But every dark cloud has a silver lining and in our case we are proud and excited to report that for the 1st time we have branded over 1 million emails for our South Africa small business users alone in a single calendar month. What is even more exciting is the fact that our clients also generated an enormous amount of new traffic to their website and generated over 60 000 new business leads through our click alerts notifications.

How does this equate to business you may ask? A simple calculation says that if all our clients followed up on all their leads and only converted 1 out of 10 leads into business with an average deal value of R500 then our small users generated over R3million in new business sales by just sending an email. If we calculate this over a 12 month period our current users will generate over R36m worth of new sales by just sending email which is 20 times more than their Rocketseed annual licensing fee’s.

Spending R1 to make R20 during these times sounds really good to me, especially when you consider that they also guaranteed a million brand impressions and 60 000 additional visits and many more page impressions at the same time. All of this combined reinforces the reality that there is simply nothing that is better value for money than Rocketseed. Your everyday email is an extremely powerful marketing channel and it is one you own.

Before signing-up for Rocketseed you only need to calculate what you spend on other marketing and branding activities and initiatives and what ROI they offer you and then look at what Rocketseed is guaranteed to offer you. How long will you wait before you do the smart thing, or will it be to late when you finally realize that you need to market in smarter, more cost-effective and more targeted way?

Times are tough, why make it any tougher …contact Rocketseed today to increase your productivity effortlessly.

Having access to your own database of user e-mail addresses (and by your own, I don’t mean the proprietary tag that comes with buying a database, I refer to a database that you’ve collected overt time of people that have indicated they would not mind receiving your information) is a highly valued asset to any business with the grey matter to appreciate client relations and communications.

Not many companies have those types of databases though. So let’s look at the benefits of e-mail branding, where businesses have the ability to showcase more or less the same marketing message than they would on an e-newsletter.

1. Personalization: And I mean real personalization. For starters, you very seldom send an e-mail to someone whose name and surname you don’t have. And when you do, chances are that the recipient would be much more lenient toward your ‘unsolicited’ e-mail than he / she would to a newsletter.
2. Conversion rates: Selling Coca Cola to Coke drinkers are much easier than selling to Pepsi drinkers. More importantly, people who know that you’re in the business of selling Coca Cola, will come to expect that you would be marketing it in some form or another. E-mail branding works in a similar fashion. People expect you to market a service they full well know you provide, and secondly, the majority of your e-mail recipients are far more likely to fit your target demographic than some random database.
3. Reputation: We’ve entered a reputation sensitive era with the internet transporting opinions and recommendations at the speed of a click. Importantly, why take the chance to annoy droves of Pepsi drinkers with your Coca Cola branded mail shots when you can grace your own (admittedly much smaller) e-mail recipient base with unobtrusive branding?
4. Ownership: Your e-mail is yours pal and you can pretty much decorate it as you choose. Chances of receiving hate mail because of it are fairly slim, simply because the marketing message is secondary to the message you sent. If it’s relevant, the recipient will click on it in any event. In fact, I think most people would appreciate your marketing efforts if done tastefully.
5. Wow factor: Because you receive an e-mail notification when someone clicked on one of your links, you can imagine the coolness that comes with calling said person literally within the same moment that they’re browsing your website.

E-mail newsletters have its place…for everyday in between, there’s e-mail branding.

From DMNews.com, and according to a Forrester Research report, “e-Mail marketing spend will increase to $2 billion in 2014 in the US. This represents an 11% year-over-year growth rate. Because of this growth, in five years consumers will be hit with more than 9,000 e-mail marketing messages a year.

Social networks play a large role in these forecasts. As social networks become more primary sources, e-mail will grow, as e-mail is the basis for all social communications, according to the report.”

I believe it is important for businesses to realize the effect social networks will have on their e-communications. Inboxes will become more cluttered and the attention spans, not to mention the patience of users will hinge on a very thin thread.

