It doesn’t have to be a movie, to move

By Cliff Guy

Brilliant news on Tink Taylor’s blog this week about Goodmail launching an inbox-safe video in email service. I’ll certainly be testing and taking advantage of all the possibilities video will offer.

In the meantime though we do still have an under-used option that can have real impact in email marketing campaigns – the trusted Animated GIF.

Because animated GIFs are not used heavily by email marketers, they are still an attention grabbing novelty for recipients. And providing they are used well, they work – helping to increase click through and conversion rates significantly.

In my experience, animated GIFs are most effectively used when they are drawing attention to a call to action, or a headline message such as a special offer. They can also be used very effectively to demonstrate product variations and colours, and even show how a product works.

Cascading bullets or arrows can work brilliantly to draw the reader’s eye down to key content below the fold in your email. The trick is not to use them ‘gratuitously’ – make sure an animation is there for a purpose and serves an objective.

There are some do’s and don’ts to follow when using animated GIFs in emails.

Keep the file weight down. You should keep your whole email size below 40K, so you may need to optimise your GIF down to keep it light.

Make your GIF easy on the eye. Limit the number of loops and don’t over use animations and turn your email into Piccadilly Circus. Less is more.

Lastly, if you are going to use a GIF animation in your email, make sure that you include the key message and/or the call to action in the initial frame. Outlook 07 doesn’t render animations so the first frame will appear as a still image to many of your contacts.

Video in Email goes Back to the Future

By Tink Taylor

A subject that I've blogged about before is the minefield of embedding video into email campaigns.

I’ve always argued that until a technology or ISP solution comes along that deals with all the deliverability issues currently associated with video, the safest way for marketers to treat video in email is to include a link to a web page.

Which is why I was really pleased to learn before Christmas that Goodmail are partnering with a technology company in Silicon Valley to allow direct insertion of video into email.

The system will be called 'Certified Video' and last I heard was due for distribution in early 2009 in partnership with AOL, Yahoo, Cox, Comcast and others. Goodmail's technology uses coding to ensure that ISPs allow the video emails to pass through and land in the inbox.

The plan is that the video will start streaming when the email is opened, but with the sound turned off (recipients will have to click to activate the sound - a relief all round for any B2B recipients in very quiet offices with very twitchy bosses!)

The opportunities for marketers are endless. At dotMailer we've already seen how adding video to our own homepage and resource centre content has really boosted user engagement. Being able to add, for example, video tours and feature demonstrations to our emails will really help us to help clients and users get the most from dotMailer - and in turn drive usage.

According to Goodmail, there will be no limit to the length of clips that can be shown and there are no limits to where e-marketers can go with this new medium. But there's going to have to be a lot of testing and experimentation before we begin to find out what works and what doesn't.

As an industry, we'll need to discover and develop a whole new set of best practices for making video in email work for marketers (not to mention development work by the ESPs to deliver this facility to their users).

As always, technology in email and digital marketing is leaping forward and keeping the job of marketing with new media a really interesting and creative role to be in. Goodmail have said that in respect to streaming video, as the web has gone forward, email has actually gone backwards.

Fortunately, I think it’s now a case of 'back to the future'.

One day at a time

By Cliff Guy

I read an entry which caught my attention on the graham jones blog yesterday. He was commenting on the recent research released by Smith-Harmon, analysing which day of the week is the most popular for sending marketing emails. Moreover, he was discussing the fact that each year, new research of this kind is released and each year we are told that we should be sending marketing emails on different days.

The issue of which day is the best for sending emails is one which resonates with many marketers. At dotmailer, our Email Marketing Consultants are asked this on a daily basis (don't ask me which day they get asked it the most!). And although Graham makes a good point that efforts are best focused on creating a killer subject line and compelling content, marketers will always want to know when is the best time to send the email they have worked so hard on creating and honing.

At dotMailer, our consultants tend to offer a simple answer to this question. Test your own data. Rather than looking for generic guidance from industry benchmark exercises and ever changing research findings, look at the actions of your own, unique set of customers, prospects and contacts.

Try sending your monthly newsletter on a different day each month, and sending your campaigns on random days during a given period. Then use your email marketing reporting tools to drill down into your response metrics by day and time sent. You may find a clear and significant pattern within your own data - or you may indeed find that in the case of your email audience, time of send makes very little difference.

dotMailer becomes the dotDigital Group PLC

By Cliff Guy

This week we made an exciting announcement - that dotMailer the digital marketing agency has been acquired by West End Ventures in a reverse takeover that will see our company renamed dotDigitalGroup PLC. We expect to be admitted to the PLUS market for trading on 2nd February 2009. There's a real buzz in the office about dotMailer becoming a public company. Watch this space for more developments.

Put your marketing on the map

By Cliff Guy

I was discussing with a colleague of similar advancing years as my own (i.e. we remember the 80’s!) how much direct marketing has changed over the last decade, with the rise and rise of new media.

But something occurred to me this morning, when using dotMailer’s newest and coolest reporting feature, called Geo Mapping. I realised that some of the old ways are still the best.

You see, dotMailer’s brand new Geo Mapping tool creates a hot-spot map showing you where around the world your contacts are opening your emails. It’s eye-opening to see, because there are so often hot-spot areas you just wouldn’t have expected. You can then select map areas at the click of a mouse and instantly create data segments by geographical selections – even if you don’t have the postcode data in your database. I told you it was a cool tool!

This is leading-edge technology for email marketing, but it’s also using traditional corner-stone marketing data that some of us may even have come to overlook or neglect in recent years. It may not be as sexy or dynamic as marketing data like behavioural analysis, click paths, and preferences or even RFV, but that most fundamental of sales and marketing questions - ‘where are your best prospects based?’- can provide some powerful and lucrative answers.

Luckily, with dotMailer you can now get the answer to that question at the click of a mouse!

When budgets make no sense

When times get tough, it's easy for Finance Directors to cut marketing budgets and hard for marketers to stop them.

You don't need me to tell you how daft that is - the money you are spending is generating new business.

The problem is that marketing is often seen as a cost centre, not a revenue generator like sales. Historically, marketers have often been guilty of treating advertising as an art not a science. If you can't set up metrics that show that your acquisition costs are much less that the profits generated, how can you expect to explain it to the bean counters?

Admittedly, that can be harder to achieve with traditional media. But email marketing allows you to track each customer from opening the email to clicking on your links to making a purchase. Combine campaign ROI metrics and data about customer lifetime value and it becomes crystal clear what your return is for every pound you spend.

Once you know that, you'll be in a position to ask your Finance Director to take away your budget completely.

Because, if you can prove that your ads make money, a marketing budget is just a way to restrict how much money you can make. And your Finance Director won't like the thought of that one little bit.

*This blog was inspired by the inestimable Seth Godin. If you haven't signed up for his words of wisdom yet, do it here. www.sethgodin.com

Posted by: Peter Simmonds