Triple Email-Marketing Opening-Rate from 22% to 74%: A Case Study

E-Mail marketing still represents a major segment of the entire marketing strategy of any professional organization.

However, in times of flooded inboxes, you have to make the content you deliver individual and – most of all – exceptionally targeted towards every individual subscriber.

In one of our last assignments we were called by a client to present them with a solution for their decreasing opening rates.

We managed to increase the opening rate of their mailings from 22% to 74% by combining their email marketing software with an advanced analysis software provided by one of our partners.

You can download the entire case study with details about the solution here.

Social media policy essentials

I’ve helped during the creation of about half a dozen socmed policies and there is no essential nor is there an off the shelf solution.

It’s a highly individualized piece of content, primarily developed for AND WITH the employees, HR, legal and the unions under the supervision of someone who knows their way around social media.

Hope I was able to help, feel free to give me a call if you need further info.

Is there a way to get metrics from Itunes?

Since your files are probably going to be somewhere on your servers the simplest thing would be to attach file analytics to the files that are being downloaded.

As for the stream you can have the RSS feed burned through feedburner which will monitor the subscribers of the stream.

Why do people say that writing for the web is different? Writing copy is writing copy.

That’s because most copy professionals THINK – despite better knowledge – that copy is copy.

Copy for the web has to sales oriented PLUS include aspects of search engine optimization, including a certain density of relevant keywords in context to the pages general keyword primaries, etc.

I especially love this question from “SEO copywriters” or “blog ghostwriters” which imply that they have understood SEO and related aspects when they’re just cheating people out of their money.

Weekend Reading: Free White Paper for Web 3.0 and Customer Centric Internet Platforms

I published this white paper to outline the definition of Web 3.0 which resembles a customer centric approach on internet platforms.

Here is an excerpt from the Table of Contents:

Step 1: Attracting (the right) people to your website ………………………………………………………….. 6
1.1 Speaking to over 2 billion prospects …………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2 Social Media Marketing……………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
1.2.1 Facebook …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2.2 LinkedIn ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7
1.2.3 Twitter ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8
1.3 Corporate Online Reputation Management ……………………………………………………………….. 9
1.4 Search Engine Optimization …………………………………………………………………………………10
1.4.1 The technical aspect …………………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.2 The Keywords and Content …………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.3 Your Competition …………………………………………………………………………………………11
1.4.4 Mobile Search Placement ……………………………………………………………………………….11
1.5 Email Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………….11
1.6. Mobile Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………..12
1.7 Search Engine Marketing & Paid Inclusion………………………………………………………………..12
1.8 Offline Marketing and the internet …………………………………………………………………………13
1.8.1 Offline Advertising ……………………………………………………………………………………….13
1.8.2 Event Marketing ………………………………………………………………………………………….13
Step 2: Your Website…………………………………………………………………………………………………15
2.1 Advanced Web & User Interface Design …………………………………………………………………..15
2.1.1 Accessibility ……………………………………………………………………………………………….15
2.1.2 Mobile Devices ……………………………………………………………………………………………16
2.1.3 Navigation and Menus …………………………………………………………………………………..17
2.1.4 Search Ability on your site ……………………………………………………………………………..17
2.2 User Experience ……………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.3 Web Analytics ………………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.4 Proactive Website Visitor Engagement…………………………………………………………………….19
2.5 Corporate Blogging ……………………………………………………………………………………………19
2.6 The Community Aspect of Your Website ………………………………………………………………….19
Step 3: Your Customer Relationship and Knowledge Management ………………………………………….20
Step 4: The Community Metric in your Strategy ………………………………………………………………..21
Free Market Research ……………………………………………………………………………………………..21
Improving Your Products & Services (crowdsourcing) ………………………………………………………22

Have fun reading over the weekend and make sure to call me on Monday to call so that we can make YOU a digital economy leader

DOWNLOAD HERE

How do you build a “healthy” organization?

I would interpret healthy as having a focus on a long term strategy which involves keeping in the back of your mind the retention of organizational data both in an internal intelligence sector as well as in context to preserving as much customer data as possible.

Both of these factors represent factors of business continuity should it ever come to a merger or acquisition down the line. Then this information can be utilized to increase the price and give you a better position to negotiate from.

