Unless you overhear a conversation about porn spam, the words “email” and “sexy” don’t get used in the same sentence very often. Email, the loyal silent workhorse of social media, steadfast driver of e-commerce, overshadowed stepsister of search, is more often likened to Martha Stewart – reliable, conservative and past her prime – than Angelina Jolie – slinky, seductive, and unpredictable – although both have built sizable empires of wealth and influence.

That is, until now. Oh yeah, we’re finally bringing sexy back to email marketing.

I’m not sure if email ever truly enjoyed a flirtatious and provocative adolescence – it sort of leapt from childhood to married-with-two-kids – but we got a brief glimpse of its sex appeal a little over a decade ago when video in email first arrived on the scene.  Unfortunately, deliverability constraints and increased receiving environment security quickly thwarted passage of live-motion-video and audio in the inbox, and video moved almost exclusively to websites and later, YouTube.

Today, three exciting innovations are bringing video, audio, animation and dynamically-updated content to email and the inbox has never looked hotter!

So without further ado, let me roll out the red carpet for the sizzling trends that’ll make your email marketing messages not merely stand out in the inbox, but leap into stardom:

1.   Video in Email

Thanks to the arrival of HTML5, video is back in email. Unlike earlier efforts to integrate video in email using proprietary technologies, HTML5 is an open standard, which means it’s built into today’s Web browsers and most new mobile devices. This broad adoption has created the momentum video in email has sorely needed now that security risks inherent in third-party applications and plug-ins (like that of video-in-email pioneer RadicalMail) are eliminated.

Today, the following email receiving environments can display video directly in the body of the email message:

• All iOS devices when opened in the native mail client (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch)
• Hotmail, when viewed in an HTML5 compliant web browser
• IE 9+
• Chrome 3+
• Firefox 3.5+
• Safari 3.1+ on desktop, and 3.0+ (iOS)
• Thunderbird
• Apple Mail 3, 4
• Outlook for Mac 2011

According to this excellent post on video in email, close to 50% of all email messages read today support full video in email – which means on average about half your email subscribers should be able to have a rich media video experience in the inbox.

Better yet, deploying video in email has never been easier now that providers like Liveclicker have developed solutions such as Video Email Express. The tool allows marketers to upload a video (hosted and served by Liveclicker), configure a few settings, and embed the video in an email design in a matter of minutes. Leveraging HTML5 design, Liveclicker works with any email marketing software or ESP – no integration or switching necessary.

(Check out this Discovery Channel email using Liveclicker Video Email Express).

Best of all, video-in-email solutions like those offered by Liveclicker or agency Style Campaign aren’t subject to deliverability pitfalls because they doesn’t rely on Javascript of Flash which are disabled by over 90% of email clients. Style Campaign, although also supporting video in email, does so without sound as in this example from Kraft.

Despite the widespread technical support of video in email, most marketers still opt to redirect responders to video hosted on either their website or – in an attempt to drive beneficial traffic – their YouTube channel. And almost none configure video to auto-play on open (a wise choice in my opinion).

Consequently, video-in-email placeholders like the one in this Vail Resorts email appear as though they will stream video directly into the inbox, but instead redirect the responder to the company’s YouTube channel.  To my dismay, this Disney email takes a similar approach, redirecting clickers to the Disney Nature site instead of streaming video into the message itself.

The good news? HTML5 has brought video-in-email out of the IT closet and will, I believe, usher it into the mainstream. With close to 50% of your recipients able to see full video in email and the appeal and visual engagement that video still commands online, now is the time – especially for marketers with ready-at-hand video content – to begin using video in email marketing if they’re not testing it already.

2.   Animation

Animation is a close relative of video in email, and like video has been around in email for over a decade. It’s currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity for similar reasons to video (the HTML5 open standard). Perhaps its biggest advantage – for now at least – is how easy it is to create.

While video in email requires the existence of video footage, animation can be accomplished with static images in .gif or .ping format, something most email marketers already have in their content arsenal.

Recent examples of note include this message from Bed, Bath and Beyond which routinely uses animation in other ways like this (check out the roving eyeballs). What I love about the first example, however, is how it leverages limited screen real estate by showcasing three times as many images in the space needed by just one.

Here’s a similar approach from BuyBuyBaby. And let’s not forget British retailer Johnnie Boden which also creatively uses animation to bring motion and action into its emails, as you’ll see here and here.

Even without sound, animation can show vs. simply tell. Email is primarily a visual medium, so a picture is truly worth a thousand words and a moving picture even more.

3.   Dynamic Content

Perhaps the ultimate in email creative is live, up-to-the-minute, date- place- and time-specific message content. What if, depending upon when your recipient opens a message, the content could change to reflect:

- how much time remains before your offer expires?

- real-time inventory quantities remaining?

- updated event or travel itineraries?

- maps showing what’s nearby?

- names and faces of others attending a conference or event?

- social media (Facebook or Twitter for example) comments?

With dynamic content it can. There are two players leading the way in real-time dynamically-customized email marketing: LiveIntent and Movable Ink.

LiveIntent is focused on advertiser-oriented dynamic content solutions for publishers. Their aim? To help publishers monetize email subscribers as easily as they can monetize web visitors by dynamically-placing publisher-sold ads into email newsletters or allowing LiveIntent to dynamically-serve ads (from across their agency network) seeking an audience.

