 | By Sandeep Vadgama, Founder, Fourth Source |
Last Tuesday I attended the Silverpop Agent ROI Tour, which is Silverpop’s email marketing event and for the first time it was being launched in the UK held at the Tower of London. I was particularly looking forward to the director of marketing – EMEA of Silverpop, Richard Evan’s presentation on Email’s role in a “Mocial” world. Mocial is the term often referred to as the rise in the increasing use of Smartphone’s and social networks, although there is no definitive definition of the term.
Key takeaways
Both mobile and social networks are here to stay. Towards the end of last year at the F8 Developers Conference, Facebook announced they had acquired more than 800 million users worldwide. In addition Twitter has surpassed the 500 million users mark. Meanwhile the number Smartphones shipped exceeded the number PC’s being shipped in Q4 of 2010. And let’s not forget tablets, approximately 65.2 million tablets will be shipped from manufacturers to major brand vendors in 2011, with a staggering 40 million of those expected to have been Apple iPads. Clearly these numbers cannot be ignored.
Does this mean email is dead? Not by a long shot. There are still expected to be around 2 billion email users around the world.
Email Marketers must adopt, adapt and improve
Evans said email marketers can do this in four ways; integration, context/design, humanisation and automation/triggers.
| Integration | Context/Design | Humanisation | Automation/triggers |
Integration
Integrate the two where possible, i.e. does your Facebook fan page have an email opt-in form? And include social network sharing buttons in your email campaigns. With mobile, are you allowing your customers to opt-in to your email by SMS?
Context/Design
With all the devices available these days, we are living in a connected world. It is easy to find yourself with design overload, trying to solve deliverability and renderability issues. You can use services such as Litmus, to preview your email online on the different devices.
Consider where your emails are being read, during the early morning, received emails may be read on Smartphones as most people are on their way to work. I often ignore marketing emails which I receive overnight, because I perceive them to be aimed at someone in a different time-zone and therefore irrelevant to me.
Also consider the finger is the new mouse as most devices are touchscreen so optimise things such as the size of your call to action button.
Humanisation
The old rule was sell the size not the steak, the new rule is educate your readers with grilling tips, recipes and wine pairings.
Let your customers do the selling, use testimonials from your customers in your email marketing. In the case of Air New Zealand, they send their flight confirmation email with a huge image of their flight services manager, who the customer will then see when they arrive at the airport to board their flight. It’s the little things that can make a huge difference.
Automation/Triggers
Email allows you to use dynamically driven data to upsell in your email marketing campaigns and more, which social media cannot do yet, so use social media to drive your customers to email.
Email Strengths
- Highly personalised
- Triggered off behaviour
- Campaign tracking
- Dynamic
- Transactional
- Nurture
Emails offers low volume and high ROI
According to figures from Silverpop client S&S Worldwide, triggered emails made up 4.1% of total emails sent and 40.2% of sales came through triggered campaigns.
Evans concluded by stating that social is all about conversation and email is the driving force behind conversion, making email healthier than ever.
What are you doing to advance your email campaigns?
