Tag: email marketing

Social networks have become an important part of the internet and online marketing landscape in the last decade. How do social networks impact Email Marketing, and is Email Marketing still relevant in a world full of social networks? We explain why Email Marketing is more important than ever in a socially-networked landscape.

MySpace. Facebook. Twitter. Google Plus. There are an increasing number of social networks that, at one time or another, dominated internet traffic. Of course, marketing via social networks has increased too, which is an obvious necessity since so many consumers and customers spend so much time on social networking sites. Does it make sense for you to allocate all of your marketing resources to marketing through social networking? No! Email is still a very important part of any complete web marketing strategy. Of course, in the socially-networked world, you’ll need to combine your email marketing strategy and your social networking strategy to meet different goals. Here are some tips and advice on how and why to incorporate email marketing with your social media strategy.

Email Marketing Still Provides the Highest Return on Investment

The reality is that everybody from comScore to Marketing Vox have run studies and surveys of top marketers and one statistic remains true – no matter how big the social networks have gotten, email marketing still returns the greatest return on investment. This makes sense when you think about how little overhead or time it can take to send an extremely targeted email to a very specific group of customers or users. If for no other reason than because you are a smart business person who appreciates the  importance of a strong ROI number, email marketing should be at the top of your list of important direct sales and marketing communications channels.

Consumers and Users Do Not Switch Email Addresses – But They Do Migrate Social Networks

Do you remember MySpace? What? You don’t? But that was just a handful of years ago when MySpace was the most popular destination on the internet (other than Google) and everybody had a MySpace profile and spent hours every day on the dominant social networking site. Then, of course, Facebook arrived and became wildly more popular. At the time of this writing, it seems unthinkable that anything would take over Facebook’s position, but it’s entirely possible that, by the time that you read this, Google Plus will be the social network that everybody spends all of their time on. If there is one thing that seems to be true of social networks, it is that users will eventually migrate to another social network.

That, however, is not true of email addresses. Certainly, sometimes people change their email address. But more frequently they simply add a secondary email address and use their older email address less often or for different purposes. The reason that Hotmail remains the largest web-based email service in the world is because it is the oldest, and, even if they don’t check it daily, most people still check their old Hotmail address at least periodically.

An email address isn’t as permanent as a postal address, but once you have a customer’s email address, you have a fairly assured way of getting a message in front of that customer. Changing email addresses is cumbersome. You need to notify all of the people whom you email with regularly and you lose what is often an emotional email history. Unlike social networks, which have so far proven to be transient at best, an email address is an almost assured way to be able to reach most customers or users eventually if not immediately.

Messages Do Not Disappear from Inboxes

Once you send an email marketing message to a consumer, customer or user, that message remains in that individual’s email inbox until the individual either reads it or actively chooses to delete it. That means that even if the user hasn’t read the email, your subject line is still there in the inbox reminding the user of their relationship with your brand. A message on a social network is not permanent. Once you post a message, you are reliant on your user or consumer being logged into the social network in a time frame that allows them to see the posting. No matter how many times per day your business updates Facebook or Twitter, you may not get the message across to a large group of your desired consumers. However, whether it’s actually read or not, email gets to your user or customer and reminds them of their relationship with you.

Email is Targeted. Social Networking is “One Size Fits All”

The nature of social networking is to protect a certain degree of privacy. Additionally, people do not always provide the most truthful information about themselves on a social network. However, your email database contains information that allows you to segment and target communications based on facts such as purchasing history, gender, age, and even geographic location. The most effective marketing messages are the most targeted marketing messages. Social media and social networks do not allow you to target messages effectively.

Social Media is a Brand Engagement Tool. Not a Direct Sales Tool.

At the heart of the matter, however, is the role of social media in your marketing strategy. Most marketing experts agree on one thing – social media is a branding tool, not a direct sales tool. A great part of the reason that email marketing continues to deliver the highest return on investment of all marketing channels is that how users behave on social networks does not translate into direct sales. Social network users gather information and discuss products, they don’t necessarily buy products. Social media is important for brand engagement. It is not, however, typically a direct sales channel like email marketing is.

Email Marketing and Social Media Need to Work Together

Any good marketing plan is a comprehensive marketing plan. That means that your social media and your email marketing platform should work together. There should be opportunities for users to share email contents via social networks and opportunities for users to join your email list via social networks. One strategy does not mean that the other strategy doesn’t need to exist. However, the existence of social networks certainly does not take away the need for a strong email marketing program and strategy!

