Email Marketing Evolution

There's been a constant debate about how email marketing should go, it was the next evolution from direct mailer. The fact that email takes about 30-40% of online activity, means it will not go away soon. But with today's social media being another channel of communications, means it could evolve the way we interact.

I believe email marketer should combine both email marketing with social media power, they could proof to be even more effective. If you combine the impression of your email database with social media - such as Twitter and Facebook, you'll gain more impression which is more powerful. Such as below:

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But before you jump into combining your email marketing with social media, I believe you need to cover the basic:

  • Are you still using one single image as the base of your email marketing? This approach is still being used until today, however it increase the chance of being spammed or sending the email into junk. The best way is to keep between 30% image and combination of text to reduce the spam rate probability, a lot of the email marketing system these days will carry a test tool to show what it takes to deliver your email marketing.
  • Time, re-look into your industry and when would be the best time for your readers to open your email.
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  • Tracking link, if you are selling something, better track it.
  • Data integration, best to have your email marketing data sync to your sales or other CRM system to ensure it is two-way flow. This will avoid any duplicates and ensuring all info is updated.
  • Segmentation, don't generalize your customers, each will be interested in one thing only and you should focus on that.
  • Less is more, never try to deliver more than 3 things or best to be simple.
  • Ensure you have something to deliver, plan your email marketing delivery in advance and how you can superceed or follow-up from that.
  • Clean list, try to gather a double opt-in data at all times. It is a way to ensure that your customer are interested in you and have given you permission for you to send information.
  • Optimize, optimize and optimize - there are always items to improve, your subject line, layout, conduct A/B testing to try and obtain which is the best way of delivery.
  • Growth, ensure your database grows constantly. The more "qualified" audience the better and ensure they are interacting with you.
  • Select your provider, there are many good ones out there:
    • MailChimp has to be on top of my list and I've used them for over a year. It's affordable and has rich third party integration which is useful.
    • Campaign Monitor also has good features on social media, although not much on third party integration.
    • Constant Contact, is also a good one in the market.

Here's some reference material to jump start your email marketing:

Click here to download:
an_introduction_to_email_marketing_final.pdf (1.31 MB)
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Click here to download:
Field_Guide_CrossChannelMrktg_WEB.pdf (1.8 MB)
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Marketing Creativity + Technology Platform

I've been waiting for this moment for some time, let me start by saying "Marketing creativity has to be met by Technology Platform". You need the mean to deliver your ideas and how you gauge whether it is working or not.

Marketing is about creating demand that most probably there or not there, or shift market share. By any means necessary, there are lots of way to get there, traditional or modern. The means for this 21st Century has certainly became a bit more fruitful, whereas in the past has been dominated majority by print advertising, public relations and perhaps direct mail/newsletter. Today you have a lot more options (which is helpful and also drives the price to be more competitive or less monopolized), it helps us marketers to re-evaluate our core business objective and what perceived value we want to deliver.

Recently, I had a tiny success in setting up the company's Facebook page (seeing that a year ago they were not confident on this area). I took a different approach and try to avoid generalization of audience, instead I segment it. Instead of one general company Facebook page, we setup four Facebook page (one had already existed, but we revamped and relaunched it). As you can imagine this means the content will need to be drawn up on four approach instead of one and that can take a lot of time, as well as resources to prepare it.

Campaign Asia covers a bit on my work:

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There are many approach on building a fan base, I set an objective of integrity and that means no inside employees are encourage to join the page. As we really want to build an organic community and our future customers. And so the conversation begins, we try to  ride on as much as we can through our fan base friends and that was painstaking at the beginning as the number growth can be really slow, our first page took about 3-6 months to grow to where it is today. But once it does, the rest comes through and the growth skyrocketed. But... fan base/numbers are of course nice, but we focus on the engagement quality.

We combine multiple tools such as HootSuite, Facebook Insights and Facebook EdgeRank to determine how we were doing. I think any Facebook marketers would agree that driving Fans engagement can be challenging, there are many factors to consider:

  • Time decay - the post could decay over long period of time, hence sometimes its a good idea to recycle your message.
  • Volume - your fans are naturally on Facebook everyday and they can't just be fixated on you, so you need to consider where and when the page post should appear.
  • Engagement - most people typically just watch and they don't really engage, hence why you need to encourage them like "click like" or "don't forget to share this", etc as a call-to-action as that is what Facebook Insights and Edge Rank measures.
  • Is your post interesting - don't be lazy and take off a flier and just post it on Facebook (unless it is really interesting), but try to create something more customized for your fans. Consider picture as number one, video only when you got something really interesting.

Below you can see the average stats of Facebook post that attracts your fans:

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Below as a sample, a content that rides on an event would tend to receive a lot of LIKES and SHARES as well, which is really nice.

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But even then, the global average of engagement is pretty low, so don't get disappointed, just keep working on it and it'll come:

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It's a community, let them speak up. Having said that, I do police my Facebook pages and set a very strong profanity block list as there are many spammers these days that tries to ride on your traffic. You don't want that to happen as it can annoy your fans. Below is a sample:

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End, let me close by saying what I believe for social media consists of two things - engagement as king and conversion as queen, if you can't convert in short or long run then it's effort wasted.

