Posts Tagged ‘Email Marketing Strategy’
Posted by Bill Leming on April 18th, 2013
We’re in the final stages of wrapping up a 45 second video testimonial for a large financial institution and thought it might be helpful to compile a list of key considerations if you’re thinking about adding video to your website, your emails and your MMS mobile messages.
- Map out as precisely as you can what you want to achieve (length, content, authenticity, feel, tone, key takeaways, music, disclaimer requirements, scripted or non-scripted, who is hosting the video, etc.) and define as narrowly as possible your intended audience BEFORE you take another step. Preparing a detailed Creative Brief will define the scope, which will allow you to accurately estimate costs and help keep everyone on target.
- Hire an experienced director; they’re well worth the added cost and will quickly turn what, might otherwise be an amateurish endeavor, into a professional video. The same is also true for your editor.
- Have a skilled make-up artist on site. We’re all such avid consumers of various professional video formats that we almost take these people for granted. Don’t—they too are worth the additional investment required.
- Speaking of the production crew, review samples of both the camera and sound crew before you hire them. If you’re considering interviews, promotional announcements or testimonials, ask to see some recent examples. Like all things, some are better than others and some have particular fortes.
- Carefully interview your talent pool before you ask anyone to participate. Besides the obvious qualities of being photogenic and having a non-abrasive speaking voice, having a face-to-face interview before asking them to participate may reveal some traits and/or mannerisms that do not translate well to the screen and that might not be apparent via a phone conversation.
- Send the editor any and all client branding guidelines (documents or online resources) as well as any client specific font requirements before production ever begins…It will save you both time and money.
- Select an appropriate location that reflects the nature of the individual you’re interviewing or a site that seems natural for the individual providing the testimonial.
- Unless you’re particularly skilled and adept in the video world, seriously consider using an experienced production management team such as Harland Clarke Digital.
Like so many things that on the surface seem relatively easy, there’s a whole host of production details that are all critically important to achieving your video success. This list would include talent waivers, disclaimer copy, honorariums, transcription of final cut for legal review and an entire list of others, all of which need to be managed if you’re going to be successful and are on budget. Call us today to discuss how we might best work with you on your next video.
Posted by Nic Winters on January 16th, 2012
If you have taken the step of including personalization in your email campaigns (even if this is limited to including the recipient’s first name, their sales rep, etc.), your goal was likely to make your emails take on a more personal tone. An additional step that may be the right fit for your email marketing strategy is personalizing the landing pages you link to within your emails.
These personalized pages could be limited to a handful of different versions of your landing page that include slightly different offers or a page that utilizes merge tokens to pull the recipient’s email address or other information into form fields.
When you go to incorporate these personalized URLs (PURLs) into your emails, you can achieve this goal using the same approach used to insert recipient first names and/or other data fields into your emails. With the personalization tokens provided within your SubscriberMail account for each data field you can personalize the URL for a hyperlink as well (inserting the token at the point within the URL where differentiation occurs to make the content of a particular data field related to the PURL pull into the link).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can incorporate PURLs in your email messages.
Posted by Nic Winters on February 17th, 2011
When collaborating with clients on their email marketing strategy, the team at SubscriberMail regularly focuses on different methods of testing email campaigns. However, testing can be fruitless without an understanding of your results!
After the deployment of a campaign, users can pull a bevy of data-rich reports that identify percentages related to clicks, renders, etc. But for users more involved in the reporting process and less involved in message creation, clearly interpreting the differences in results for A/B tests related to design or content changes can be difficult without a visual representation of the messages themselves.
To help assist those that have been outside of the in-depth design/construction of the email tests, we urge our clients to utilize our Click Overlay Report to help visualize which items in the message have generated the most click activity (as click data is displayed in callout bubbles over the actual design of the email).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can visualize email results with the SubscriberMail Click Overlay Report.
Posted by Nic Winters on December 6th, 2010
At SubscriberMail we often get asked by future clients if we have integration with X, Y, or Z web analytics packages. Instead of designing features solely related to one or a handful of web analytics packages, our Development team has designed with flexibility in mind. The SubscriberMail web analytics integration utility allows clients to specify the exact parameters for the appended code related to their web analytics package that should be inserted into each link related to their website’s domain. This additional code allows the analytics software to identify web traffic that is originating from a particular email campaign.
By integrating their email with a web analytics package, clients are able to follow click activity from their emails to website traffic patterns and potentially website purchase activity. This connection enables email marketers to relate sales directly to their emails and thus generating a value associated with email campaigns to help measure success and justify driving more resources toward their email efforts.
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can relate your email campaigns to website activity via web analytics integration.
Posted by Dave McCue on October 18th, 2010
Emails viewed in preview pane windows—or those that extend below the fold when viewed in full—often see a lack of reader engagement with content closer to the bottom of the message. Many recipients make the decision to stay or go based on what they see near the top of a message without scrolling further, thereby missing out on potentially valuable content.
If your email messages tend to be on the longer side, including a table of contents near the top of each message is a good way to present recipients with all of the available options in your message. Through the use of HTML anchor tags, clickable items in a table of contents can lead recipients to the point in the message where the content appears, eliminating the need for any scrolling.
For example, if I have “Summer Sweepstakes” listed among my table of contents, I would link that item like this:
<a href=”#Sweepstakes”>Summer Sweepstakes</a>.
Further down in my message code, I would insert an anchor with a name attribute at the point where my Sweepstakes content begins, like this: <a name=”Sweepstakes”></a>.
This second anchor would serve as the destination point for users who click on the Sweepstakes link in my table of contents. Using this approach, recipients who don’t scroll down in the message will at least get an idea of what lies below, and may decide to engage with content they otherwise might not have seen at all.