Movable Ink, on the other hand, seeks to turn marketing emails into containers for live content. When an email created with Movable Ink is opened, they serve content based on current time, recipients’ locations, social context, or business rules marketers define.

I love the countdown clock in this 1-800 Flowers Mother’s Day email.  Here’s another example – from Movable Ink – highlighting a count-down clock plus dynamically-changing location, inventory and social media content.

Both providers can sense the device email is being opened on before sending dynamically-customized images, so a recipient opening an email on a smartphone will see one version of a message whereas another recipient opening the same email on a desktop will see a different version.

Email: Finally sexy and we know it

I’ve long-predicted the email inbox to eventually resemble a portal more like television that a Web page, and we’re now closer to that reality than ever before with the triple threat of video, animation and dynamic content in email.

I don’t know about you, but when I see moving pictures in my inbox, I experience a “pattern interrupt” that gets my attention. I appreciate and value relevant, specific up-to-date information tailored to me as an individual and crafted with my (vs. 10,000 other people’s) selfish interests in mind. I want a little “show” with my “tell”.  If that’s not feelin’ the email love, if that’s not bringing sexy back – or finally to – email, I don’t know what is, but I do know I’m excited to see what’s coming next.

Struggling with your email message development? Need a messaging strategy or help planning your email marketing calendar? Then a coaching program is for you; learn more here.

Related Post: 3 Tried and True Creative Tactics for Instant Visibility in a Crowded Inbox

There’s a heated debate in email marketing over what to do with inactive subscribers and whether or not they can seriously  harm a sender’s reputation, deliverability and response enough to justify no longer emailing them.  The passion on both sides of this issue – the potential harmful downside of continuing to mail “inactives” juxtaposed with the potential helpful upside of keeping them on your list – makes this argument one worth taking a closer look at.

The Downside

In the one corner, it’s a reality that major email account hosting ISPs (like Yahoo, Hotmail and Google) convert abandoned email accounts into what is known as “spamtraps”. While there are many kinds of spamtraps, perhaps the most damaging are the ones that were once valid email accounts, now abandoned. Email is often still deliverable to these abandoned accounts (although some ISPs will reject mail to them for a period of time, not all will), yet like an empty house “the lights are on but nobody’s home”. So to a marketer, it appears as if an email list subscriber is simply ignoring their messages when in fact a live human is no longer using the account – rather, an ISP is managing it to “trap” unwanted email.

The problem arises because along with email account holder complaints, hitting spam traps is the number one way to damage or lower your reputation as a sender of email. (And in case you didn’t know it, yes you do have a measurable reputation according to the major ISPs – so does every IP address that sends email). Stories of entire programs being throttled or shut-down due to spamtrap hits are legendary. While it’s impossible for most email marketers to avoid having at least a few spamtraps on their lists, especially lists with tens of thousands or more names, your inactive subscriber segment is highly suspect especially if you’ve seen no signs of email activity from them in the last six and certainly, twelve consecutive months.

Yet even if you miss hitting a spam trap, sending to unresponsive list members can cause another problem – poor placement of your well-crafted email messages in the inbox. Now that major ISPs are using engagement (open/click) metrics to decide whether to place your email more prominently in the inbox (as Gmail does) or direct it to a bulk or junk folder (like Hotmail), getting your subscribers to interact and measurably engage with your email messages affects not only your response and ROI, but your ability to successfully deliver future email as well. Although most major ISPs are still in the early phases of testing and deploying engagement to drive inbox placement, it’s expected to stick around and increase. Ouch.

The final argument against mailing inactives is cost. Although the cost-per-name of sending email to one’s own list is now so low as to be effectively free, the question remains: why spend on inactive subscribers now that the downside of mail not being seen combined with the potential for hitting potential spam traps is at an all-time high? Better to save the money and play it safe?

The Upside

In the other corner, we have the case for mailing inactives anyway because even a few sales from them can more than justify the continuing cost of doing so. This side of the argument centers around two main points:

1)    Subscribers (usually customers) may be inactive in email but active in other channels, therefore eventually likely to purchase. Email may be influencing purchases in other channels – an action we simply can’t track.

2)    Subscribers may be monitoring and technically opening your email but not clicking, which means they are still engaged, but for some reason you can’t track their opens, either because they are not registering property, or because subscribers are scanning and deleting email from within the inbox before an open can register.

In either of the above two cases, it makes perfect sense to continue mailing inactive email subscribers, because – at least in the first instance – they’re not truly inactive customers, they’re simply inactive email responders. They have not abandoned their accounts and are buying in your other channels, so it’s pretty safe (but not 100%  foolproof) to assume their email addresses have not been converted to spamtraps.

Naturally, you’ll need to clearly define all potential channels for customer purchase/conversion and – assuming there are more buying channels than your site – assess whether an email list member is truly an inactive customer across the board, or simply an unresponsive subscriber. You should not only create a definition of “inactive” but also establish inactivity thresholds for different customer groups.

If an email list subscriber has in fact been totally unresponsive – a verifiably inactive customer – for a considerable period of time relevant to the purchase cycles in your business, it pays to look further at their past purchase history and customer LTV (life time value) before ultimately deciding whether to suppress/remove them from your email list.

For example, in apparel retailing if someone hasn’t purchased in the past twenty-four months (two years) they’re often considered inactive, but that same definition of inactivity won’t necessarily make sense when it comes to electronics, cars or jewelry which have higher price points, lower purchase frequency, and longer consideration paths.