Marketers will have it all to do to make sure they not only manage to grab the attention of users, but also strike a perfect balance in terms of timing, frequency and targeting of messages. Where it was once reasonably safe to deliver generic material to a mass audience base, technology has become both the Achilles heel and the enabler among users.

Targeted, user specific material will become crucial and the nemesis of countless businesses. Many will publicly question the relevancy and effect of e-communications because of that. While the marketing spend on email is forecasted to increase, it will become more difficult to retain recipient loyalty.

Which indirectly leads to another form of e-mail marketing. E-mail branding has been around for some time. It is not widely publicized, probably because it is one of the less attractive business models around. It doesn’t enjoy the media sensation as the likes of mobile technology, social networking and viral campaigns. It’s not a revolutionary technology, and it’s not necessarily a concept that is easily dressed up and paraded with.

Which makes it all the more effective. Its simplicity is its unique selling point. The notion of branding the inevitable white space within e-mails is arbitrary, yet often neglected. With technology that performs in the background with only the good stuff engaging with the user makes it one of the more enjoyable campaign trackers available.

The main attraction of e-mail branding is that it works while you’re using it. The reporting functionality is a classic example of how important real-time conversions are. It is often the time lapse from receiving an e-mail notification that somebody has clicked on the link of your branding to surprising the user with a phone call literally while they’re still browsing your site, that leads to the sale.

We live in a time where media and marketing have become the sex symbol of commerce, where turnover and profits seem secondary. I have yet to witness a business that manages to survive on this mantra though.

Probably the most perfect opportunity to impress your brand image onto your customer is ignored for reasons that boggle the mind. Coca Cola, the world’s most recognized brand, is spending billions of dollars each year on marketing and advertising…virtually guaranteeing no single person could go through a day without being exposed to their brand.

However, Coca Cola must be sending millions of emails every year, yet they don’t brand a single one of them. You, as Small Business Owner, spend much less on marketing. But those dollars are probably much more sensitive to your bottom line. To prove this, ask your marketing guy to tell you straight how difficult it is to get funds approved for new campaigns.

So what’s so funny about all this?

Well, for starters, most of the abovementioned were written and published way back in 2001 already. Even though it was related to the Australian market, it still holds true for most countries today, eight years later. It is still one of the cheapest forms of marketing, performed through a channel that you own, and yet the market is still largely untapped.

There’s no competition for space, no bidding on placement and zero cost per click and with very little onset capital needed, the branding potential and ROI through this channel is huge.

MarketingProfs which I hold in high esteem, indulges us with 15 benefits of email branding:

Technical Benefits
1. Integrate templates into your corporate email system
2. Apply different templates for different situations
3. Control access to templates
4. Publish managed content to email templates to enhance corporate branding
5. Customize email templates to corporate branding and personalize to the sender
6. Minimize the impact to the email system with lightweight HTML templates
7. Utilize the centralized storage of a web server to store resources instead of sending them along with each email

Business Benefits
1. Reinforce your brand each time an employee sends an email
2. Ensures your company maintains a consistent professional profile
3. Differentiates your company from competitors by providing a flexible communications tool
4. Increases productivity and efficiency by directing recipients to relevant sections of your website, or to a free phone number
5. Enables your company to send targeted and focused messages, increasing brand awareness
6. Can be incorporated as part of a lead-generating process, using Web links
7. Increases customer retention through more effective and continuous communications
8. Contributes to the identification of new business opportunities by making your brand more visible

What are typical questions you want answered before adopting this approach?

While marketing- and internet trends move at lightning speed, I do feel that it’s important to slow down a bit and focus on the most important things businesses can do today to gain strides in marketing, requiring minimal budget.

Blogs continue to be highly rated, although of late, much less hyped. It has become a mainstream practice now. Where once the early adopters were marveling at the droves of traffic their blogs generated, the hype has flattened out, reinstating normality. Now it’s not as cool anymore to have blog, but rather accepted by the user that you would.

So let’s focus on 6 critical reasons I found why your blog is important and then if still thirsty for opinion, enjoy my 4 additional reasons.