 

Read More:

• Last article: The Top 10 Benefits of Email Marketing
• Next up: Email Marketing Case Studies: Improving Revenue with Email

Download FREE eBook: Email Marketing Tips-Email Your Way to Success  

Comm100: The #1 Fastest Growing Customer Service Software Provider

VANCOUVER, BC–(Marketwire – Oct 26, 2011) – Comm100, the #1 fastest growing customer service software provider, launched a new cutting edge product suite on October 24th, 2011 to help businesses take their customer communication to a new level. This revolutionary upgrade had been long anticipated by Comm100, its 160,000+ business clients as well as numerous potential customers.

Comm100 is the leader in customer service and communication software. As the #1 fastest growing company in the industry, Comm100 has won the trust of over 160,000 customers from small to large sized businesses including Dell, Intel and Xerox. Comm100 products include Live Chat, Ticket/Email, Help Desk, Forum, Knowledge Base and Email Marketing. Powerful, integrated and hosted, Comm100 gives businesses an unmatched power to communicate effectively with their customers through multiple channels and deliver superior customer experience.

The improvement coming with this upgrade is huge. Tons of powerful features are added; user-interfaces are totally redesigned and become much friendlier; the integration of products is much more seamless; and the service response is even faster. It’s the child of six months of design and development, four months of testing and the continued support from thousands of loyal customers. Both Comm100 staff and Comm100 users are excited by this release.

“Comm100 is growing at an unprecedented rate because our products create positive changes for businesses. The new product features are truly revolutionary and can change the business practices of even the largest customer communications centers. We are proud of having the most supportive customers in the world and we’re hopeful that these new features will make their businesses even more successful,” said Amy Gu, VP of Comm100.

And customers agree. “We thank Comm100 for providing such a useful service. I recommend it to every website who wants to win trust and provide instant support to their customers,” commented Jennifer, Ecommerce Sales Manager of Complete Online Pharmacy.

About Comm100

Comm100 is the leading global provider of enterprise-level integrated online customer service and communication solutions, including Live Chat, Ticket, Email Marketing, Help Desk, Forum and Knowledge Base. Comm100′s products have been embraced by over 160,000 global companies including prominent technology and consumer sector corporations. To learn more about Comm100′s industry-leading business solutions, visit www.comm100.com.

1. Added Comm100 Help Desk integration. After the integration, your help desk visitors have the option to subscribe for your newsletters from the help desk; your help desk registered users can update their Newsletter subscription information and review all newsletters they have received in the help desk.

2. Moved Contacts Management to Comm100 Contacts module. You can have a 360 degree view of your contacts so as to understand them better.  (Partially Available)

3. Added APIs which allows you to integrate Comm100 Email Marketing with your website and existing systems.

4. Added permission settings which allow you to set permissions for each operator.

5. Added web version of newsletters which allows your recipients who have difficulty in viewing your email to open it in a web browser.

6. Added customizable fields which help you manage your contacts better.

7. Added Double Opt-in. With double opt-in enabled, a confirmation email will be sent to subscribers. Subscribers need to click on the link in the email to confirm their subscription. Double Opt-in can verify that the subscribed email address is indeed the owner’s.

8. Added Reply Email Address. You can set an email address to receive your contacts’ replies.

9. Added the Bounce Management which allows you to block or/and delete bounces. Bounce Management helps you easily manage your mailing lists and keep them clean.

10. Improved Block List management which allows you to manually add email addresses into the block list. Comm100 Newsletter does not send emails to blocked email addresses.

11. Improved usability of Macro Parameter.

• Added the option of adding macro parameters in the subject line of your emails.
• Added the option of adding macro parameters in text-only emails.

12. Added Update Subscription.

• Added the Update Subscription link in every sent out Newsletter which allows subscribers to click on the link to update their subscription information (e.g. email address, name, mailing lists and so on).
• Improved the subscription process which allows subscribers to update their subscription information if they subscribe again.
• Added the option for you to customize the Update Subscription Form according to your needs.
  

13. Improved view of sent out newsletters:

• Added the option for you to remove the sentence of “To ensure delivery of these emails to your inbox, please added name@domian.com to you Email address book” from your newsletter.
• Removed “Spam Report” link from your newsletter.

14. Added the option of only viewing the records of sent out emails which are not deleted.  At the View by Email page, you can select the option of displaying all the sent out emails.

15. Added Audit Log which allows you to view the history activities performed by your operators.

16. Fixed the bug that the error message language cannot be customized despite that you have set a specified interface language for the subscribe form.

17. Fixed the bug that the status of a subscribed member will be changed from Normal (Subscribe) to Normal (Import) after you edit the member’s information.

18. Other minor bug fixes and tweaks.

Thanks.

Hey guys,

We are offering a free ebook about Email Marketing now, which explains the concepts and best practices of Email Marketing.

Book Name: eMail Your Way to Success - The Principles of Email Marketing

Download it at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketing/emailmarketingtips.aspx.

Thanks.