What If They’re Really, Truly Tuned Out?

Still, lack of purchase according to your activity definition combined with lack of measurable marketing response (in ANY channel) is usually a reliable indicator of disinterest.  So the bottom line is – YES – continuing to email to your inactive subscribers without

a) proper, regular email list hygiene to identify and remove spamtraps

b) trying to reactive them via other marketing channels and

c) cross-channel assessment of their buying history

can harm your email program by hurting inbox placement and damaging your reputation and deliverability. If you’re not doing A, B, and C above, I recommend suppressing inactives from further email campaigns until you do.

If on the other hand you’re practicing regular reliable email address hygiene, deploying re-activation campaigns in complementary marketing channels (like direct mail) and investigating WHO your email inactives are in order to understand whether they’re just lurking or truly gone, there are specific strategies for emaling your less responsive list members than can make continuing to do so worth your while. I’ll explore those in a future post, but in the meantime, tread cautiously and get busy emailing smarter before you simply email more.

Given that all things Internet seem to move at the speed of light and come or go overnight, it’s fairly impressive to see commercial email marketing approaching its fifteenth birthday. I remember first becoming involved in email in 1999 and being impressed then with what was creatively and technically possible – even though dial-up Internet connections still outnumbered broadband!

Although anti-spam software and abuse-prevention delivery rules have often thwarted the channel’s technical capabilities (even since its early years – video in email was possible in 2000), there is no excuse to still be mailing like it’s 1999. After a decade of “best practices”, it’s high time to examine the core components of your email program to be sure you’re applying contemporary thinking and capabilities rather than simply re-running what worked or was assumed to have worked in the past. Many so-called “best practices” are far from evergreen and if not re-examined continually, become the number one reason an email program slowly degenerates into mediocrity and diminishing returns.

List Building

1999: Opt-in permission was a much-supported standard of early email marketing but never legally mandated in the US. The result? To develop email lists of any critical mass, marketers often disregarded permission, favoring quantity over quality and adding email addresses to their files through any means possible – co-reg deals, list swaps, and compiling data from directories or prospect files. Long story short, there are plenty of large email lists amassed through less than opt-in means, a huge percentage of which are disengaged, unresponsive people who probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

2012: First, examine your email address gathering methods for a) use of clear permission and b) a UVP (unique value proposition) that entices engagement from subscribers. Not that both aren’t important – they are – but valuing quality (of list members) over quantity always results in better qualified, more engaged list members which translates into better response performance and ROI.

Keep in mind too that large percentages of inactive, disengaged subscribers can affect your deliverability and reputation, since some of those inactives will included abandoned accounts-turned-spamtraps; and hitting spamtraps frequently can land you on blacklists. With at least two major ISPs now also monitoring email address owner engagement with email messages and using it as a determiner or inbox placement, keeping broad swaths of “zombies” on your list will, over time, actually harm your ability to reach the people who really want your email as you find campaigns increasingly relegated to the junk folder. So, either re-engage your inactives with an orchestrated campaign, or suppress them, and remember to conduct regular email list hygiene to identify and remove spamtraps.

Subject Lines

1999: The conventional wisdom on subject lines was “keep ‘em short and sweet”, “long subject lines will be truncated” and “don’t use the word free”. None of these practices are relevant today.

2012: While it’s true long subject lines may still not be fully visible in many email client viewers, their content itself is rarely if ever cut off or truncated. New research by Alchemy Worx, a London-based ESP, reveals long subject lines to be powerful motivators of not only opens, but also clicks, and as a result better relevancy indicators than short subject lines. Long subject lines also allow the inclusion of multiple vs. single topics – for email messages with multiple offers or benefits this makes for a more descriptive subject line which better sets and manages the expectation of recipients as to what the email is about, and therefore correlates to a higher incidence of actually responding to the email offer vs. just being intrigued enough to open the message.

And yes, in the early days of email when content filtering was king, the word “free” did sometimes trip spam filters and result in junked campaigns. Free, however, remains one of the most powerful words in direct response, and rarely does it trigger content filters today. So if you have a great free piece of content, free trial, or free gift, be sure people know it!

Measurement & Analysis

1999: The basic metrics of email campaigns told the story as we measured delivered, opens, clicks, conversions and unsubscribes.  Was there more revenue than cost at the end of the day? Great! Positive ROI!

2012: While basic email process metrics and ROI remain staples of campaign analysis, they don’t tell the whole story and we can’t stop there today. Contemporary smart email marketers look beyond open/click/conversion rate (how many people took this action on campaign “x”?) and are examining open/click/conversion reach (what percentage of people on my list has ever opened and what’s the frequency distribution?).

In addition, contribution metrics like AOV (average order value) and RPE (revenue per email address) also paint a richer results picture than simple ROI and serve as meaningful metrics when comparing the results of one campaign to another or when comparing head-to-head test groups.

How to Email Like It’s 2012

In 2012 successful email marketing isn’t simply about just being in the red or the black at the end of a campaign or business cycle. Today it’s about maximizing potential and continuous improvement – achieving optimal delivery, response, and financial contribution from the channel: the biggest “bang for our buck”, the max for the minimum, the most efficient use of resources, and the brightest, most relevant application of strategy.

