As most of our clients know, we are big fans of email marketing here at eMedia Worx. For a small company that is just getting started, or even a medium company looking to increase sales, there are few more effective ways to target your clients than by an email straight to the inbox.

Unfortunately, here lies the problem. Because it is so easy and cheap, marketers tend to not really think about what they are sending and how effective or relevant it is going to be. They just queue it up and blast it out. (I hate the term eBlast, for this reason)

Louise often says that when you are designing a site you should answer “So what? What is this page for?”, and this rings true for email campaigns. If you don’t have a clear reason for why your readers will actually read your email, then there is a very high chance that it will get skipped over, or even worse, deleted.

I think that is it getting more and more important that marketers think about the relevance of their message. Web based email services, especially Gmail and Windows Live (Hotmail) are becoming more and more advanced when it comes to filtering out spam and unwanted email messages.

Gmail’s Priority Inbox sorts out all the messages from senders that are most commonly opened and replied to, and bundles the rest in a lower “priority” list. This means that if you don’t engage your customers early in the delivery cycle, then chances are you will never get the chance.

I will hopefully give a few more tips on how to go about this, but at the moment I just want to give you all a bit of a heads up. I have just read the article on ClickZ entitled Preparing for the Future of E-mail Marketing which pretty much sums it up. Because people are so busy now and are bombarded with junk, the email marketers that think about their approach to email marketing will be the ones that get their message through above the competition.

Googles all new gBall is set to revolutionise the Australian Football world.

Its features include

• tracking you kicking data to determine ways to improve your technique
• full compatibility with your Google account
• inbuilt tracking to help find your Footy on Google Maps
• for those with talent, it can send details of your kicking data directly to scouts, who can immediately contact you through an inbuilt vibrating alert.

As one customer testified:

“Thanks Google and Sherrin – this gets my boyfriend out of my hair for a few hours each day. He won’t stop kicking the gBall. He goes to the park on his own and kicks it from one end to the other, fetches it, and kicks it back. He says he’s waiting for it to vibrate.”

Cara, Perth

Check out the gBall now, and view quite a clever little viral marketing campaign.

You can watch the video here:

I am personally looking forward to this case study, as it means that I will be spending more time on the Ballina Info newsletter, as well as showing you just what we do and what can be done to improve an email marketing campaign.

Setting the Scene – Determining our Goals

Because Ballina Info is mainly an informational site targeting the local area, the main goals of the whole operation is to generate good traffic numbers to sell online advertising. The newsletter has two main goals:

• to generate traffic to the site – especially repeat traffic to help build our online community
• to attract enough newsletter subscribers to become an attractive  form of advertising for local businesses.

We know already that the site generates good traffic numbers, so we are a little disappointed in the subscriber numbers. We see this goal as being the most important, so we will mostly try and focus on the goal of increasing the number of subscribers.

Subscriber details

Breakdown of subscriber list (from Email Marketer)

We currently have 644 subscribers, with 580 confirmed contacts. Email Marketer automatically keeps track of the subscribers who have confirmed or who have unsubscribed. The list is attracting on average about 10-20 new subscribers a month. Considering that the site has between 10,000 – 20,000 visitors per month, this is a very low conversion.

Our aim is to have at least 1,000 subscribers before we can consider it a viable entity, so as you can see, we have a fair bit of work to do. On the positive side, we do have the traffic already coming to our site, we just want to send them to the places we want them to go.

How we collect email addresses

Screenshot of Ballina Info displaying the subscribe button

Currently we collect email addresses solely through a form on the website. If you click on the screenshot you will see the button that is placed on the side navigation throughout the site. This links through to the subscribe page.

This could possibly be a key factor in the low subscriber count. On most screens and on most key pages, this is down low (below the fold) and not really eye catching. Even with the red arrow next to it (which is just for the screenshot in case you are wondering) it doesn’t jump out.

This will be one of the elements we will test. Getting potential subscribers get to the subscriber page will be a very important part of the process.

The next step – the subscription page

The form on the subscription page of the site.

The Ballina Info Newsletter subscription page uses one of the forms straight out of Email Marketer, placed into one of our pages. Email Marketer allows you to create a customised form to place in your site to extract as much detail as you need from your subscriber. The forms also handle all the stages of the double opt-in process to make sure you have a fully legitimate list.

One of the problems that you face is the more detail you extract, the more flexible and targeted your campaign is, but the downside is that people hate filling out long forms. Ballina Info currently asks for First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Preferred format and the security code.

We will also test the effects that this has on the subscriptions, as well as work out how to extract as much detail as possible.

I guess at this stage, that gives a pretty good idea of the actual sign up process that we use to get our subscribers. In the coming weeks we will document our efforts in refining the process of signing up, then we will move on to the actual content of the newsletter. If you have any questions, please feel free to post a comment below and I will be happy to answer them.

The very first thing you should do with any campaign is work out what it is that you have that will make users go to the trouble of signing up, confirming, opening, and eventually reading and clicking your email.

If you get your basic plan in place early, then spam compliance, catchy subject lines and compelling content can help get your message accross, but it is the product or service that you offer that makes your email undeletable.

One of my favourite newsletters that I have recieved for years I would class as undeletable. The email often gets caught up in the spam folder, or marked as spam by our server – mainly due to its content – but because the information inside is such good quality I have gone to the trouble of whitelisting the email address so that I will recieve it without a hitch every week.

