The Internet presents some unrivaled opportunities and channels for businesses to harness to engage with prospects, but do you know which pond to cast your net in first?

I know it seems like there’s a new social network or communications tool popping up every other day, we’ve no sooner got to grips with the last one before the latest shiny new-fangled network creeps onto the scene, but it is for this reason that you need to identify where you should be investing your precious time and marketing efforts.

Rather than second guessing where your prospects spend most of their time online, why not just ask?

A survey that simply asks ‘which is your social network of choice?’ can provide you with a good indication of where you should focus your attention. However, why not dig a little deeper and ask visitors to your website:

• How much time they spend on each network a week
• Whether they like brands to communicate with them via text/email (if yes, ask for their details!)
• Which brands they enjoy following on Twitter/Facebook etc. and why?
• Why they like to follow brands and businesses online – if you can gather this data then you can begin to give your prospects what it is that they want, whether that be discounts, information or competitions.
• What their social media handles/profiles are – this way you can follow them and try to engage them in conversation on their network of choice.

A survey of this nature can very simply be embedded on your website but to encourage responses you may like to consider incentivising participation with exclusive discounts, competition entries or free downloads.

Of course you could just decide to cast a huge net and show up everywhere online, but do you really have the time, money and resource to waste?

As the title of this post says, fishing in the right ponds is vital to your businesses online success. So make sure they you harness the potential of online surveys to find out which fish are swimming in which pond.

I love to read your thoughts on these posts so please don’t hesitate to share your experiences below

The post Social: Are You Fishing In The Right Pond? appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

Video: The Why’s

Forbes recently reported that when it comes to getting the most bang for your marketing buck, ‘the use of video and visuals has a direct impact on engagement and effectiveness’.

Even if a video is filmed with a shaky hand on a budget set up, it’s still likely that it’s going to be more engaging than a chunk of plain text sat on a webpage.

Video engages people online in a way that text just can’t match. If you’re trying to encourage respondents to take part in your survey then a video introduction/responses plea might be an interesting avenue for you to explore.

A well-thought-out video can enhance your message (whatever it may be) by injecting a little personality, adding some heart and demonstrating your authenticity.

Video: The How’s

• Remember, a video doesn’t necessarily have to cost you the earth and you don’t need to be Steven Spielberg to create something great. Often I actually prefer watching those videos that are a little rough around the edges; they tend to possess an authenticity that big snazzy productions just can’t match.

• The most popular videos are usually only a few minutes long (sometimes even shorter). You should work hard to make your video as sharp and snappy as possible whilst still including the key components; an introduction, the why’s, the how’s and a call to action.

• You should mention in your video how respondents can view your survey’s results. Heck, you may even want to present those in a video.

• Upload your video to YouTube and embed and share it to your heart’s content. Place your creation directly above or next to your survey if you’re embedding your form on your own website to encourage respondents to take part immediately after watching. The easier you make the whole process for potential respondents, the higher your response rate will be.

• Depending on where your video will sit in relation to the survey, you can experiment with call to actions like ‘fill in the survey below/to the left/above/by clicking this link’.

I love to read your thoughts, tips and questions, so please don’t hesitate to speak your mind below, or tweet @dotSurvey – we’ll always respond.

The post Surveys Love Video appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

If you’re not familiar with the show then you really are missing out on a treat! However, having said that, if you’re yet to watch it and have 6 seasons ahead of you then I’m very jealous indeed!

The show follows the exploits of Madison Avenue’s Sterling Cooper advertising agency. The show is set in the early 60’s and aside from the fashion and the dramas, it has been much-admired for making brilliant use of marketing strategies.

As much as marketing is changing and has already changed, we must remember that not everything is new, in fact quite the opposite really. Mad Men draws on marketing practices from over 50 years ago, and while the characters weren’t talking about email and twitter, there are undeniably marketing lessons within the show that are very much still relevant today.