Times have changed and with them the rules of email have evolved and will continue to evolve. Success in this channel is (and I believe always will be) defined by flexibility, agility and innovation. Stay nimble, always question your assumptions,  don’t be afraid to experiment and you’ll be light years ahead of the pack who’s still emailing like it’s 1999.

Want to learn more “new rules” of email? Tune in to my FREE virtual training “The NEW Rules of Email: Innovations, Tactics and Secrets you MUST Know to Generate More Sales, Revenue and Business Growth in 2012”. Register here for complimentary access

photo credit: Rocpoc

It’s probably the number one rookie mistake in advertising and marketing copy writing.  It can tank an otherwise exceptional sales offer to the exact right audience. It’s guaranteed to bore readers and listeners to death, and it’s a downright sin in direct response.

What is this ill? It is writing or talking about – or to – ourselves rather than our potential and current customers.  In other words, speaking in the language of “me” rather than “you”.

And it’s both so pervasive and toxic that it’s exactly why when it comes to much of what you write online – from your email offers to your social media status updates to your product and sales pages – it’s imperative that you answer the question eternally hovering on the tip of your readers’ tongues: WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me?)

In other words, that you learn to speak the Language of Results.

Okay, What’s In It For Me?

In the spirit of practicing what I preach, what is in it for you to learn the Language of Results and apply it to your marketing? These 5 powerful benefits spring to mind:

1)    More customers

2)    More sales

3)    Improved customer retention and renewal

4)    Continuous revenue/income generation (fewer peaks and valleys)

5)    Greater buyer satisfaction

The Language De-Mystified

Let’s take a look at a few elements you won’t find in the Language of Results:

• Detailed product specs
• Lengthy feature lists
• The back-story or history of the product’s creation
• Your logo
• Extensive terms and conditions
• Rules and regulations

Don’t get me wrong, each of these items have their purpose and specific place in your marketing.  It’s the emphasis you give them that matters.  These items accomplish other necessary tasks in the sales and marketing process, but will fail when relied upon to answer reasons why, create justifications and motivate response.

Now let’s see some of the components that definitely are part of the Language of Results:

• Customer testimonials – the more descriptive of actual results, the better
• Images and photos portraying products or services successfully (or beautifully) in use
• Reasons to buy – simple “benefits” lists will suffice, but you can go positive or negative here (be careful portraying too grim a picture of not buying)
• Outcomes of purchase (guaranteed or not)
• Before and after comparisons, stories or photos than illustrate positive transformation
• Facts and figures from scientific or other quantifiable studies proving results
• Money-back guarantees

The Results, Naturally

The Language of Results achieves two essential parts of the selling process: the creation of promise and the establishment of proof.

The Language of Results is about selling the sizzle, not the steak. It’s about making your value or the value of your product, service or event obvious and apparent.  It’s about the transformational outcome your potential customers will experience when they take you up on your offer and apply what they’ve invested in with you.

Are your opt-in pages speaking the Language of Results? How about your sales and email campaign landing pages? Email messages themselves? E-newsletters? Product launch materials? Direct mail?

Learning to speak the Language of Results is like learning any other language: the more you practice it the better you get. If you’re struggling, a coaching program can help. Click here for more information on coaching by Synchronicity Marketing or to instantly inquire if coaching is right for you.

photo credit: shahsjunkie

With email inboxes more crowded than ever before, simply arriving successfully is half the battle.  Assuming you routinely have good deliverability, the second half of that battle is standing out in a crowd.

The majority of email users (more than 70% by some estimates) view the lineup of email messages in their inboxes via preview panes, so only a snapshot of each message is visible either to the right or on the lower half of their screens.  Mobile environments can be even worse, eliminating preview-ability altogether.

Like it or not that’s today’s reality for email marketers, which is why it’s so essential that your email messages not only pop and get straight to the point, but also know how to make an entrance!

What follows are three tried and true creative tactics that always up your message appeal. Although you may have seen these applied to marketing and advertising in offline channels, because of the short attention span, deliverability and rendering issues of email I think it’s even more important to adhere to them in the inbox, and that they have greater impact online than off:

1) Compelling, Colorful Headlines stand out and are easily readable in preview panes. They immediately draw the reader into the main point of your message.  Don’t rely solely on a graphic header like one that may be topping your blog or site to do the job of a headline; they’re two different things.  While a graphic banner or “masthead” may be fine for e-newsletters, other marketing messages require more punch and relevancy.  Each deserves a unique headline.  Take a look at this example from restaurant group Bonefish Grill (they have a history of great email headlines, by the way).  Notice not only the great headline copywriting, but that each section of the message has a sub-headline to draw the reader in.

Enlightened eMarketing Tip:  Headline font faces, sizes and colors are routinely tested, but you don’t need to go to such lengths if you simply follow the graphic standards of your brand and marketing communications.  So, don’t forget that headline, and try tying it into your message subject line too.

2) Pictures, please!  Eye-tracking lab studies measuring how people visually interact with email has proven that messages with images get higher readability than those without.  While including a picture of a product is an obvious tactic to increasing advertising effectiveness, much email marketing is not product or retail-oriented; it’s service or content-oriented.  Finding relevant photos and images for these types of messages is just as important as it is for clothing and furniture retailers, whose catalog-spread-style emails and sites consist largely of images alone.  See how much more interesting this B-to-B email for phone conference services looks with images vs. text alone.