Further, the management should be able to pick the brains of their employees and teams by means of inner-organizational crowdsourcing. This can be achieved through internal social media tools implemented.

DIGITAL ECONOMY

ABOUT
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DIGITAL ECONOMY is the premier and soon to be largest group uniting thought leaders, professionals and subject matter experts from digital marketing, e-commerce, web analytics, SEO, SEM, SMM, CRM, ERP and other related fields.

MISSION STATEMENT
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Our mission is to make the DIGITAL ECONOMY more efficient and productive by unifying all aspects of conventional commerce and their digital counterparts.
On this platform we will exchange ideas on all aspects of increasing effectiveness of related business processes and decrease risks of digital economy related issues like privacy, IT infrastructure security, et. al.

MEMBERSHIP
=================================
Please apply for membership with your current affiliation and a brief description of what makes you a subject matter expert, professional or though leader and what your intentions are.

This link will lead you to the application for the DIGITAL ECONOMY group on LinkedIn.

Free Market Research

The internet offers us many great things, but probably one of the greatest is access to free market research data based on our customers.

Free market research based on social media tools is fairly simple. You can use portals like Facebook, LinkedIn and XING to create so called groups where you surround yourself with other likeminded users.

Because of the relationship with their network which you currently don’t have access to, they will spread the word about your product or services to their peers just by “liking” or sharing certain articles you publish.

The articles your members like will then be featured and, in turn, spread to their network.

The free market research part comes in, when your community has grown to a size of multiple thousand users which – in context to your efforts – is not a hard goal to reach.

Major brands like Coca-Cola have developed communities of a few million users following and thus spreading their brand on social media portals like Facebook.

But back to the free market research and how you can get representative results.

Once your community has reached a size you’re comfortable with, you can start engaging them, asking questions about latest products and informing them about updates.

Each of these updates will be featured and visible to them when they logon to the community, bringing your brand back into their mind.

The part where you start acquiring free market research data from is when you start asking them about reviews for your products, for instance where they have last had a Coke.

Coca-Cola, for example, managed to get thousands of responses from their community sharing pictures of their last drink. Among those were images were some from remote locations like people hiking in the mountains, others having a BBQ and yet others just having a casual drink at the office.

Bose, the sound specialists and loudspeaker manufacturer is another company doing a terrific job getting free market research from Facebook.

While the community they have built is by far not as large as that of Coca-Cola, the free market research data they get through social media is even more valuable to their efforts because of their specialization in the market they serve.

Recently they asked their community where they last listened to music which got a tremendous response, the answers superseding the thousands, spreading the word of the question like a wildfire and engaging third party members until then not accessible to the company which lead to a significant increase in brand visibility.

Another interesting question for them to ask would be which song each member listed to recently. In context to market research it would allow them to determine certain aspects of cross selling in cooperation with portals like iTunes. Or, based on the market research data of music distribution portals, allow the determination of demographics in their in their community.

While these aspects may seem exciting enough by themselves, there is the aspect of getting free market research directly from your community, engaging and involving them instead of hiring an institute or agency to anonymously get you the data. While the data you get from the agency may be more efficient, the social media market research part is more fun to the community and gives them the impression of your brand being the more approachable one.

New White Paper: Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector

I have just released a new white paper outlining the importance of Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector.

It starts with the introduction about the topic, addressing the problems but also presenting a solution oriented approach for CORM in the financial industry.

The chapters are in the product description. You can download “Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector” here.

Looking forward to your feedback.

What every CMO should learn from iStrategy 2010 in Berlin

First of all my utmost respect to the organizers of the conference for putting up such a great event. Given the fact that it was the first one I can only give my biggest kudos to the iStrategy crew.

See the web as a marketplace, not as a marketing instrument!

One of the primary things I have taken away from the event is that hardly any organization pays attention to what their website visitors experience once they have arrived. And even though this event was promoted solely around social media strategy, thus of course perceiving all the social media channels as marketing instruments, I can only repeat what I stated in the MeetTheBoss.tv interview: Please try to put yourself not only into the situation of the customer, but also move forward and start seeing the web as a marketplace, not only as a mean of marketing.

