Christmas is a great opportunity to boost your email marketing results. Here are our top tips for making the most of it:

1.Timing is everything:
If you’re in a business to business sector, this may be a slow period for you – use your emails to give you a seasonal boost, or to help you line up extra business for 2008. Bear in mind that during the build up to Christmas, workers take more half days off, therefore send your email in the morning. But be considerate about the quantity of mailings during the Christmas period as they might irritate some of your recipients.

2. Get creative
Christmas is a great opportunity to get a bit more creative with your email designs and content. Create a seasonal theme to add more substance to engage the attention of the recipients.

3. Focus:
Christmas is a very busy time of year. Make your campaign easy to remember by focusing on one offer over an extended period rather than on multiple offers over shorter periods. One generous promotion will be remembered better amongst the multitude of competing offers sitting next to it in the inbox.

4. A good time to re-establish relationships
Christmas is an ideal time to try and re-establish relationships – why not target them with an extra special seasonal offer?

5. Clear for landing:
Keep in mind the ultimate goal of your campaign – new business. There’s no point if your Christmas email campaign was successful at bringing customers to your site but failed to convert any of that traffic to sales. Make sure your call-to-action is clear and direct your emails to the correct landing pages.

With the IPv4 internet addresses running out and the move to IPv6 over the next few years, will this have an effect on our own personal information and freedom?While the move to IPv6 will allow IP starved countries have more addresses, and will support an increase in net security as well as allowing for greater interface interaction, it could also open a Dystopia which would have Orwell salivating at the typewriter.

Forget the furore about ID cards…what if every kid born was given his or her own IP address. Swap a name tag in the labour room with an RFID chip and voila.  It’s perfectly possible with IPv6. “The very large IPv6 address space supports 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) addresses, or approximately 5×10²⁸ (roughly 2⁹⁵) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×10⁹) people alive today.^[1]52 addresses for every observable star in the known universe^[2] – more than seventy nine billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 (2³²) supports”. Wikipedia

The benefits of being able to interact automatically with all sorts of interfaces could be tremendous. Environmentally we could all have our own trackable carbon footprint perhaps set our electricity use to match with lights coming on and off when we enter rooms, alloting a number of car journeys per week etc. Or perhaps gadgets will be configured to our own preferences – kind of like cloud computing but with the individual becoming the hub and being able to interconnect remotley. Micropayments could be charged to your IP wallet so no need for money or cards, if we find a more secure system than the London Oysercard trails.

Your health could be linked to your IP – exercise regime, bloods, dietary requirements and advice linked to your weeky shop, which would automatically add in a few more leafy greens to the delivered box after a week of partying.

The potential is huge… but for for someone who has an aversion to even signing up for a Tesco card (much to the annoyance of my better half!), the tech utopia outlined certainly has its Dystopian side.

Imagine every car having it’s own IP address. With GPS it’s now trackable constantly. Great for stopping thieves, the insurance companies are no doubt looking into it as I type… but worrying for personal freedom. Our activities are already trackable through our bank cards and mobile phonenetworks… but just think how much more effiecient this collation of data would be if it’s liked to your own personal IP, not to mention Vanillia Sky like ads being triggered as you walked in the canned goods aisle or drove past a billboard.

Yikes!

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: ipv6

In times of less cash, it’s all about about sustaining revenue.  With customers being more discerning with their disposable income, you need to work a lot harder to keep existing clients spending or from shopping around at the competition.

Email is a great channel for making sure that you are communicating as effectively as possible with your existing customer base. There’s no harm in having a review of your basics to make sure that you are keeping your customer’s attention and are their no brainer choice when it comes to purchase.

1 Plan your campaign
What is your objective from the email campaign? Decide what it is before you start your campaign and create your email with your goals in mind.

2  Get permission
To ensure compliance with Data Protection legislation make sure your email marketing is permission-based which means you need the customer’s consent to contact them. To build up your contacts database, collect email addresses from your customers at every opportunity!

3  Call to action
Include a call to action in every email you send. For example you could invite customers to download discount vouchers, purchase a discounted product online, or agree to attend an event.

4  Be personal
Try and speak directly to the individual customer, the more personal you are, the more successful your campaign is likely to be. Follow up the campaign with a ‘thank you’ or a special offer.

5  Be relevant
The first question the recipient will ask is ‘What’s in it for me?’If you don’t sent them information which can save them time, money or give them information then they are unlikely to take action.

6  Unsubscribe Link
The recipient must have the ability to request that they no longer want to receive emails. Their details should be removed from your database immediately.

7  The Subject line
This is very important and influences whether the recipient bothers to open the email. Think very carefully about the title, keep it short, to the point. Do not use capital letters and exclamation marks and never use words like Free!

8  Provide plain text as well as a HTML version
Have two options as some recipients will have their images turned off. Also when sending HTML versions, make sure the design works in the different email client interfaces (test test and test again!) and there are no mistakes. Keep the content short, be consistent with your layout, and design elements – it reflects the professionalism and brand of your company.

9  Deliverability
The main obstacle with email marketing is the email actually ending up in the recipients in box. ISPs delete billions of emails each day. Research an Email Service Provider with good deliverability rates. (blatant self promotion – we have a very rigorous email marketing set up which has great deliverability across Europe and the US ).

10 Statistics
Review the statistics after  each campaign. How many emails were delivered and opened, and which links customers clicked on within the email.  Each subsequent campaign can be fine tuned with new information collected. The power of email marketing is being able to segment your database based on consumer behaviour.