Enlightened eMarketing Tip: Include at least one image in every promotional email.  Photos are ideal, but even illustrations, cartoons, caricatures, logos and icons are effective.  Experiment with different percentages of copy vs. graphics.  Editorial-style emails are usually longer on copy than graphics, but you might find a highly compelling photo with a strong headline and short intro paragraph working just as well or better as your meatier messages.

3) Less is so much more.  When it comes to effective email creative, simplicity rules. Too many marketing emails err on the side of needing more “white space” in their designs.  Don’t feel compelled to fill every pixel with color or content.  Give your readers’ eyes a rest, and remember that a few bold elements can draw curiosity (and are more visible) than many detailed ones.  Just try this J Crew email on for size to see what I mean.

In summary, harken back a moment to something I mentioned at the start of this article: we approach email with an incredibly short attention span, sizing up whether to open and act on messages in near sub-second timeframes.  So when it comes to your email marketing, let clean, clear, simple and to the point rule your design.  Show as well as tell, and don’t just tell in one way – use subject lines, headlines, subheads and message copy to tell and tell again. Not only will clear, uncluttered email gain the gratitude of your designer, but your customers as well.

Next month:  Three innovations in email marketing creative that will have your messages not merely standing out in a crowd, but gaining celebrity in-box status.

Creative Commons License photo credit: lululemon athletica

In Part 1 of this series you learned about transparency and authenticity. Part 2 explained why creating resonance and cultivating magnetism are essential to generating emotional connections that are real and enduring.

Now in the last of this three-part series, let’s look at the final two ingredients that strengthen the emotional bond your market has with you AND each other: community and consistency.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem impersonal.  It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do.

But there’s good news – the online world also offers an expanded ability to connect with others and develop communities beyond the boundaries of our physical worlds. That’s why community is one of the final essential ingredients to creating emotional connections in your online marketing.

5) Grow Community

We’re always seeking community.  Humans are not meant to exist in isolation.  Deep down, we’re tribal dwellers, not solo wanderers.  We need social connections in order to thrive and grow.  What that means for you as a marketer is when your customers find something they love, or which solved a problem for them; they’re going to talk about it.  They’re going to share it.  And these days, the fastest way to do both is online.  When that solution is yours, there’s nothing so wonderful or effective as this “word of mouse”.

Take a moment to recall that most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.  Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making.  More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to make strong, positive emotional connections right from the start.

Many of our emotions are influenced by groups. Enable online sharing by building your own digital community. Recognize the power communities have to no only extend your message, products and services, but sway sentiment.  With email, social media and blogs, it’s easier than ever to cultivate community and “build a fence around your herd”, as one marketing guru likes to put it, to keep them happily in your pasture.

A few of the faster and more recognizable ways to build community online are

1) Create a Facebook group.  Invite current favorite connections to join

2) Tie a blog into your web site and require people to register before they can comment

3) Get on Twitter and start following people you’d like to have in your community

4) Start a group on LinkedIn

5) Develop a free or paid membership club or subscription.  Unlike social media, blogs and membership sites provide a more intimate, private place for community members to share opinions and information.

There is another thing online communities do that helps strengthen emotional connections with your target market.  Communities give people a chance to converse not only with one another, but also with you or your employees on a personal level – like we can on Facebook for example – and that creates trust and credibility.  Now, your marketing communications (and customer-service) can look more like real time conversations with your market rather than simply talking “at your market” (as is done with traditional mass advertising).

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  It’s simple. When people trust you and trust what others are saying about you or your products, they’re more likely to invest with you.  By building a community you create a buying environment that doesn’t seem sales-y, because your people know you’re serving them with information, content, or entertainment that is relevant.  As a result, when you do make an offer they are far more receptive to it than they would be if they weren’t already part of your community.

Cultivating community creates a comfort zone in which you and the people who are already interested in what you offer can intersect.  Within your community you’re marketing in your target zone, not just shooting aimlessly.  I think the community-building power of social media in particular (and online marketing in general) is possibly the greatest asset of the Internet as a marketing channel, and the most underutilized.

Here’s a final compelling reason to invest in building community: the financial payoff.  Ask yourself, what’s the annual value of each additional new subscriber you add to your email list?  For a lot of companies, it’s at least a couple of hundred dollars.  What’s the lifetime value of a new customer?

If you invested in growing your online community through social media and that in turn generated just fifty new email list members who then resulted in ten new customers a year, what would that be worth to you?  $5,000? $10,000? $50,000? And if you’re going to be in business for another twenty or thirty years, what’s it worth then?

6) Stay Constant and Consistent

The final essential for building emotional connections online is consistency.  When it comes to email and social media marketing, it pays to crawl before you walk and walk before you run.  Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once, but once you start, you should be prepared to commit to a schedule.  Strive for consistency, publishing and mailing on a regular if not predictable basis.

That goes double for blogging. Once you begin posting, your readers and customers will begin to look forward to what you have to say next. It’s important to both manage their expectations and balance them with your own resources, so plan to post on a schedule you can keep up with.  Many bloggers post daily, although I don’t recommend this for beginners.  Weekly or even every other week is more reasonable.

Besides frequency there’s another important dimension to consistency:  voice. Remember, the entire point of this is building emotional connections online; to do so successfully you’ll need to communicate with consistent authenticity, personality and transparency. Your unique voice, tone and style should be clear and unchanging, not shifting any which way the wind blows.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Don’t be who you think your market wants you to be.  Don’t infect your blog with multiple personality disorder.  Don’t shift your writing style on your customers to the point where there is a brand disconnect.  Instead, just be yourself.