1. To have meaningful social media impact, you must provide a critical mass of content that will position you and your organization as thought leaders within your market niche. Nothing works better than a blog to achieve that objective. The more content, the more findable by those customers you need to attract.

2. You can provide an unlimited amount of vital information in a single location. Because Web visitors are desperately seeking answers to their most pressing questions, you have the opportunity to provide just the right answers for your ideal target customers.

3. Content aside, the structure of a blog enables you to organize your information almost effortlessly to the benefit of your visitors.

4. Unlike other social media tools, such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, your blog is open to the entire world. This enables you to achieve potentially infinite reach for your critical mass of content.

5. You can be both timely and comprehensive. Although Twitter couldn’t be more timely, the information, opinions, and advice you tweet can never be comprehensive. Your blog can be just as timely as Twitter because you can post information instantaneously. But you can also make each post as comprehensive as necessary and integrate that post with lots of other relevant information on your blog.

6. Your blog posts, far from being isolated from other great tools such as Facebook and Twitter, can be automatically pulled into each one.

My 4 additional reasons:

7. Above being able to pull your blog content into your Facebook & Twitter account, you can also feed it to your e-mail branding. The more channels you use to distribute your content, the better the reach.

8. Blog content can and should be used to add credibility and opinion to your electronic newsletters.

9. Blogs are RSS capable, which simply means your content could be syndicated across multiple platforms.

10. It also means that people on the move can feed your content to their mobile phones. As mobile usage increases, the demand for content on the mobile phone will increase too.

Rather than keeping up with the current trends, trying in vain to understand, implement and execute with immediacy, you should rather try and focus on a single social media component first, do it well, and then move onto incorporating other.

As one of the leading lifestyle and event destinations in the world, Cape Town plays in the big league and is constantly up against the large marketing budgets from other 1st world and emerging market cities. But Cape Town, in addition to its natural beauty and diversity, over the next 18 months, has more good news and event information to publish than arguably any other lifestyle destination in the world. Just think about some of the events which will be hosted in Cape Town in addition to the normal heavy schedule:

• Indian Premier League T20
• Nations Cup Cricket
• Tri- Nations
• British Lions Tour
• FIFA 2010 draw
• IFIFA 2010 world cup training camps, friendlies and official fixtures

As you can well imagine, to mount a global awareness campaign highlighting all of this could be very costly. But, in what is arguably a first in any Tourism industry, Cape Town Tourism has partnered with Rocketseed to help drive global brand awareness of Cape Town as a Lifestyle and Events destination of choice, by using the marketing force of its membership and a marketing channel they already own – email!

Consider the numbers:

• Cape Town Tourism has over 2500 members who offers hospitality and tourism services.
• So these members will have over 5000 people that actively communicate by email to business recipients.
• Typically these recipients are international customers, prospects, agents, tour operators (and these recipients have a global reach too as they act on behalf of multiple countries).
• Each of the 5000 email users will publish their membership affiliation and CTT news releases on every one of the 30 emails they send, every day, as a combined marketing force.
• So, Cape Town Tourism and its members will be able to secure over 54 million headline exposures for their press resleases to a targeted audience over the course of one year by inserting them dynamically into their members Rocketseed branding using our RSS feed facility.
• By using Rocketseed, Cape Town Tourism and its members are able to measure and track the success of this campaign, knowing exactly how many exposures and, in fact, click throughs achieved – to the members’ websites, members’ listings and the News section on the Cape Town Tourism website.

An example of what a typical Cape Town Tourism member’s email, who has joined this campaign, will look like with the RSS feed of news headline and CTT logo on it:

Not only is this true leadership through innovation, it also shows how businesses and marketing bodies with common interest and objectives can use technology to unite around a very important common cause, and drive a joint campaign irrespective of the fact that in many cases they are competing in the same markets.

Rob Love, MD of Rocketseed SA, commented “not only are we proud to be associated with this campaign but we are also excited to provide the software and support that enables this unified industry campaign which according to our knowledge is definitely a World first. We want to congratulate Cape Town Tourism and their executive on their foresight and leadership through innovation. It simply shows that South Africa and its people can lead the way in the world, including the fields of marketing and technology.”

