Conversion Marketing forum

Tips to make your e-mail marketing more human

Manu De Ros — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:08:15 +0000

Chris Donald of the Inbox Group posted this week at OnlyInfluencers.com with some basic tips on making your online marketing more human. It’s a nice post full of common sense e-mail marketing tips which will not only provide a better experience for your subscribers, but generate more leads and conversions from your e-mail marketing efforts.

Chris’ tips are in bold with my own two cents thrown in below each tip.

Marketers don’t think high of social networks for branding and sales leads

Jim Ducharme — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:43:29 +0000

“It seems we're always in transition and that it's more about trends than it is about what's meaningful.” – Marlee Matlin

That insightful quote may well sum up how a lot of marketing people are feeling in today’s cross-channel reality. It seems to me that in my lifetime so much has been in transition and I’m often feeling nostalgia for a world which may never have actually existed. After all, change is the only constant.

Those of us in social media have to be more sensitive to this and move toward being facilitators rather than evangelists. It’s time to stop promising marketers a place in heaven and start showing them the path to get somewhere.

comScore: shift from web-based to mobile e-mail shows need of cross-channel marketing

J-P De Clerck — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:38:18 +0000

Traffic to web-based e-mail services has dropped in the past year, down 6% from 153 million in November 2010 compared to a year ago, while people accessing e-mail on mobile devices has risen 36% to 70 million.

That’s according to new data from comScore. “Digital communication has evolved rapidly in the last few years with an ever-increasing number of ways for Internet users to communicate with one another,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile.

B2B marketers: give us inbound, social, e-mail, marketing automation and content

J-P De Clerck — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:11:17 +0000

People have more control over how they communicate, look for information and win advice during the buying process and over the choice of interaction channels to do so. Although there are differences between B2B and B2C marketing, the boundaries between both are fading. Indeed, the B2B prospect or client is a human being and consumer and business man (or woman) at the same time.
The evolutions in the field of B2B marketing, as MarketingSherpa describes them in a new report, clearly show that people’s changing behavior has an important impact on the way business-to-business companies (should) do marketing.

Marketing Executives: We Don’t Use Social Media Effectively

J-P De Clerck — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:18:52 +0000

I can jump into a pool and do the butterfly stroke, but I can be pretty sure I’m not doing it right. I may be in there thrashing away, but good intentions never spared anyone from drowning. That might be a good analogy for companies doing social. Anyone can do it, but are you doing it right?

The Harvard Business Review Analytics Services conducted a survey of 2,100 marketing executives about social media and found that only 12 percent believed they were using social media effectively.

That’s a clear indication perhaps that we’ve been a bit too focused on jumping into the pool and not focused enough on learning how to swim.

Eight tips for corporate blogging

J-P De Clerck — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:58:33 +0000

So you understand that a blog is a social media hub? That it’s a great way to have a human voice and face instead of a corporate building? You want to start a company blog? Here are some tips to help you engage people and keep then coming back.

Look around first

How are your competitors doing it and can you do it better/differently? Just copying what the other folks are doing is a sure way to be lost in the noise. Start off by asking your staff and even your customers what blogs they love and why they love them and then do it better/different.