Posts Tagged email marketing
Nominate a deserving nonprofit for free Emma email marketing service!
When we say it’s the most wonderful time of the year ’round these parts, we’re talking about Emma 25 time. It’s the annual program (now in its sixth year) where we team up with our customers to award free Emma service to deserving non-profits — 25 around the world, and 25 in the cities Emma calls home (Nashville, Portland, Denver and Austin).
If you’re an Emma customer, why not nominate your favorite non-profit for free email marketing and survey services from Emma? It’s a fantastic way to help those groups use email to stay in touch with volunteers, find donations, send newsletters, manage events and more.
Come early January, we’ll post all the eligible groups and invite the whole world to vote for their favorites. But for *your* favorite group to be an honoree, *you’ve* got to nominate ‘em.
It just takes a few minutes, and you’ll have that warm, fuzzy feeling that no amount of delicious gingerbread lattes can rival. Go on and get to nominating!
Email and video together boost click-throughs for VideoLink.
VideoLink is a stylish video production company headquartered near Boston. And, as an Emma customer, they understand that a stylish email stands out in the inbox. But in a recent campaign they added video, and it stood out in the response data as well.
They set up the campaign to promote their new (and, may we add, fabulous) website. But before hitting send, they were true to their name. They made a short video, added a screen shot to their email and linked it to a video landing page they made through a service called Flimp On-Demand.
“We worried that a text-only email would be overlooked,” said VideoLink Sales Manager Marty DeLoreto. “So by adding the video player to the email we hoped it would attract more attention and hopefully more click throughs.”
Plenty of folks clicked through, all right. Their click-through rate was a fantastic 26.2 percent. And while Emma was tracking all the email response data, Flimp was tracking the data for the video page. Of people who started the video, 64.5 percent watched the entire thing. And 127 people clicked a link to visit the website.
While video in email may not be for everyone, it’s certainly worth trying. Consider these statistics from Forrester Research:
- 71% of online audiences watch Internet video.
- The number of video streams likely will double by 2013.
- Video in email can increase click throughs by two to three times.
Still, there’s no perfect way to embed video to play within an email (yet). But what VideoLink did is fairly common and effective: use screen shots and text links to send people to a landing page that hosts the video. Emma customers can also host videos in their document library and link to ‘em, too.
And the video doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective, either. VideoLink’s video lasted only 49 seconds and it was fairly simple, with CEO Gina Chudnow describing the new website’s features.
“We also had more personal comments back to the CEO praising her performance and congratulating her on the launch,” Marty added. “That kind of communication would rarely happen with a text-only email.”
Marty plans to use email and video together in the quarterly newsletter, featuring other high-level employees. How about you? What kinds of things are you doing (or want to do) with video and email? Do let us know, won’t you? We’d love to hear about it.
April Fools, email style.
Last week, we asked our community of Twitter followers to tell us the ways they saw companies using email to play their April Fools jokes. It’s always refreshing to see companies injecting personality into their marketing campaigns, and this year’s f-f-f-foolin’* was no exception. Here are two we heard about from our Twitter friends:
Scentiments
(click the icon for a close-up)
With this email campaign, the online perfume retailer launched, ahem, Scratch and Sniff technology. When you click through to the landing page, you get the promo code for the discount – GOTCHA09. Even if the technology was fake, at least the discount wasn’t a joke.
Thanks to @PrecociousJewel for the tip!
Whole Foods
(click the icon for a close-up)
Whole Foods took a more subtle approach in their weekly “Whole Deal” newsletter, featuring one banner ad for “Organic Air” as their Sure Deal of the week alongside regular products and promotions – the “deal” being paying $6.99 for .02 ounces of air. The landing page adds a few more jokes to the mix, including a picture of local penguins lining up for their new Antarctica store.
Kudos to @StephanieKern for letting us know about this one.
And of course, there were a few other popular ones – Gmail’s a perennial favorite (thanks, @NDPtweets), and the Guardian fooled a few folks into thinking they were going to be publishing all their news in Twitter format going forward (thanks, @moragbrand). I completely fell for Under Consideration’s fake rebranding of Verizon and felt equally as stupid as I did disappointed when I figured out it wasn’t real.
What about you? Did you get a particularly clever or convincing April Fools campaign? How do you and your team find ways to add a little personality to your campaigns during the other 364 days of the year?
*Come on. A blog post without a gratuitous Def Leppard reference isn’t really a blog post at all, is it?
[tags]email marketing, april fools, myemma.com, scentiments.com, whole foods[/tags]
A survey invitation that’s, well, inviting
When we released surveys to the Emma community last month, we couldn’t help but send a Emma-powered survey to our customers, too. And, in the spirit of learning how surveys and email marketing campaigns work best together, I used the survey’s email invitation to test which link was more clickable: an invitation to take a brief survey or a more specific offer to take a 5-minute survey.
I did some hypothesizing (thanks, 7th grade science teacher!) that the ’5-minute’ language would be more effective. After all, five minutes means five minutes, whereas ‘brief’ may just be marketing-speak for ‘the longest survey of your life, sucker.’ When you’re asking for someone’s time, there’s little question that it’s good to be as specific as possible.