Here are some of my favourite marketing lessons from the Sterling Cooper team:

Telling stories:

In the first episode of series 4, Peggy Olsen, copywriter at Sterling Cooper attempts to save the agencies Sugarberry Ham account. Peggy stages a publicity stunt and hires two actresses to go to a ‘grocery store’ and fight over the last Sugarberry ham.

In a nutshell, the actresses are arrested, newspapers publish the story and the agency keeps the account. Marketer’s today need to remember that consumers respond to real stories that involve brands and the only difference now is that we have another gazillion channels (including email) to amplify and publicise these stories through.

Get emotional:

Don Draper, the show’s protagonist is enlisted to help sell a slide projector.

As you can see from this video, his pitch doesn’t revolve around the technical features of the product. Instead, Don talks of nostalgia and a device that ‘isn’t a space ship, but a time machine that goes backwards and forwards and takes us to a place where we ache to go again’.

The marketing lesson here is that despite all of the technology that we have at our fingertips nowadays, it is emotion that often clinches a deal. As Marketers, we have to work to conjure emotions that connect and help consumers relate to a product or service.

The medium is The Message:

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “the medium is the message” that Sterling Cooper’s office manager Joan recites in this clip.

The phrase was originally applied to radio, TV, and print, but nowadays we have countless mediums. Regardless of what the medium is however, marketers must adapt their strategies to the preferences of people dependent on the devices they choose to consume our content on.

Are you a Mad Men fan? Have we missed one of your favourite marketing lessons from the show? Let us know in the comments section below…

The post What’s All The Fuss About ‘Mad Men’? appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

This data journalism handbook says that by using ‘databases of — for example — census data or survey data, journalists are able to move beyond the reporting of specific, isolated events to providing a context which gives them meaning’.

As we’ve mentioned before, in today’s online world brands are becoming publishers. A website is no longer just an electronic version of a sales brochure and as a result, data journalism is not only relevant to traditional journalists, but to anyone involved in marketing or managing a brands online presence.

So, how can you turn survey results into data-driven stories?

• Pick out any interesting outliers within your results and run with them.

• Have you collected qualitative data as well as quantitative data? If yes then harness comments and opinion to help bring your story to life.

• If a particular action has influenced the results of your study or survey then consider this as the lead angle for your story.

• Are there any results that you feel people will connect with emotionally? If yes then these should be highlighted.

• If they’re powerful enough, then let the numbers speak for themselves. Numbers are a universal language that everyone can understand and relate to.

• Consider using video explanations and charts alongside written word to help recipients of your information grasp ‘the big picture’.

The post Using Survey Data To Find Story ‘Hooks’ appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

It’s cruel to laugh, but in today’s post, to illustrate the importance of thorough country research, here are some hilarious (although probably not for the brands in question) blunders that could have almost certainly been avoided had these companies conducted detailed research and sought advice from experts.

Pepsi promises more than they can deliver:

Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” was a strap-line coined by the company in an effort to expand their market share and convince the younger generation that this product belonged to them. However, little did they know that the phrase translated literally into “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave” in Chinese.

Honda gets dirty:

Honda introduced their new car ‘Fitta’ in 2001 to Nordic countries. Much to their dismay, in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, ‘Fitta’ is a vulgar word used to refer to a woman’s genitals. It wasn’t long before they changed the cars name to ‘Jazz’. 

Fowl play:

When expanding to the Hispanic market, Perdue Chicken found that their slogan got terribly garbled.  The original slogan, “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” appeared next to a photo of Perdue (the man behind the brand) with one of his birds on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that translated to “It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused.”

As the above illustrate, it’s critical that businesses take time to cautiously vet marketing materials when taking a marketing campaign outside of the country it was designed for. If you’re using a translator, ask for a transliteration, not a literal translation! To save yourself from ever suffering extreme embarrassment in new markets, you must take linguistic and cultural variations seriously.

As always, I love to read your thoughts, tips and questions, so please don’t hesitate to speak your mind below, or tweet @dotMailer – we always read and respond to them.