I was one of the many that warned against social media, the manner and speed with which negative brand impressions can proliferate online. The online community, mostly moms of course, were outraged. They spoke of disrespect toward the truly humbling job of raising a child while pursuing a normal (professional) life. Pain is not funny.

Well here’s a pickle, it seems it is. Thanks to PR Squared, I’ve now found that (because of the outrage?) there was a Lightspeed research survey done and according to the results…not many people really seemed to care.

“(Almost) 90% of women had never seen the ad. Once they saw it, about 45% liked the video, 41% had no feelings about it, and 15% didn’t like it. Even fewer, 8%, said it negatively affected their feelings of the brand, compared with the 32% who said it made them like the brand more.”

Now I can think of at least 10 people (undoubtedly there are thousands) that would be grimacing gleefully at this piece of information and with a sarcastic hand on the shoulder share their “I told-you-so” sympathy shrug. I am after all making a living doing exactly this.

So now what? There are tons of these examples of social media gone bad floating around on the internet, but not many research surveys done to support any side of the matter. Do we take the Lightspeed survey as proof and go find a job selling insurance?

Well, no. I think it was Mike Stopforth who once said that if 10% of your target audience is online, then you should spend 10% of your marketing budget online. That to me also means that you should roughly spend 10% of your time managing your online profile (or brand as we call it these days). If 90% of the people then react negatively to your online campaigns, then it simply equates to 9% of your total brand audience (I think. You do the math). Handle the issue quickly and efficiently and move on.

The trouble with this is the following:

1. Few companies employ the (right) tools to quickly and efficiently monitor their online presence.
2. Many companies have no clue who their target audience really is and therefore simply cannot measure their online brand equity.
3. There are too many “jack of all trades” net experts making very fast bucks by doing way too much of the wrong work. Get someone willing to assess your business before he launches his sales pitch.
4. Companies get stuck on the idea of using external channels (other websites, Google etc) to market from when they have a perfectly viable, personal and loyal communications (pdf) channel they could target.

When it comes to online it seems there are no set rules, people abuse their newfound status as content creators and thought leaders and you can very easily be sucked into a digital mud slinging when you could well have spent your time more constructively.

2. At the end of 2008, about 19% of internet connections around the world did so at speeds in excess of 5Mbps – a 21% increase from the year before.

3. South Korea reigns supreme in terms of internet connections and connectivity speeds. It connects at an average speed of 15Mbps, ten times the global average.

4. They also rank #1 for the amount of connections above 5Mbps, with a total of 69%.

5. The USA ranks in a #17, but enjoys top spot for unique internet connections globally, with an astonishing 401 285 817 unique IP addresses.

6. Sweden and Norway tops the charts for the number of connections per capita, at 0.46 and 0.42 respectively. The United States ranks in at #6 with 0.38 connections per capita.

7. Mayotte, Equitorial Guinea and Rwanda ranks as the countries with the slowest internet connection speeds with 98%, 96% and 96% of them accessing the internet at speeds less than 256Kbsp.

8. I guess it’s not surprising that the USA and China ranks #1 and #2 respectively for the countries with the highest attack traffic in the world with 22.85% and 19.3% respectively.

For the complete “State of the Internet Report”, head over to Akamai.com.

From the Church of the Customer Blog:
“Amazon recently deleted the sales rankings of hundreds of gay- and lesbian-themed books. Writer Mark Probst blogged about the de-ranking and was told by an Amazon representative that the company will no longer include sales ranks for “adult” material on the site.”

Word soon spread across the Twitterverse (Don’t you just find these Twitterisms annoying?) and virtually within hours a global online community sang in unison: It is time to teach the big guns a lesson.