One more thing... don't forget to have fun, work wouldn't be interesting without fun.

Utilizing Facebook Advertising

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Anyone can start a Facebook page, the question remains on how do you grow them. The most common steps any company would take is to send out their company fan page to the internal team, asking their immediate friends and family to like them. This often followed by a boasting press release of reaching an X amount of fans on the page, but...

Does this help the company at all, getting your friends to like your page or even your content maybe great on the surface, but defeats the purpose of truly reaching out and creating a set of direct conversation with your audience.

After a long time experimenting on Facebook (and still am until today), I've discovered some of the following that might help your fan page:

  • Leverage the power of Facebook advertising, but don't take on an approach of traditional advertising.
  • Running contest and giving away free items maybe great, but how to convert them into your customers.
  • Take your online effort, to an offline effort (e.g. a flashmob to introduce your new Facebook page, a door stopper campaign, etc).
  • I found ShortStack to be the best and affordable tool to create and manage the content via the easily editable CMS. It is also one of the platform that has rich integration with third party systems. They have ready made template, but I recommend setting aside a budget to get it designed properly.

More notes on how to use Facebook advertising (first I think its a different approach on what you call advertising on Facebook):

  • I found conversion for acquiring fans are traditionally low or slow sometimes, but the figures is between 5-10% or could be more depending on what you are offering.
  • Leverage on the power of your existing fans (when I say this, this only works when you have organic fans).
  • It doesn't work like Google Ads, there are no keywords. Instead its interest, gender, age, language, etc (having said this always take into account that no one will ever complete their full interest or what they like on Facebook, the most basic or common targeting you can use are - age, gender and location).
  • Start with a small budget, I normally start with USD50-100 a day.
  • Always conduct A/B testing on your ads, find out which one works best and then roll out with that one on a bigger budget/scale.
  • If you are intending to lead the ad outside of Facebook, make sure you have a well designed landing page with capture form or conversion point (but take note normally it will be a one time visit only and the conversion is even lower once they've left Facebook environment).
  • The best Facebook ads that works are to direct them to your own Facebook page, it can be a post story, promoting an event to capture RSVP, sponsored stories, etc.
  • Before you start the ad however, make sure you have designed a proper landing page. It should be no less than fan gating, introducing who or what you are, what's your product or service and why they should like you. Try to provide fans reward and best not be a cheapskeat, as they are your fans after all.
  • There is a good reason why you need a landing page, imagine your new fans landing on your wall, where the conversation has happened. You can see why they can get confused.
  • The chance of your fans unliking your page after they became a fan is less than 1%, so no worries there.
  • Focus on engaging ads, something that will draw their attention from the wall for a split second. Maximize and design a great image that demands attention.
  • Got a special announcement or story to tell, use Facebook ad to spread the words to the people or audience that matters to you.
  • Rotate your ads as much as possible and localize.
  • "Great artists steal" go to Facebook Ad Board for some inspiration - https://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/
  • The minimum threshold for your targeting should not drop below 20,000 otherwise it will not go anywhere.
  • Always go for CPC model, even when there is no click your ads will keep on appearing until the end of your campaign.

Final note, keep on experimenting :)

I will try to keep on updating the ads and share how it works out.

 

Update - 30 January 2012: updated an ad sample of sponsored ad by Ritz-Carlton.

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Is Nokia following the Apple steps?

I still remember it was around 98, when Nokia was the cool phone, the one you need to have. It was (if I'm not mistaken) the first to go without antenna and came out with sleek plastic color designs that can be customized. It used to be a great product, a great phone that everyone loves. I think these days it may need to focus on low to middle market as "how the mighty have fallen". After years of success, in fact I think they are retracing the Apple path right before 1997.

Their product line has become very confusing, they keep on rolling different models and sub-series for each line. And they only have minor details upgrade or some extra features. Their UI is also not as good or has become more confusing, it used to be really simple. Then there is pre-Windows phone version where they try to come up with "their own" UI but really just copy Apple. The result was not impressive at all, the scroll was just way to weird and no smoothness in transition at all. It just became middle of the road product.

Then came in the desperate partnership between Nokia and Microsoft to launch their latest smartphone. The UI is better, but its not Nokia's and have stray even further from where they use to be. Whether Nokia-Windows phone will take off, not sure. They still have a lot of groundwork to do and far from Apple or Android.

Anyway, I was picking up a phone for my mum and I noticed several things when I was doing research on which product to get her. Nokia website has just undergo renovation and... it copied Apple layout? It became a lot simpler, with all the navigation bar on the top, search bar on the right, big photos and 3 main sub-promo... it all just look too familiar and did a comparison and yup it is the same.

Next (and I'm still an iPhone user by the way, is just that my mum operates simple phone) I decided to pick-up a Nokia Asha 300 at their official retail stores which is couple days ago. Service and experience was just not great, there was no salesmanship, no excitement about technology and enquiring what type of phone am I looking. Instead I was just left alone until I picked a phone and still no part of it convinced me, I had to go around to several other phone store and decided to came back and convince myself. Worse, its holiday season, no gift wrap, no holiday specials. No wonder the company is in trouble, its not inventing anything anymore, its just contempt going in circles.