The post Oops! Email Campaigns Lost In Translation appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

Prime Minister David Cameron, dotMailer founder Tink Taylor, and Mashable’s Peter Cashmore

This week saw UK Trade & Investment’s (UKTI) US team welcome David Cameron and Prince Harry to NY, who paid tribute to their sterling work in helping UK-based businesses ensure their success in international markets, and for encouraging the best overseas companies to look to the UK as their global partner of choice.

dotMailer was presented as a prime example of a company perfectly placed to enter the US market to fuel its overseas expansion plans to double revenues by 2016.

As the UK’s largest and fastest-growing email marketing automation provider, services 50,000 users across 150 countries from its UK operation is hoping to build on its successful organic revenue growth of 580% seen over the last five years.

Of the expansion, our COO, Tink Taylor said, “we have seen significant growth from international corporate  franchise operations and reseller partners requiring easy –to-use email marketing automation technology, with a multi-language interface, that can be quickly rolled out to local markets, and managed centrally to track campaigns and billing. BP and DHL are examples of this.”

Working with professional advisers at UKTI, both within the UK and US, dotMailer’s marketing team have been given key market insights, advice and resources to help start building new business relationships, to execute our sales and marketing plans.

Long may this relationship continue to help us become the kings of international email marketing automation!

The post dotMailer, UKTI & Royalty in the USA appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

You’re going to have to work to make your presentation as engaging as possible and no, no amount of PowerPoint bells and whistles will quite cut it.

I’ve watched so many PowerPoint presentations whereby the presenter thinks they’ve delivered something stimulating because each sentence or image arrives and leaves the slide in some sort of chequered or looping fashion. Presentations like this are unlikely to hold an audience members attention for long, especially in the age of the smartphone when news, social interactions and cat videos are less than arms reach away. The good news is that engagement doesn’t come with fancy formatting; it’s actually much simpler than that.

Ditch the slides:

No, not all of them, but certainly get rid of the unnecessary ones. Remember, you are the presenter and you want people to be listening to you rather than being fixated on your slides.

Give it some depth:

Consider whether you are able to work video, audio or animation into your presentation/s. You might not even have to create this in house; YouTube may very well already host some relevant industry or topical content that you can embed straight into your presentation.

Harness your qualitative data:

If you used open ended questions in your online survey, then pick some of the best responses and include them in your slides.

If a point is too text heavy, don’t be afraid to bullet point it. A good rule of thumb is to have no more than six bullet points per slide and no more than six words per bullet point.

The post Make Your Powerpoints Powerful appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

Have you asked them yet? Your customers and prospects are the perfect resources for you to tap into for inspiration because they’ve shown an interest in or purchased your product or service previously. They’re also relatively accessible to you.

Rather than ploughing money into ‘trial and error’ content, create content based on interactions with your customers to take the guesswork out of coming up with ideas that even after substantial investment might well flop.

Using an online survey tool like ours, you can help to ensure that the content and the information that you produce and share is exactly what your customers want.

So, what should I ask?

• Don’t be afraid to straight up ask participants what it is they want. Ask them what they feel will add value to their communications with you.

• Ask whether they prefer reading articles, watching videos or listening to podcasts to help you decide which medium to invest the most time and effort into.

• Depending on your product/service/industry, ask about current areas of confusion. Is there terminology that they just don’t ‘get’? Is there a theory that baffles them? You could list some tick box suggestions, but always be sure to include an ‘other’ option so that recipients can provide answers outside of the options that you’ve come up with.

• Find out what it is that your customers evaluate when they’re deciding between you and your competitors.

• If relevant, find out what problem your product or service helps them to address. This could fuel a post along the lines of ’10 problems xxx can help you solve’ or ‘90% of people buy xxx to help them with xxx’.

• Ask about the impact that your product/service has had on a participant’s life and/or business. If you can draw out a series of qualitative responses then you can, with a respondents permission of course pen a nice little case study.