Probst’s blog post was dated Sunday, April 12 at 2:08 am. In 24 hours, here’s a quick look at how things developed:

Twitter: Users begin using the hashtag #AmazonFAIL. It was the number-one trending topic on Twitter search all day. After an Amazon spokesperson told CNET news that the de-ranking was “a glitch in our system and is being fixed,” Twitterers responded with a new hashtag: #glitchmyass.

Blogs: Over 5000 15 000 blog posts about the news. It was the top story on the widely read Techmeme.
Facebook. The AmazonFail Group launched, quickly gathering 1,200 3700 members out of the gate.
Online petitions.

Online petitions sprang up protesting the “adult” policy. One gathered more than 9,000 25 663 signatures in a few hours’ time.

Google bomb: A blogger launched a campaign to redefine “Amazon rank” on Google. It’s working. This page is #2 in the search rankings.

Hacking: Protesters started tagging the de-ranked books on Amazon site with #AmazonFAIL. At last count, 882 1500 books were tagged.

Logos: People created logos for the protest.

Merchandise: #glitchmyass boxer shorts, t-shirts and other apparel are for sale!

Complaint templates: Customers wanting to complain and who need writing help can use this pre-crafted complaint letter.

Boycotts: Customers on Twitter and blogs are talking boycott.

Over 335 885 mainstream media articles related to this story, including Wall Street Journal, Wired, and NPR.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that the “cataloging error” was the result of a single Amazon employee in France who flipped the wrong switch, causing over 50,000 books to be flagged as “adult.” This is according to an anonymous source inside the company.

But Amazon’s customers are having none of it. It’s not difficult to see why so many businesses long back to the days before the internet considering that an alleged “mistake” could get you punished in a very unceremonious and indeed costly manner.

It also seems rather time consuming to go to these sort of lengths to have your voice heard, doesn’t it? Just when did the human become so annoyingly spiteful? I’ll tell you when…

When the opportunity arose to jump on a bandwagon. There’s a smarter saying for that: “Monkey see, monkey do.” Unfortunately, as always, word of mouth carries exceptional credibility. Only these days, one idiot’s opinion has the ability to reach so many more idiots on such a frequent basis that it has become critical to keep an eye on them.

So when was the last time you had a look at the conversations around your brand?

As South Africa’s presence on contemporary world markets is still in its relative infancy, really only since the advent of democracy in 1994, the perception in these markets is that the South African wine industry is a comparative new-comer..

As you can well imagine, to mount a global awareness campaign of the 350 year anniversary could be very costly. But, in what is arguably a first in any wine industry, WOSA has partnered with Rocketseed to help drive global brand awareness of the 350 year campaign, by using the marketing force of its membership and a marketing channel they already own – email!

Consider the numbers

• WOSA has over 500 members who export their wines.
• So, these members, including WOSA, have over 2500 people that actively communicate by email to recipients abroad.
• Typically these recipients are international customers, prospects, distributors, media, private buyers etc (and these recipients have a global reach too as they act on behalf of multiple countries).
• Each of the 2500 email users will broadcast the 350 year campaign on every one of the 30 emails they send everyday as a combined marketing force.
• So, WOSA and its members will be able to secure over 15 million exposures of this fact to a targeted audience over the course of one year.
• By using Rocketseed, WOSA and its members are able to measure and track the success of this campaign, knowing exactly how many exposures and, in fact, click throughs achieved – to the members’ websites, WOSA’s website and the WOSA350 year website.

An example of what a typical WOSA member’s email, who has joined this campaign, will look like with the 350 year logo on it:

Not only is this true leadership through innovation, but it also shows how businesses and marketing bodies with common interest and objectives can use technology to unite around a very important common cause, and drive a joint campaign irrespective of the fact that in many cases they are competing in the same markets.

Rob Love, MD of Rocketseed SA, commented “not only are we proud to be associated with this campaign, but we are also excited to provide the software and support that enables this unified industry campaign which according to our knowledge is definitely a World First. We want to congratulate Sue Birch, CEO of WOSA, and her team on their foresight and leadership through innovation. It simply shows that South Africa and its people can lead the way in the world, even in the fields of marketing and technology.”