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Asks and Beachheads
MediaContact.ie hosted a brilliant seminar this week, entitled, “How to build a tribe online”. It centred on the use of “political marketing to grow followers for your business”. It was a little vague in terms of its title, but the trainer and content were far from it. I was drawn to the seminar as I have seen Ewan McIntosh (the trainer), in action. As CEO of NoTosh, Ewan helps organisations engage with people, whether they’re voters, customers or kids in a classroom. McIntosh has played various roles in his career, from language teacher to National Advisor on Learning and Technology Futures for the government to the coordinator of the $100m, 4IP Fund for Channel 4.
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Building Your Email List
 When we meet with potential clients, lack of data is often cited as a prohibiting factor in using email marketing. We can reassure you that many organisations have a lot more data than they realise and work with our clients to build, increase and improve their in house lists. I’ve listed some brief guidelines to help kick start your database growth today.
Your first step to creating a list is to collate the email addresses of those you have been in contact with, over the last year. This means that the list will be familiar with you and the information will be relevant to them. Once you have the list, be sure to review it and break it down into a segmented list (the conditions will depend on your needs e.g. leads, customers etc).
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Social Email
Social Media is changing the face of communications. It can not be avoided, nor should you hide from it. Instead, harness the power of social media and benefit, taking your message to a wider audience. Email has never been about one to one communication – if the content is relevant, it will always be shared. Having said that, social media has increased the speed at which you can share. Instead of forwarding an email to a select number of contacts, readers can now use in built social sharing options to post content, for their friends and followers to view. Facebook states that the average user on the platform has 131 friends – following this logic, sharing your email will reach a large and wide range of potential customers, which can benefit your campaign. (more…)
SEO & Email
We’ve already explained why it is important to avoid image based email marketing. While it might look very attractive and your creative team worked very hard to amaze you, it doesn’t work 70% of the time, as email clients will block images before they reach the recipient’s inbox and it is up to them to download the imagery.
Image based content is not only bad for business, but it’s bad for SEO too! SEO is the organic method of increasing a sites visibility in search engine rankings, meaning that it will appear higher on the search results of an engine. This implies that your site will see an increase in the number of visitors from the search engine’s users, due to its location in the search results. (more…)
Getting Personal
There has been a lot of coverage recently relating to privacy and security, but what about the customer that is engaging with your brand? How can you get closer to them? We feel that the direct approach is best.
Segment your database
Every customer on your list is different and while you can’t segment your list contact by contact, a brief segmented list is better than a “one size fits all” email campaign. Emails, like gifts, are better received when a little thought is added. (more…)
Email Imagery
Images can make a massive impact on a piece of content….
We always advise our customers to avoid using image based email marketing. While it may look very attractive, by default, most email programmes do not download image based emails.  This policy has been in place for a very long time, due to the rise of spammers trying to fool spam filters (as spam filters scan text to determine what is spam and what is legitimate email communication).  Image based emails are particularly popular with designers who are new to email marketing, but the results can be seen in low delivery and interaction rates.
The Auto-Responder
The auto-responder is an email communication triggered by an action e.g. subscribing to an email mailing list.
Auto-responders are as flexible as the content used within them and if used properly, can become a valuable asset to your organisation and a point of interest to your customers. They should be designed with your brand guidelines in mind with the flexibility to modify the content as frequently as your market sees fit.
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SPAM – A Common Sense guide
What is spam?
There are many different emails that are considered Spam.  Just because you are a legitimate organisation, it doesn’t mean that you can’t fall foul of your customers spam filters.   Any unsolicited or undesired mail can be considered as spam – whether the individual chose to receive emails from your organisation or not, they still have the option of marketing your email as Spam.
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Cookies and Security
When using the term cookie with reference to online – especially email marketing, we’re referring to standard web tracking devices also known as web beacons. When you send a tracked e-mail message, if it’s a graphical HTML message (not a plain text message) the e-mail marketing system may embed a tiny, invisible tracking image (a single-pixel gif, sometimes called a web beacon) within the content of the message.
When the recipient opens the message, the tracking image is referenced. When they click a link or open an attachment, another tracking code is activated. In each case a separate tracking event is recorded by the system. These response events accumulate over time in a database, enabled the email marketing software to report metrics such as open-rate and click-through rates.
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New Legislation
The release of new legislation regarding data protection within the “Electronic Communication Sector”, is the perfect time to review what data your organisation holds and how you are managing the process and storage of it within your organisation.
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