internet boom, and it still works today. Basically, email marketing is making specialized custom emails to generate leads, promote your brand or a specific offer, and initiate deals with consumers.

However, there is a common mistake many marketers are still making that diminishes your brand’s reputation and credibility. Many email marketers are still not creating proper email templates that are optimized for typical inboxes. Simply put, seeing a poorly formatted or designed email sends consumers looking for the button leading back to the inbox, or worse, looking to label your email as spam.

Web Designer Depot writer Lior Levin has a list of 10 ways marketers fail to properly structure their emails, ranging from writing the body copy of the email in a word processor (which attaches extra HTML code that will likely ruin the layout) to forgetting to create a plain text copy for those who require it.

With how long email marketing has existed, you would think most would have it down already. But, judging from my inbox littered with random emails that look terrible or don’t load, it seems some at least need a refresher.

/0 Comments

Social Media’s Advantage Over Email Marketing

, , , ,

Recently, I wrote about the dangers of trusting the wrong, essentially superficial, metrics when diagnosing your social media strategy. Today, let’s talk specifically about the great battle of social media vs. email marketing.

Errol Apostolopoulos reports for BostInno that “unique impressions delivered via Facebook’s sponsored posts average out to be 18x more cost-effective than those delivered via traditional email acquisition methods.” When you add in that you can use standard posts to reach a wider, if less concentrated, audience, Facebook, and other social media sites, really set themselves apart. 

Does this mean you should completely forsake your old pal email marketing? Heck no. It still has an important role to play. Pairing email and social media can lower your cost per acquisition on both platforms. 

/0 Comments