The question was: does being more specific in the invitation really make a difference in how people engage with your survey?
Here’s what we found. While the difference wasn’t outrageous, the five-minute invitation gave us better click-through rates and survey participation rates. Between the ‘brief’ campaign and the ‘five-minute’ campaign, we saw:
* An 8% increase in click-through rates in the email campaign
* A 9% increase in people who started the survey once arriving on the page
* An 11% increase in people who completed the 18-question survey
And yes, there’s more. In the email campaign, there were two places folks could click through – the top mention, which is where we tested the different language, and the bottom mention, which stayed the same between the two campaigns. What’s interesting? The 8% increase showed up *exclusively* in the difference between the top-mention clicks. The clicks on the bottom-mention were statistically identical between the two versions.
Based on that fun little tidbit, I’ve been doing some rather unscientific speculating (sorry, 7th grade science teacher) that the boost in engagement doesn’t come just from a subscriber *understanding* it’s a five-minute survey and appreciating the specificity. Perhaps it’s connected to the physical act of seeing (and then clicking) the language that’s setting the expectation. If that weren’t the case, I’d have expected a little more variation in clicks in the lower mention.
The moral of the story: While setting an expectation with a specific time isn’t the silver bullet to boosting your survey participation numbers, the people who appreciate the specificity will be increasing likely to visit, start and complete your survey.
Are you using email marketing to promote your surveys and online forms? If so, tell us what’s working for you.
Announcing the Emma 25 honorees!
We’re proud to announce the 2008-2009 Emma 25 honorees. For five years now, Emma has donated email marketing startup & service to small non-profits, from more than 150 nominations from our customers.
The idea is that these non-profits could use Emma accounts to stay in touch with donors, coordinate volunteers and spread the word about the great work they do.
These non-profits made the list after nearly 5,000 votes. Thousands of people now are aware of some truly great projects out there, and we’re looking forward to helping these organizations do more good work in 2009.
Smarter email marketing in a recession
In an economic downturn, we know how appealing it sounds to send as many emails as possible to everybody on your mailing list. After all, email marketing is champ when it comes to making the most of your marketing dollars, returning $45 on average per dollar you invest.
But like that half-eaten eclair in the break room, you’ve got to resist temptation. When you email too frequently with generic information, your readers might start to ignore your emails, opt out of them, mark you as spam, or (worst of all) completely dump you as a sender. It doesn’t mean you can’t send when you have something to say. It just means you want to be smart about how you’re sending. Here are three quick tips for staving off email fatigue:
* Target your email campaigns! – With email segmentation, you can make sure that your message is getting in the right hands. Rather than sending another promotion to everybody about the newest Snuggie, send it to the people who are mostly likely to take action. Perhaps that’s people who’ve bought a similar product, clicked but *didn’t* buy in your last promotion, or people whose survey results showed that they really love the idea of a blanket with sleeves. Either way, email segmentation allows you to send fewer, more targeted messages.
* Ask how often they want to receive it - Email frequency doesn’t have to be a mystery. When new subscribers sign up for your email campaigns, it’s easy to find out just how often they want to receive information from you. Give them the option to subscribe to a higher frequency than you would normally send — it might surprise you how many people actually want to receive extra content from you. Just be sure to honor their request.
* Give ‘em what they really want – There’s no point in sending a message if you’ve got nothing to say. When people fill out your email signup form, they’re expecting a benefit for joining your list. After all, email marketing is a relationship. Reward the time and information your subscribers are giving you with a special coupon, product preview, whitepaper or VIP information.
Are you trying any of these? Has the downturn impacted your email strategy or email marketing budget? Did you actually buy a Snuggie? Leave us a comment and let us know.
5 ways to bundle holiday cheer into your emails
Daylight Savings Time gets me *every* year. Seriously. I go from having evenings filled with activities, to feeling like I should be in bed by 8:15 pm. But the cool thing about this year of early evenings is it’s given me more time to delve into the bounty of holiday emails starting to roll in.
So, in the spirit of giving, I thought I’d share a couple points that have stood out in my season-laden inbox.
* Make it easy to forward. Whether it’s to pass on an invitation or drop a subtle gift hint, make sure subscribers have an easy option to move the information along.
* Keep the holiday related information at the top. You’ve heard us preach about the ‘above the fold’ importance before, but it bears repeating. Turn the top 1/3 of your email into a virtual hub of reader engagement. Which…I’m not so sure is a real thing. But you understand, right?
* Get personal. People have fairly full inboxes in general. When the holiday season hits, they get even fuller. So take a moment and find three ways to get a little more intimate with your readers. I know I’ve been more apt to click through emails that are tailored for, well, me.
* Balance those images. I’ve received more emails with one large image this month than I have any other month. While I know rich images are tempting, be careful. Find a nice balance of images and text, and be sure to make the most of your alt tags.
* Be thankful. Let your readers know they’re important to you. Whether it be a white paper, discount, or even a separate campaign, don’t miss the opportunity to let your subscribers know what they’ve done to help you out over the past year.
So, happy holiday season, Emma blog readers. I hope you’ve latched onto a few ideas that will take your communication efforts to infinity. And beyond. Which is not a hint that I want anything Toy Story related this year. Or is it?
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