Now that you know the six essentials to creating emotional connections in your online marketing, tell me in comments below where you’re using them successfully and what the results have been?  Or if you’re struggling, what are your greatest challenges?

Any by all means, let me know how I can help.

photo credit: aechempati

One of my email seminar students recently asked: “I feel like the only emails my company ever sends are sales messages: like we’re always asking people to buy, buy, buy.  Should we supplement these with other types of email and if so, what?”

Don’t feel bad, lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for many marketers.  Businesses newer to email or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list. Here are just a few of the many greetings and message types you should include in your email program:

A Newsletter

Whether it’s weekly, twice a month or monthly (I don’t recommend less than monthly) your e-newsletter is a fantastic email catch-all for many different types of content and messaging.  Include articles, useful tips, recommendations, testimonials, event information and yes, product offers and specials too.  It’s a “news” letter after all, so be sure you’re weaving together not only what’s new with your business, but what’s new in your industry.  If you have an above-average perspective on developing practices, breaking news or trends, legislation or inventions in your market, share helpful information about it in the form of feature articles.

Personal and Holiday Greetings

Are you acknowledging your email subscribers’ birthdays and service anniversaries with a thank you email? You should be.  How about holidays – are you sending Thanksgiving greetings, Happy Holidays messages, and other emails reflecting the seasonal celebrations throughout the year?  These are some of the easiest messages to develop and deploy, and some of the most cherished by subscribers because they’re intimate, appreciative and timely.  Integrating them into your message stream makes you or your brand more personal and welcome in the inbox and as a result, more thought of as a trusted friend than the “friend who only calls when she needs something”.

Triggered Follow-Ups

Did you know triggered email generates ten times the revenue and over twenty times the profit of broadcast campaigns? Yes, it’s incredibly powerful and relevant because it is targeted to individuals based on recent actions, dates or unique characteristics. So remember to include event reminders, bounce backs, purchase thank-you’s, and browse or cart abandonment follow-ups in your mix and you’ll see an incredible boost in email ROI.

Education, Information and Entertainment

You probably know more useful, fun and educational things than you realize – but do you share them? A weekly “hot tip” or “helpful hint” goes a long way toward “selling by way of serving”, which I believe is quickly replacing “selling by way of promotion”.  This kind of content marketing strategy also gives you yet another reason besides selling to keep in touch with your list, especially if your email frequency is low.

Why strive for variety at all? Try these five compelling reasons on for size:

1) When it comes to email, variety literally is the “spice of inbox life”

The average person is a far more sophisticated inbox navigator than ever before and will tune out (read: delete) what looks like repetitive, same-old, same-old messaging.

2) While some marketing thrives on continuity and predictability (like, incidentally, newsletters) a pattern interrupt is a tried and true practice for grabbing attention and engagement.

Increasing the variety of your email messages makes it difficult if not impossible for subscribers to predict when and how you’re showing up in the inbox, which means they’re more likely to notice you when you do.

3) You can only send so many promotional buy messages before you’re likely to alienate list members to the point of unsubscribing.  If that’s all you ever send, you’ll see a steady list attrition pattern. Increasing variety is a fantastic way to increase frequency without redundancy and alienation.  In short, more variety gives you more legitimate reasons to mail your list.

4) Expanding your messages into educational, information and entertainment content improves your inbox mojo.  Content marketing is hot because it positions you as an expert, influencer, or both which correlates with higher trust, credibility and appreciation.  Yes, doing something to actually help, serve or amuse your subscribers is seen by most as relevant and valued – both necessary for long email relationships to thrive.  These types of messages can give you fantastic legitimacy and digital “street cred”. GREAT content even creates loyalty and dependency.  So, yeah, please don’t leave email out of your content marketing strategy!

5) Triggered email pays huge dividends. In addition to doing all four of the above, triggered email accounts for a tiny percentage of overall email volume for most marketers but contributes huge amounts of revenue, engagement and profit.  So you’d be crazy not to work it into the mix.

For help integrating these and more into an annual email message plan, check out our Online Marketing Content Planner.

What other types of messages have you included in your email marketing mix? And what have they done to benefit your business?

Creative Commons License photo credit: mscaprikell

In Part 1 of this series, I explained that marketing is not simply about hawking your wares. Certainly it’s about communicating what you have to offer, but how you do that is what makes the difference between feast and famine.

Whether we know it and like it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small. Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making.  More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem highly impersonal.  It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do. That contributes to a lack of trust (and unfortunately, fraud) online, so allowing people to get to know you digitally goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need to buy from you in any channel.

Thankfully it’s easier than ever to create emotional connections online due to social media and content publishing platforms that are easier and more accessible than ever before.  Last month I covered the first two steps to doing so; here are steps three and four of six that I recommend:

3) Create Resonance

When you authentically and transparently communicate with your target audience, they resonate with you.  You get reactions like “this is perfect for me!” or “finally someone understands what I’m going through!”

When you resonate you strike a chord with your audience.  You both tune into the same “vibe”, and it results in comfort and trust, allowing you to sell in a non-salesy environment.  Just as in music, you’re singing to the same tune as your audience, harmonizing with them by recognizing their needs, pain, challenges or struggles and meeting them in that space.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Write for your target market, not the world at large.  Not everyone is your potential customer!  The more you have a specific profile of your ideal clients and the more you know about your existing best customers, the better you’ll learn to relate to them.  A great exercise when writing email, blog posts and articles is to imagine you’re speaking to your favorite three customers over dinner – what would you say to them?