• Ask recipients which resources they currently go to for information relevant to your industry; these might be able to provide you with some more inspiration.

Got your own tips? I’d love you to share them below…

The post Want To Create Content Marketing Gold? Just Ask! appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

If your customers use mobiles, you’ll get better results using a mobile optimised template.

Hot on the heels of our new mobile preview tool, I’m happy to say that we now offer a collection of free templates that are optimised for mobiles and tablets.

What’s more, we’re highlighting which of our free templates are optimised in the template library (lookout for the desktop, tablet and mobile icons under each thumbnail).

The mobile myth

Even if a template isn’t optimised for a mobile, it will still work on those devices. But optimised templates are a bit special: they use media queries to display differently on smaller screens (images that are next to each other on a big screen collapse under each other on a mobile to ensure your recipients don’t have to scroll horizontally, for example).

Free mobile optimised templates. Yes, free!

The final dimension – not just a bad film

You may also notice that we’re no longer giving the image dimensions in our mobile-optimised templates. When images can show differently depending on the device they’re viewed on, the dimensions can change.

Sometimes, an image can be larger on a mobile than on a desktop. As a result, it’s always worth uploading the best quality image you have, and letting EasyEditor resize it for you. It can look at the code, establish the largest possible size the image may be shown at, and scale it accordingly. Which is pretty neat.

Use at will

Despite their cleverness, mobile-optimised templates can be used like any other: the text and images can be replaced to craft a campaign as normal. Just don’t forget to use the mobile preview to see how your work will show on smaller devices!

The post Free Mobile-Optimised Templates appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.

Among other tactics, Argos has been harnessing the potential of online reviews. In September 2008 they introduced ratings & reviews to their website and then ‘ran a successful email-based reviews promotion that added 90,000 reviews to their site within two weeks’.

I knew that Argos welcomed and encouraged reviews but it wasn’t until this email (pictured left) landed in my inbox last week that I started to think about what reviews and recommendations can actually mean for a business’s bottom line.

After a little digging I found that upon examining conversion for products that had been reviewed against those that had not, ‘Argos found that reviewed products have a 10% higher conversion rate than those without reviews’.

A year after they introduced the review feature to their website, they sent an email to their customers who had bought something from them online in the run up to Christmas (their busiest time of year no doubt). In just 24 little hours their customers had submitted over 70,000 reviews and 4 months later they’d collected over 200,000 responses!

Perhaps even more impressively, 53% of the reviewers that responded awarded Argos a top product rating of five stars. Bazaarvoice, the company that supported Argos’s review feature implementation have said that although the results are impressive, they’re not surprising. They say that Argos’s review success supports their “J-Curve,” theory ‘which has found that, across their UK clients, 88% of all reviews are positive (four or five-star ratings)’.

So, why am I harping on about Argos? The practice of collecting reviews in a similar fashion to Argos is probably easier to replicate than you may think. While it’s unlikely that you’ll collect anywhere near a quarter of a million reviews in less than six months, it’s certainly a tactic worth trying with the customer base that you do have.

An online survey tool like dotMailer’s can relatively easily be moulded into a review collection tool. Simply craft your questions around a product, service, price or promotion and embed it on your website, seed via social and/or email your contacts should you have that information readily available.

The key to success here is simplicity. Nobody will want to give you more than a few minutes of their time so think about your questions carefully. You can pretty much find out all you should need to know with three or four short questions:

• How satisfied are you with xxx?
• Would you recommend xxx to a friend?
• Please rate xxx on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the highest:
• Any other comments:

Once you’ve captured this content, not only can you use it for marketing purposes, it will also help you to make purchasing decisions, shape your processes and signal areas for improvement.

Do you ask customers for their feedback on your product or service? What do you do with the data once you’ve collected it? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post The Power Of Reviews To Boost Conversion appeared first on The Email Marketing Blog.