When I went to the movies over the holidays, I saw the preview for the new Steve Carrell movie — “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” — about a magician.
Maybe it’s the fact that a good illusionist has to get the audience to opt in to the performance. Or maybe it’s because the trailer featured many scenes in Las Vegas, site of the upcoming Email Summit 2013.
Either way, it got me thinking of some of the key tactics every email marketer should know. So I turned to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Handbook – Second Edition to pull out some basics.
For example, while every magician should know The Best Coin Fold and The Mystery of Princess Karnac, every email marketer should know …
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For the recently released MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their understanding of customer mobile device adoption …
Q: How well does your organization know the level of mobile device adoption of its customers?
Damir Saracevic, Director of Digital Marketing, Catalyst, shared his thoughts on the data …
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Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Tom Pick of Webbiquity, chosen as best B2B marketing blog … by you.
With more than 90% of B2B and high-value consumer product purchasing decisions now starting with online research, online visibility is crucial. Companies that seem to be “everywhere” online for specific search phrases, with relevant content, stand an outsized chance of winning the business.
Maximizing online visibility isn’t just a matter of search engine optimization (SEO), though that plays a key role. As prospective buyers look to influential third-party information sources as well as peer reviews in addition to vendor content, disciplines that have traditionally operated in silos (SEO, online advertising, social media, PR) need to work together in a coordinated fashion.
Content that is not coordinated between different functions (e.g., marketing emphasizes customer service while PR talks about new features) is confusing to prospective customers. Content that is re-created independently by different functions rather than created once and then repurposed is a waste of money. And, content that isn’t cross-linked for search optimization purposes is a missed opportunity.
But, as author Lee Odden points out in Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing, “For many companies, it can be very difficult and complex to implement a holistic content marketing and search optimization program.”
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Most email marketers still batch and blast their audiences, sending one email to everyone in the database, said Responsys CEO Dan Springer yesterday at Responsys Interact 2012. Springer spoke during the event’s kickoff session in San Francisco, and noted that not every marketer is guilty of batch-and-blast (Full Disclosure: Responsys sponsored my attendance of this event).
“For all of you that are already innovative, if you want to maintain your innovative status, you are going to need to keep pushing,” he said.
Where you should push is toward integration, Springer said, which he called the future of digital marketing. Yesterday’s sessions were loaded with examples of how companies are integrating email marketing with other channels. Here are two that stood out:
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This week’s B2B newsletter article, “B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics,” features three industry experts providing insight into mobile and social media marketing. Although there is some overlap in practices, the complex B2B sale involves some channel techniques that don’t completely apply to consumer marketers.
But, luckily for B2C practitioners, one of the experts, Tim Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer, 44Doors, a mobile marketing solutions provider, had a few ideas for the consumer channel, too.
Here are a few quick-and-dirty ideas to hopefully improve your mobile marketing efforts. Some ideas you may have heard about before, and some might be completely new practices.
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The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 audience was treated to Brian Solis, author of The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the way you work to succeed in the customer revolution.
He opened with the idea that the real marketing challenge is the culture of the organization, and he provided a phrase he uses to describe this:
“Digital Darwinism is the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than your ability to adapt.”
Another big idea he offered was “social media is the new normal.” He continued that, “Social media is different than other media channels before it. Here, it’s about relationships, recognition, engagement, value and help.”
As you might guess from this set-up, the intro of Brian’s talk focused on social media and the mobile experience, and he offered many data points, such as:
- More than 350 million Facebook users access the platform via mobile devices
- Daily mobile social networking grew 58% in 2011
- Accessing social platforms via mobile browser is up 25%
- Accessing social platforms via mobile apps is up 126%
And given these numbers, Brian offered a chart that illustrates that the “connected consumer” isn’t limited to a certain age group:
Click to enlarge
Brian said, “My mother uses Facebook more than I could ever hope to use it. I may have to opt out of her feed.”
The mobile and social introduction led into the main theme of the keynote: integrating all the channels including social, mobile and email.
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