When you resonate with your target audience, they perceive you as authentic, real and passionate about what you do and as a result, they will follow you anywhere and – this can be huge – overlook mistakes when you inevitably make them.  Or, if they can’t overlook your missteps, they’ll at least stick with you through tough times.

Either resonance (positive) or dissonance (negative) means people have connected with you.  Like direct response marketing guru Dan Kennedy says, “If you’re not offending someone by noon, you’re doing something wrong!”  Remember: the worst reaction is no reaction.

Ideally you want your marketing to generate more positive than negative reaction.  While pain is a powerful motivator, if you don’t follow it up with promise and hope you’ll be stuck in the sucking quicksand of doom and gloom, and believe me, nobody wants to dwell there.

4) Cultivate Magnetism

What is magnetism?  It is defined as “strong attractive power or charm”.  It means your marketing has a distinct, attractive personality – either positive or negative.  And if you have it, or can cultivate it, it’s the number one way to sell without ever being perceived as “pitching”.

Because the Internet is a crowded space, a magnetic personality is vital these days, and sometimes it requires outrageous, edgy or at least “dare to be different” approaches.  If you don’t have a distinct personality, if you can’t stand out from the crowd, people will gloss over you or your business because they’ll perceive you as a commodity.  And you can’t make an emotional connection with a commodity.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  The secret to standing out from the crowd, even if there are thousands or millions of people doing the same thing as you, is to have a unique, targeted focus.  A unique angle.  It’s not about how you look, it’s about two “P” words: Positioning and Passion.

Positioning first: when you’re willing to put a stake in the ground and claim your space, your unique niche of people you want to serve and your unique system or way of serving them, that gives you magnetism.  You will draw people to you.  That might mean leveraging your unique quirkiness, your edge, or your laser focus, no matter how bizarre.

Second, your passion leads to Attraction Marketing.  Your genuine interest in what you do, and in sharing it, naturally propels you to serve which allows you to effortlessly sell by way of serving.  As a result you attract customers to you rather than having to pursue them.  Draw people to you from your place of service, from your unique offering or gift to them, not from greed or desperation.  You might have heard that before in this saying: “Bring your seed, not your need”.

I’ll bet you can think of several celebrities, authors and personalities who have equally powerful positive or negative magnetic personalities. On the positive side there’s someone like Oprah; on the negative, Rush Limbaugh comes to mind. Both are wildly attractive in different ways, because the truth is you can attract with a wide array of personality types.  What I said about resonance also goes for magnetism: a strong reaction either toward or away from you is at least still a reaction that requires feeling.

By fostering resonance and magnetism you’re creating memorable marketing messages.  Memorable messages are meaningful to us.  We remember those that evoke emotional reactions and that are funny, inspiring, outlandish or provocative.  Are your messages presented in a way that is worth remembering? If not, don’t be afraid to inject more transparency, authenticity, and personality into them. Worry less about if and how people will judge you and instead remember that any feeling is better than none at all.

I’ll conclude this series next month with the two final steps to creating emotional connections online, but in the meantime, tell me what you’ve done in your marketing? What’s working best for you?

photo credit: katerha

This question was recently posed in a private online marketing group I belong to called Only Influencers: “If I can tweet five times a day, why can’t I email five times a day?”

Keep in mind Only Influencers is an invitation-only group of highly experienced and savvy digital marketers (most of the industry’s “big names” in email already belong) from established and well-known brands, so they were not flippantly, but seriously, pondering the messaging norms we’ve come to think of as “acceptable” in different online marketing channels.  The question and the depth of discussion around it made me think, Why can’t we? And if we can’t or don’t or won’t, why not?

Here’s my take on the question. I’d love to hear yours too so please share it in comments below.

I’m all for greater email frequency when it’s relevant and useful to recipients at least as much as to marketers.  However, there are obvious fundamental differences between email and social media: the two that relate most to this question are 1) the differences in how people interact with email vs. social media, and 2) their expectations of messaging in each medium.

When it comes to the average inbox, most people still feel compelled to process every email message that arrives in their inbox. This “processing” can be a quick skim of message subject lines in order to decide what to open and read vs. delete. It might also be to check various folders at different intervals, as many inbox owners auto-route different types of email (or email from different senders) to different folders. Whatever the message triage process, every message is at least glanced at and accounted for in the average inbox, even if it’s for a swift move to the junk bin.

Not so with social media.  Twitter and Facebook are point-in-time communication streams much more than email is. I don’t think most people expect to read every wall post from every single friend in Facebook, or every Tweet from those they follow on Twitter.  (Those that try quickly find their eyes glued to a screen sixteen hours a day). Rather, because our eyes need to be other places, like on the road or watching the kids or, say, closed when sleeping, people logically jump in and out of these networks when they have time or are specifically prompted.

The bottom line: there’s a great sense of spontaneity in social media whereas there is still a sense of obligation centered around email.

All of which means it makes perfect sense to have high frequency and even intentional redundancy in your social media messaging because one can safely assume the average social media friend/follower won’t see all – or even close to all – of your status updates, only a fraction of them.  You want to catch people while they’re in the social network interface, knowing that will be different times for different people and that if you don’t catch them while they’re there they likely will not see your previous or subsequent communications ever.