In my interview (for those that had to depart early or didn’t manage to make it to this great event at all) I stated a pretty plastic example; that what is being done now compares to running the energizer bunny through the city, catching everyone’s attention.

Those people will definitely visit your store, but if there is no sales staff there to engage with them your products can have all the value proposition they want and no one will buy, thus rendering the marketing efforts invested in this campaign(s) obsolete.

Wikipedia describes a market as “any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information” and this is where you have to go people… the level of the web are customer centric web presentations allowing both customer initiated and proactive engagement from the side of organization running this web operation.

Real time website analytics, backed by behavioral targeting will allow you to pinpoint interested visitors, mark them as prospects and allow your sales staff to directly speak to them through a chat window which will appear on the visitors screen.

Just to give you an insight: I have been experimenting with proactive customer engagement instruments for the past 5 months and have seen two extreme results:

1. Once you initiate the chat window on your visitors screen roughly 40% immediately shut it and leave your site because they perceive their privacy to be invaded and they have never seen something like this before. Due to the fact that I see this kind of interaction to spread magnificently in the next months because of its simplicity however, I think that this rate will drastically reduce over the next 18 months.

2. The other 60% accept the chat request simply because you introduce yourself to them on the fact that you have seen their interest in the specific product/page they’re currently viewing and giving them the opportunity to ask questions they may have in context to this product. Questions which they would have not asked if you would have made them access the contact form (if you offer points of contact at all).

For those of you who would have expected the all healing solution in the post: I’m sorry to disappoint you at this point, but it’s not out there simply because your organization is too unique starting at the vertical you’re in and ending with factors like the mindset inside your company or enterprise and how willing the employees are to embrace new things or how keen they are to engage others.

Utilizing social media as an instrument for internal communication!

Social media has so much more to offer than what it’s primarily being (mis)used for by the companies out there today.

Another very interesting aspect is the internal usage to gain and preserve intellectual property, preventing/reducing the risk of – for instance – re-initiation of projects which have been worked on prior reducing process faults and costs resulting thereof.

An internal blog made available to the whole organization can not only enable horizontal communication which will allow you to spread innovative ideas immediately (and improve them through the discussions which inevitably are going to happen over time) but also catch other ideas for improvement of processes and organizational purposes.

As I have pointed out above, there is no all curing prescription drug which will take care of all your needs. And nor is Microsoft’s Sharepoint!!!1

Corporate Online Reputation Management (CORM)

Nothing is as bad as leaving something uncommented. And why should you? I have just recently found out that pretty much none of the fortune 500 companies of the world listen to what is being said about them on Twitter.

While I could understand that not all channels can be monitored (which is also a lie) Twitter is one of the “hottest” portals.

Don’t see it as negative energy being spread about you on the web but see it as an opportunity to engage with a customer, thus strengthening your relationship with them. Don’t believe me? Well, give it a try. It works, trust me. John McCrea does a magnificent job with it on Plaxo, so why shouldn’t you or Lufthansa, or Bose, or Allianz Global Investors?

Beside the fact that you directly engage with the customer however, you can catch a lot of FREE!!! (That’s the thing without paying millions for people collecting market intelligence for you) customer feedback. Not only what your customers think about your products but also where you should go to have a look for more info about you which you may have not been able to assess which may be stashed in a third party discussion board, blog, etc. Oh yeah, did I mention that THIS INFORMATION IS FREE?

BOTTOM LINE!

Yes, the iStrategy is definitely worthwhile, especially to those organizations which have not undergone any efforts of implementing social media into their marketing strategy. (IMPORTANT: the marketing strategy is only ONE PART of what you should do. Don’t forget the: the objective of social media marketing is to drive customers to you. Don’t make the mistake and leave alone in your desolate virtual warehouse, a. k. a. your website!)

Should you join the next one? Pretty much so.

The value proposition is there, loud and clear and it will most likely give you important insights into the market (and hey, I’m probably going to speak there).

And if you don’t learn anything there is still the possibility to network with some really big people there from several industries.

Even if I repeat myself: there is no golden rule. The more individual your strategy is the more authentic it will come across. Copying is not really the solution. But copying for inspiration and then making it better definitely is an idea to pursue.

For any questions you may have please comment them to this post and/or use my contact info to reach out to me. Or follow @lars_hilse on twitter.