And that's why Nokia's stock market has slumped from their highest of 39.71 (Nov 2007) to today's 4.95, that's a whooping fall down. Pity, for a company that used to be leading the phone industry.

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iPhone 4S launched in KL

Well after months of waiting iPhone 4S has finally arrived in Kuala Lumpur today, so I went to check it out today at the first outlet available. Currently you can only pick it up at Maxis KLCC, I think (and I only am guessing) they have reserved iPhone 4S for people that has pre-registered at their website weeks ago.

I have to say, I was expecting a bit more excitement (something like a long queue line), but there was only a handful of people and I don't think they even displayed the 4S as a demo, only iPhone 4 was displayed. So I didn't get the chance to chat with Siri.

Anyway the package is quite pricey if you add up the whole thing and it is kinda of complicated...
First the contract you need to get is here.
Second, if you walk out of the contract minimum of 12 months you'll have to pay for the rest... ouch.
Last, the plan will evaluate if you are current Maxis customer and instead of just say adding a bit more months on top of your current contract, they increase on top of it... so double ouch (say you have committed a year previously and you have used for 8 months, the new iValue plan will add another 12 months on top of it, instead of just releasing it to you with just additional 4 more months.

Anyway I did a bit of calculations and I think you'll agree with me... if you are non Malay resident.
Say we'll take the iValue 1 at RM100, 12 months. Choosing iPhone 4S 16GB.
So it will be RM500 (RM100 x 5 months) + RM1,750 = RM2,250. But you'll need to stick with the whole 12 months, you can upgrade. So say 12 months plus the iPhone 4S you will be paying RM2,950. And if you walk away from the contract you have to pay the remaining of the months... so ouch if you plan to leave Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia in the next 12 months.

Best bet is to get the unlocked version straight from Apple, check it out here. If you do the math you will end up with RM2,076 (based on exchange rate USD1=RM3.2) no contract and as iPhone is a global phone you can take it anywhere and get a local micro-sim card. Which you can also just pay RM25 to get your sim card switched here or you can take the risk of cutting it. As I am using 2 Maxis plan and I have to say that I am paying varying between 50-150 top per month and its rarely I hit 150. So better to save up that cash and use it somewhere else.

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Kind regards,
Adhi

Zynga, North or South?

Zynga, has been getting the PR spotlight in tech, gaming, Internet or social media industry for the last couple of weeks. Biggest headline or pressure to launch USD $1 billion IPO offering, largest since 2004 of Google.

First, Zynga has discovered a niche market of 'freemium' business model, it can strike a balance between getting cash from its players (although the margin is low) or it can get it from its advertisers that are interested in a certain set of demographics. There are potential in this market, it hasn't been fully discovered yet and has a lot of growth opportunities. The way I've seen multiple research of eMarketer, a lot of companies will be sure to find alternatives way to invest more into the cyberspace as it has proven return whether it is short or long as the online space has matured a long way since the golden days of its launching.

Second, as a social game company, it can compete with bigger companies such as Electronic Arts and alike. Which is pretty outstanding.

Zynga is not only focusing on its current games as their major assets, it is planning to release new stream of gaming again (possibly pending due to IPO to lift up after its first trading this Friday). As well as an approach to the mobile gaming as this is the second largest stream of revenue with 1 billion mobile on the planet and the growing platform of smartphones. It is a market with a lot of potential even if Zynga decided to just tap into 3 providers, aka iPhone/Apple, Android and Windows Phone. Again they can approach this market with either selling the app itself as a game, the virtual goods or tap into the mobile advertising opportunities.

It's special relations with Facebook, as well as revenue shares will have Facebook ensure it is in their best interest to allow their partner to be successful in their domain. Its presence in several countries such as China and the youth easily addicted to online gaming is another edge. Finally Zynga has over 13 studios under its flag, including the bid for PopCap Games one of the largest successful online game company acquisition will probably catapult them.

Last, who is in the seat of the driver, is he determined? Is he a great leader? Mark Pincus was on the other side of Internet business investment, he was behind several big things from Friendster, Facebook, Yahoo and so on. So he knows the game on two side of the fence and he runs a very tight ship.

I think there is a lot to expect from Zynga if they continue to make great products and the way the social network grows. I guess we'll see their debut on 16 December 2011.

You can read the details of their IPO offering here.

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The World Mourns for Jobs

Yesterday the world lost an innovator and a dear friend. Someone that has inspired me and hopefully the rest of the world. He works tirelessly and shows what a love on what you do, could change the world. He has not only revolutionize his company, but also created opportunities for others outside and globally. Donald Trump once said "as long as you're thinking, think BIG". I believe this is true for him, he believed he could, will and has changed the world. The world is still talking about the Einstein of the Millennium or the third Apple that changed the world. The news reached out globally via news, print, radio, tv, online, social media and just about everywhere. I think the news about his passing is probably bigger than anything else. I first bought my Mac in 2002, what I bought was the salesmanship and was swayed away. I've not turn my back to PC ever since (aside from company requirement). Thanks Steve.

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