With email on the other hand, repetition and high frequency is much more noticed and if not relevant, HIGHLY irritating, because once people do get around to checking their inbox ALL of your communications are there waiting for them in one place.  They’ll see the entire chronological stream so if you’re repeating messages without relevancy, they won’t understand why because there’s nothing in it for them.

While I recognize there is value in frequency from a brand impression and recall standpoint (meaning even being in the inbox with substantially the same message multiple times can boost brand recognition), if you’re planning on increasing email frequency, at least consider a creative tactic such as a sequence that tells a story or breaks a topic into shorter more frequent messages and relevantly justifies why you’re sending more often.  People enjoy connecting the dots and will follow a series to its conclusion, but don’t appreciate being beat over the head with boring redundant messages repeatedly.

The real question may not be why you can’t email five times a day, but this: What do you have to email that warrants it?

In other words, how do you justify your email frequency? Have you tested it to the point of diminishing returns in response and an increase in unsubscribes? Do you maintain low frequency in fear of complaints or high frequency in the face of them? Is every email you send useful and relevant, or repetitive and self-serving? These are worthy questions deserving exploration. I encourage you to give them serious thought, or put some solid tests into place to prove or disprove your assumptions.

If you’re a business owner, marketer, agency or consultant interested in joining Only Influencers and posing questions and discussions there, tell me in comments below if you’d like to be nominated and why (but first, it pays to read the qualifications for membership here).  If you’re a social media marketer there is currently a free six month trial membership available. The group is invite-only and the membership investment is (a well worth it) $20 per month or $200 a year.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley

You might read that title and wonder what in the world emotional connections have to do with online marketing or any marketing for that matter.  Isn’t marketing simply about telling people what you have to offer and letting them know how to buy or work with you? Certainly it’s that, but much more.  Whether you realize it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.

Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal.  There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines or bypasses the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels delivered.  Plus, there’s a huge lack of trust (and fraud) in the digital world so allowing people to get to know you online goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need before they’re willing to buy.

So, is it easy to create emotional connections online? The good news is “YES!” thanks largely to social media and content publishing platforms that are faster, simpler and more accessible than ever before.

So, how do you do it? Here are the first two of six steps I recommend:

1) Increase Transparency

In the age of Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever iteration we’re in!) transparency has never been greater.  Companies blog about their internal workings and behind-the-scenes processes.  You can Google a person or business name and harvest a cornucopia of information about it in just a few minutes.  Peer reviews, blog comments, complaints and praise round out the 360-degree view of you, your products, or your brand.  Much of what is written or said is not from you, or up to you.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Take charge of the conversation by participating in it and opening the kimono a bit wider than you have in the past.  If you don’t have a blog, start one.  Frequently ask for comments to new posts AND promote your posts on social media.  Include community involvement initiatives and employee profiles or endeavors in your marketing and as blog posts topics to give your company a more human “face”.  Monitor social media mentions and conversations so you can constructively join them, respond to customer service issues, and have actual conversations with your customers.

Remember, people do business with people, not nameless, faceless entities, so give them some names and faces they can clearly relate to. Becoming more transparent doesn’t mean you have to reveal everything, but it does mean coming out of hiding if you’ve been a little too comfortable there.

2) Embrace Authenticity

When you think of American Idol, who’s more interesting  and memorable – Randy Jackson or Simon Cowell? I vote for Cowell.  While he may not be as personable as Jackson, Simon Cowell certainly doesn’t pander to fans or crowds – he’s his own man, like him or not.  In fact, a big part of his staying power as an American Idol judge is that he dared to be brutally honest, even if that meant disagreeing with his fellow judges and the voting audience, or hurting contestants’ feelings.

He’s a perfect example of authenticity – Cowell is not afraid to be himself.  He’s also a great example of how negative vs. positive personality traits can be wildly attractive – you don’t need to be hospitable, warm and fuzzy to get customers, fans and new business, but you do need to be real.  By refusing to pull punches and daring to defy convention Cowell developed a huge following and has grown his business considerably.  He also left Idol on his own terms, when he was ready, unlike other judges who were nudged out.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Take a good look at whether your brand/business personality is what you think it needs to be for your market to accept you, or is what you really want it to be based on the true story behind it.  Don’t copy your competitors or feel you have to mimic them – they have their unique origins, and you have yours, so use your story to your advantage.  The true-life individual personalities of founders, inventors, or practice professionals should permeate their companies and in fact, have defined entire corporate cultures (witness Virgin, Apple, Google and Facebook).

Also, it’s practically impossible to maintain a phony or veneered façade, so don’t try.  Trust that when your genuine values and traits – whether friendly or grumpy, liberal or conservative, soft-spoken or edgy – are visible in your online presence and flow through your digital communications, you’ll resonate with like-minded people who genuinely want to do business with the real you.  And typically, the more they do, the better they’ll want to get to know that real you and the more authentic you’ll become in their eyes.

These are just two beginning steps to creating emotional connections in your marketing, and today’s online channels make it easier than ever to be open and real, then continue to reveal as much as you’re comfortable sharing about yourself and your business.

I’ll continue this next month with two more steps to creating emotional connections in online marketing, but in the meantime, tell me what you’ve done to create emotional connections online? What’s working best for you?