Gaming ads are to make a reappearance on Google adwords. No doubt the rush of revenue this will bring as gaming brands, affiliates, gambling aggregators and consultants all rush to get a pieceof the traffic will provide a financial comforter when marketing budgets get cut.

It’s hoped that the more scientific approach to analysis of traffic sources and user behaviour will in some way curb the rush for gold in them thar Google hills… but there’s always going to be the chumps who throw money on the roulette wheel hoping that lady luck will shine on them.

How this will affect cpc rates is anyone’s guess but we’re betting on a big spike in competitive bidding for generics and some rather charred fingers as budgets get burned on injudicous kwyeord research and slack management.

Tom Tom subsidiary Tele Atlas have signed a deal with Google to provide them with updated mapping in 200 countries over the next 5 years.

Mapping is increasingly becoming mainstream for Mashups – the overlaying and linking of different streams of information. To the extent that many people think that mashups are only about maps. That Google maps will continue to be kept up-to-date is great news for digital marketing as the manipulation of the Google maps api has ever more commercial applications.

TAKEOUT

When faced by the sometimes hefty licence and traffic costs of commercial mapping providers, look around at the possiblities offered by Google, Yahoo and other providers.

Search behaviour – increasing impatience of search engine users

49% of search users change their keywordphrase before checking out the second page. Does this mean that searchers are growing increasingly impatient with the results served by search engines. Absolutely, there’s no doubt that in the “think-it-get-it” environment of the web, users expect to have the right information at their fingertips.

Additionally if you appear after page 3 in the SERPs for a phrase, you can expect only 2% of users to go that far down the list. A whopping 68% of searchers don’t venture past the first page.

TAKEOUT – Your listing on the search engine returned page(SERP) not only has to be in the top listings on the top page, it needs to be as compelling as possible. Engage the searcher with content which meets their needs.  It goes back to understanding searcher demand and levels of intent. Too many keyword research projects focus solely on looking at volume and search share. This misses out half of the equation and has optimisers placing effort in the wrong keywords – lowering ROI. By understanding how searchers behave, how they communicate their needs and relfecting this in your content and messaging, you balance traffic volume with relevancy.

Search isn’t about throwing as much at the wall and hoping some of it will stick. The search industry is full of people being busy achieving nothing. By applying communication principles to search, commercial and communication objectives have a better chance of being met.

How are searchers choosing to search?

Blended search, also known as Universal search, has shaken up the search industry over the last year. This is the serving of different types of content in a search engine returned page (SERP).

Vertical search is the ability for searchers to look in content-type channels in a search engine e.g. news or images.

According to a study by Jupiter Research, searchers are still a little shy of vertical search, but when different content types are presented in the SERPs users are much more likely to click on these results.

The response for searchers using blended search results differ, perhaps indicating that either users are more comfortable with the main results being served to them than going down a channel which they perceive to offer less choice.

TAKEOUT

Blended search offers search marketers additional means of getting traffic. While searchers are still reserved about going down vertical search channels, this may change in the future as users get less patient with search results. (68% of users now don’t search past page 1!!)

However what is clear is the success of blended search – still in it’s infancy but it seems that searchers are liking the choice it provides.

MSN and Yahoo! are back in talks.  You’ll remember that MSN approached Yahoo! with a $40 billion evaluation which was later sweetened by $7.5 billion. On refusal Carl ICahn started getting vocal with his 4% of Yahoo! and a threat to depose 10 of Yahoo’s directors.

Google are in the sidelines watching as the number 2 and 3 in the market (leaving Yandex out of European figures for the moment) disuss becoming a possible number 2 with a third of search market share. something not to be sneezed at with the value of search valued at about $40 billion per annum and set to double by 2010.

It’s certainly all to play for. The test of Google adsense being used in a percentage of Yahoo’s paid search ads last month has attracted the anti trust boys so the previous avenue of a commercial agreement which would see Yahoo as inventory for Google sales looks like its being put on the back burner.

Where will it all end? Without Yahoo, MSN will struggle to grow or even to maintain marketshare with their search offering being so limited in comparison to the products offered by the other two goliaths. Will MSN pursue the social media route instead with it’s proposed talks with Facebook.

Exciting stuff.

How do you get to be a futurist? Is there an application process or do you just keep ontop of trends and extrapolate forward like some kind of commercial sci fi writer.

The Society for New Communications Research has some futurists on their board and they’ve come up with some interesting research on how Web2.0 is affecting consumer behaviour:

• 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
• 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care in their decision to do business with a company at least sometimes
• 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research, according to respondents. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)

Nowhere to Hide

Web2.0 offers fantastic opportunities for brand engagement and positively affecting consumer decision making. It’s already being used to great effect by retail, travel, computing and lifestyle consumer goods (amazon, dell) where customer reviews, sharing of experiences and providing opportunities for good customer care increasingly being supported by marketing budgets.

Other sectors have been less successful and there are still many examples of this being done badly – corporate blogs writen by PRs, seeded reviews etc. With the deadline for web 2.0 no-tolerance on seeding coming up on May 26, the choice is either embrace Web2.0 and use it to create stronger relationships with your audience or climb back under that rock and hope this whole web thing is just a passing phase.

Matt Cutts has come out and said it.  Search engine optimisation is not spam. The white hat stuff that is. I’m tempted to download his presentation at the web2.0 conference, “What Google knows about spam” onto my iPod to play to those caught somewhere in 2000 who think that all online marketing is spam.

Nice presentation which covers some of the basics of protecting a site from web spam – worth a look.