Brand new features and functions rolled out for dotMailer users

By Cliff Guy

Our product development team are constantly working on new system features to help make our clients' email marketing life easier and more rewarding. In particular we've added three key new features in the last month alone:

1. Send an automatic triggered email to anyone who completes one of your online surveys

This is a great feature for helping to build 1-2-1 relationships. dotMailer Enterprise now lets you set up a triggered email that fires when someone completes and submits an online survey you've created using dotMailer Survey Builder. So your recipients who enter your online competitions or complete your questionnaires, for example, can be sent targeted follow-up messages or offers - automatically.

2. Automatic phishing links alerter

The new dotMailer platform will now warn you if you have links in your email template that might be flagged by ISPs or email clients as phishing links . A very useful device to help you maximise your deliverability.

3. Campaign grouping

You can now group your campaigns by type, product, department - any way you choose - to help you select and view your reporting in a more meaningful way for your business. Known as 'tagging' it's a great way to organise your work.

You can see an at-a-glance list of recently added dotMailer new features here.

One more thing - we are continuously working with our clients to extend our API, making dotMailer a more and more versatile solution for your IT team to integrate with your inhouse systems.

The buzzword is 'Twitter' but email is still the killer marketing tool

By Cliff Guy

The current buzz around Twitter has once again brought social networks to the forefront of many marketers' minds in the same way as Facebook and Myspace did back in digital history. But for all the buzz, it's important for marketers not to become distracted by social networks and neglect one of their key online marketing tools - email.

One of the great strengths of email marketing is its unique ability to deliver and build 1-2-1 relationships with a target audience. Used well, email does this better than any other marcoms channel available to marketers (excluding costly face to face or telephone contact).

Whilst social networking sites can provide a valuable opportunity for spreading messages, brand values and information virally, they are simply not able to offer a 1-2-1 communication in the way that targeted, personalised email campaigns can.

That’s why marketers who are successfully integrating social network channels including Twitter into their mix, are using them for mass broadcast of content such as white papers, website downloads and blogs, along with scanning them to monitor brand reputation, and facilitate customer service conversations.

There are further barriers to using social networks as an effective alternative to email campaigns. Members of social networks are not receptive to overt marketing messages. The B2C companies that have been successful on social networks have tended to add value in a very low impact way. While there is a place for this tactic, it cannot begin to deliver the responses and returns demanded by direct marketers using email marketing.

Email is highly significant in helping people to decide whether or not they want to buy from you. New research shows that two out of three people in the US use emails to help them decide about online purchases. UK purchasers have no reason to behave differently.

Whilst email is ubiquitous and will remain the primary, daily communication tool in business, interestingly there is currently a blurring of people’s business live and private lives with the use of social networks like Twitter.

Because these tools are new and people are still trying to figure out how to integrate them into their lives, they are ‘friending’ both business contacts and personal contacts on the same social networks.

This blurring of behaviour is likely to change, not least as people become less comfortable about the possibility of their clients or their boss seeing pictures of them in full social abandon on a Saturday night out!

Only then will we have a clearer picture of the future role social networks will be able to play in business.

What every marketer should know about Twitter

By Cliff Guy

Love it or hate it - at the moment you simply cannot and should not ignore it. Twitter.com is the latest social networking craze to sweep the internet, based on mini-blogs from those who can’t resist sharing the finer detail of the activities of their day.

For marketers, Twitter represents 3 important opportunities:

• Firstly, the opportunity to disseminate information about your business and your brand, quickly and widely.
• Secondly, the opportunity to drive traffic to your website .
• Thirdly, the opportunity to tap into conversations and feedback on your products and services and monitor brand reputation – invaluable marketing research.

In order to take advantage of these 3 significant opportunities, marketers need to know how to build Twitter into their communications mix, alongside their use of other social networks and their core email marketing channel.

Top tips for integrating Twitter into your marketing

A recent blog post on the anythinggoesmarketing blog provided an excellent list of top tips for integrating Twitter into your email marketing mix, particularly for B2B firms. With some extra tips thrown in for good measure, here’s a great summary of what you need to be doing:

1. If you haven’t already, create a Twitter account for your company. If you don’t, someone else might!

2. Link to your Twitter profile from your corporate website - this is an ‘official’ way of confirming identity.

3. Cross link from your Twitter profile page, to the page on your corporate site that links to Twitter – this will confirm that your Twitter account is official

4. Add a link to your company's Twitter account to all your email marketing templates. Consider adding a link in the email footer to items such as your event invitations or email newsletters.