Some times deliverability can be a bit of a battle, but building up a reputation and relationship with you audience through quality content is the key to great email marketing.

Times have changed in a very positive direction over the past decade with the uptake of the Internet within mainstream society.  Businesses, both small and large, now have the opportunity to get their message out to their customers in a more targeted and cost-effective manner via e-mail, Web sites and social networking.

More importantly (particularly with e-mail and your website) the Internet has allowed marketers and business owners to no longer rely on a scattergun approach, they are now able to make informed decisions about their campaign performance through a vast range of tools aimed at tracking visitors and performance.  Just about anything that you can think of can be tracked and measured!

Probably one of the cheapest and most powerful marketing tools at a business owner’s fingertips is email marketing.  Unfortunately though, most small business owners do not realise just how effective it can be — for a very minimal investment in time and money.  Did you know that even at the most basic level, your email marketing campaigns will tell you:

• how many customers opened the e-mail,
• what links they clicked on within the e-mail,
• who has unsubscribed,
• how many e-mails bounced, and
• if anybody has forwarded the message to a friend.

For those of you who are then wise enough to tag your links within the newsletter will be able to use Google analytics to continue to track these visitors on their Web site to see if the desired outcome was obtained (i.e. buying something, downloading a report etc).  This is why e-mail is still the most cost-effective and targeted form of advertising that any business owner can take part in.

The Ballina Info Case Study

Over the next few months we would like to demystify some of the ins and outs of email marketing by taking you on a bit of a journey with us and our Ballina Info newsletter.  During this period we will be taking a hard look at the newsletter, which has become a bit of a neglected baby.  We will plan and employ strategies designed to increase the number of subscribers and gain a better understanding of what the subscribers are doing with the newsletter, with the overall goal of transforming a service that has been costing us time and money into a profit maker by providing an extremely useful service to our subscribers which in turn will become an efficient tool for local businesses looking to advertise to local residents.

As time goes by we will report what has been going on here in the blog and hope that you can take away some ideas that may help you with your business. If you’re a Ballina resident (or have any interest in Ballina) please feel free to sign up for the newsletter!

If you would like to follow this series you can be informed of new posts by subscribing to our RSS feed or the e-mail subscription on the top right.  If you have any questions, or if there is something that you would like us to cover as part of this series please leave a comment below.

One of the biggest issues with using social media as a marketing strategy is when a business or individual chooses to go heading off like a bull in a china shop without fully understanding the implications or processes of what’s involved in participating in a social network.  For anybody who is new to social media I strongly urge you to watch the video below and then follow it up by reading this great article by Jennifer Laycock – How social media (didn’t) change business.

 
Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

While TubeMogul takes a lot of the pain out of having to visit each video sharing site and upload your video individually you do need to spend some time to set up your account correctly. The most time-consuming part of setting up a TubeMogul account is adding your login details from the video sharing sites that you plan to target.

The video sharing sites that we recommend targeting when first starting out are as follows:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• Yahoo Video
• Blip TV &
• MySpace

There are obviously plenty of other options available and we highly recommend that you investigate niche Web sites that are associated with your industry. For example if you were in the surfing industry you would look at syndicating your video on to a site like the LazySurfer Surfing Videos.

I really encourage you to think about incorporating use of online video as part of your overall Web marketing strategy. It’s definitely not going anywhere and will only become more and more prevalent. For those of you who start using video to get the message out about your business you truly are getting in ahead of the curve, and more importantly your competition.

Recent YouTube usage statistics tell us that over 10 hours of online video is uploaded every minute and that YouTube has become the 6th most visited destination on the Internet. The fact that Google were willing to invest $1.65 billion to purchase YouTube speaks volumes about what their view is on the future of online video!

When it comes to watching online video there are a number of video sharing sites that any producer (website owner) needs to take into account when developing a distribution strategy. These sites receive massive visitation and with the introduction of universal search the major search engines now display results directly from these video sharing sites in their search results.

With all of these video sharing options it is important for me to introduce to you a fantastic free service called TubeMogul, that allows you to upload a video once and have it automatically syndicate across a range of the more popular online video sites.

Not only does TubeMogul allow you to automatically distribute your project to the video sharing sites it also provides some seriously powerful tools such as the Cross site analytics and social bookmarker. The Cross site analytics alone make signing up worth the effort by providing a reporting dashboard to view, compare and contrast your viewership information.

Which Web sites are currently included in the TubeMogul distribution?

When it comes to distributing your video TubeMogul has all of the big guns covered including YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Blip.TV, AOL Video, MySpace & MetaCafe to name a few (there are plenty more niche options available). You can click here for the full list as well as links to the signup page for each property.

How does TubeMogul work?

Anybody looking to get started using TubeMogul should firstly create themselves an account. It is then a matter of signing on with the various video sharing sites that you would like to distribute your footage to and entering your sign in details for these video sharing sites into your TubeMogul account.

The next step is to prepare your video, upload it to TubeMogul, choose where you would like to distribute it and sit back and watch it all unfold. I think you would agree it is much easier than going to each video sharing site to upload your video individually.

All that you need to do at this stage is implement your plan to promote your online video and monitor the results through the Cross site analytics conveniently provided in your dashboard.

I think that you will agree that this is an extremely useful tool made all the better buy its price — FREE!

To get a real feel for how it all works I suggest that you head over and look at their instructional videos!