5. Link to a form landing page from your company Twitter account. For example if you have a Twitter post such as "New white paper on how to increase ROI". Upon clicking on the link to the white paper, direct "Tweeple" (twitter people) to a landing page where you capture their email address. In this way you're converting your Twitter followers into opted-in email subscribers.

6. Use Twitter content in your email newsletters. For example, create a feature called "Twitter Q/A". In this section, address questions/comments that came up on Twitter and what the response was.

7. Post links to your email newsletter articles on Twitter. Instead of including one tweet that says: "Check out the latest newsletter" and links back to your main newsletter page, consider seeding individual articles on Twitter over a period of time (say a week). You can use a tool like Brightkit to pre-schedule your twits in advance. Companies should make each tweet count and make the content as interesting as possible.

8. Ensure that all email newsletter article authors have their Twitter account listed on the email. This allows recipients to continue the conversation after they read the article.

9. Provide instructions in your emails about how subscribers can follow conversations about your company on Twitter. For example, if you are promoting an event in your email, let subscribers know that they can tweet about the event using the hashtag character #. For example #myevent. You would replace "myevent" with the name of the event.

10. Ask email subscribers for their Twitter ID when they sign up. Experiment with an optional field on a few key web registration forms and see how this affects your conversion rate. I recommend mentioning that you will follow the person if they provide their Twitter ID.

11. On your email preference page, indicate to those who may want to unsubscribe that they can still follow you on Twitter. While you may have lost the person from your email list, you keep them in your community. This is the strength of Twitter and how it can be leveraged to enhance your existing marketing efforts.

12. Add a link in your emails and/or on your website that allows email subscribers and web visitors to easily tweet about an article, event or promotion. All you need to do is link to Twitter with the following URL: http://twitter.com/home?status= and add in a message under 140 characters after the "=" sign.

13. Conduct Twitter interviews and use this as content for your email marketing. This type of "Twitterview" could be with a customer, partner, company exec (or any other employee), or industry thought leader. What makes Twitter great is that these types of interviews are easy to do and you can use email to promote these as "live events" as well.

The buzzword is 'Twitter' but email is still the killer marketing tool. Read more..

Tiscali's future uncertain

By Tink Taylor

After the closure of Lycos it seems that Tiscali may be following suit. Reading the news over the past few days it seems the recession has hit the purchase talks between Tiscali and BSkyB and put the future of the company in doubt.

As with Lycos, Tiscali's 1.7 million customers will need to update their details within your email databases if indeed they do go under.

Thankfully with dotMailer's sophisticated segmentation tools this is an easy process to identify Tiscali addresses within your database and request your recipients to update with an alternative email address.

We'll keep you updated with the latest on Tiscali, so watch this space.

Return Path - your chance to give your thoughts on email delivery

Return Path, the global email services and delivery monitoring organisation (and a dotMailer partner) are surveying European email marketers to benchmark your perceptions about delivery and to develop new products and training to help email marketers improve responses and revenues.

Take the survey

Your answers are appreciated and everyone who enters will be sent a copy of the results.

Take the survey and tell everyone else: http://bit.ly/AJBmL

Ready Steady Edinburgh

By Tink Taylor

Ready Steady Email is extending its reach across the UK. After successful events in London and Bristol, Edinburgh is the next city to host this unique half day workshop, run jointly by the DMA and IAB.

Benefit from up to date advice from industry leaders and use what you have learned in the interactive session where you will go head to head with your email marketing peers to create the winning email marketing campaign pitch to a brief.

Ready Steady Email gives you insight into email marketing and all of its key elements. Read more about the event on the DMA blog and website and book.

Benchmark your emails

By Tink Taylor

Just a quick shout about the latest Email Benchmarking Report published by the Direct Marketing Association.

The Email Benchmarking Reports are an excellent source of information and statistics to help you assess your own campaign performance against the combined statistics across the majority of emails sent via the major Email Service Providers.

The report for Q2 2008 shows that email is still bucking the trend for reducing marketing spend as a result of the recession. An increase in the use of email for retention campaigns shows that marketeers are understanding the importance of relationship building as well as using their client base and organically collected data to continue to drive sales and retain business.

The Email Benchmarking Report can be downloaded from the DMA website where you can also find further information on the DMA and the Email Marketing Council, on which myself and Skip Fidura - dotMailer's Digital Director - both serve.