Dear Rich,
I’m a mental health professional and I have a website. I’ve been told that I should be building a list of contacts, but I don’t really see the point. Outside of my sessions I don’t really have anything to sell, so what’s the point of building a list of contacts that I’ll never do business with?
Posterous is a micro-blogging site which makes it extremely simple for users to keep up with a site. On their site, they make the claim that “Whether you’re blogging about your passions or publicizing your business, Posterous Sites are the simplest way to send your message to the world.”
They’re taking this claim, and transferring it to the capabilities of email newsletters. Like with everything “Posterous”, sending these newsletters are as easy as a click of a few buttons.
In order to send your Posterous content as a newsletter, simply add email addresses as subscribers with the “People” tab. Once these people confirm their subscriptions, they’ll be available to receive the newsletters.
Posterous goes into a bit more detail on their site as to what a subscribe is:
Subscriber – Subscribers are people who you want to receive your new posts via email. Adding someone as a subscriber is an effective way to ensure your latest posts are viewed by people who don’t visit your site or group every day.
The newsletter is structured much like other traditional emails. The email will come directly from you, with the subject line being the same as your title post. All of the content will appear inline as a regular email.
Posterous is keeping in contact with email providers to make sure these newsletters don’t show up as spam. The program is new, so Posterous is going to continue improving the system for users.
It will be interesting to see how this system works out. As social media and micro-blogging services grow, so does the potential to mesh these strategies with more traditional email. Posterous’ system shows that these two different strategies don’t need to be mutually exclusive from one another.
For experts in the world of email, it’s pretty obvious email marketing should always be a consideration when conducting a business online. It appears many businesses are adopting this mindset asinvestments in email marketing are poised to increase in the coming years.
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Email is getting quite a bad reputation, in fact Atos Origin (a large consulting and outsourcing company) is pledging to be a zero email company within three years! Bertrand Duperrin wrote up a great post on this examining whether or not this realistic. This post however is not about whether or not we could or should live without email, or what we can replace email. Instead I think it’s worth exploring why email is being seen as one of the problems leading to enterprise collaboration instead of being seen as a possible solution to enterprise collaboration. This by the way, came after another great chat with Gil Yehuda.
Wrapping up the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Forum conference here in Austin, the last sessions begin after lunch. I am covering Nicholas Einstein’s presentation, Segmentation & Targeting: Leveraging Data to Drive Relevant, Valuable, Timely Inbox Marketing.
Nicholas Einstein is the VP of Deliverability & Strategic Services at Datran Media. You can follow Nicholas on Twitter at @othereinstein.
Email = Direct Mail on Steroids
A study performed by the Direct Marketing Association shows that in 2010, ROI from commercial e-mail is significantly higher on average compared to other forms of media including direct mail.
There are many different types of spam. All spam is essentially the same: any message that doesn’t resonate with the consumer.
Don’t spam your consumers. They should be engaged and interested in the relevant message that you are sending their way.
Targeted Messaging
When your messages are targeted to your audience, they will be more engaged and responsive to your emails. As Nicholas references a quote from Seth Godin: “Treat different customers differently.” You don’t want to “batch and blast.” Personalize emails as much as you possibly can to have an effective email marketing campaign. The goal is to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. You have to consider the data source, the content, location, demographic, device type, among other factors.
You have to be relevant and valuable.
Successful Email Marketing
One trend that I’ve noticed throughout every session of this conference, is the mention of Groupon. Where most emails that flood into your inbox, you choose either to delete immediately, save to read later, or open and read it when you receive it. If you have signed up to receive Groupon alerts, you are probably pretty excited when that daily email arrives in your inbox. You can’t wait to open it and see what the deal is that day.
This is a company that got it right. Their emails are relevant, sending deals in your city, and valuable, including some kind of great incentive. The deals are time sensitive, since you can only purchase them that day. This is a great business model in the first place, which resonates even more via their email marketing campaign.
Segmentation
How do you decide how to segment? Data. Most decisions in life are based on pieces of critical data. This also applies for segmentation and targeting for email marketing. You just need to determine what the most important piece of information is for you to acquire from potential subscribers. The most important piece of data would be the email address. Other data points you may look at are gender, location, interests, etc. Data for each business will vary based on the type of product or service that you offer.
Behavioral Data
How are your subscribers reacting to your messages? What is the open-rate? What is the response rate? Data like this could help shape your strategy with future campaigns. Look at the response rate and actions that are taken by your readers, and adjust as needed. Testing is a big factor here; as in paid search, testing timing, content, subject, etc. can make huge differences in actions taken.
Einstein’s Theories
Here are some of the things that Nicholas recommends as important information to gain (at the appropriate time).
Businesses everywhere are beginning to appreciate the benefits of email marketing.
It is a form of marketing that can be done cheaply and on a massive scale. It’s never been so easy to get your message out to your market place.
But not only is it fast, its results are also measurable.
While most people are afraid to fail when conducting a newsletter campaign, it can be really stressful to succeed. Campaigns can grow, to the point that some people feel out of control. When lists reach this point, managing your subscriber base becomes larger than a simple program can handle. This is when you search for an email marketing service.
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It was a couple of months ago when I first starting noticing some of my favorite tweeps (Twitter people) publishing their own “newspapers.” It was a couple of weeks ago when I decided to head over to paper.li to start publishing my own paper.
Paper.li is a free service that takes links from the people you follow on Twitter and organizes those links into a virtual paper for easy reading.
Creating a newspaper is easy: you log into paper.li with your Twitter account and then have four ways of creating a newspaper:
Like the last Newsletter Industry article, today’s piece is going to focus on some industry awards. Whereas most awards highlight individuals and companies that deserve applause, though, the Green Laser Review’s “Best of the Worst Awards 2010″ singled out newsletters that no one should ever imitate.
In the “Stock Pump of the Year” category, an organization called Stansberry and Ass. came in first place. An article explained, “The Green Laser Editorial Board unanimously decided to single out this well-orchestrated, exquisitely circumlocuted, letter-of-the-law promotion as the past year’s most ingenious example of copywriting telekinesis, which purely by accident levitated a penny share’s price 80% in 10 calendar days – in perfect yet completely coincidental unison with a timed trading service sales push!”
Members of the newsletter industry will soon get a chance to shine. The Web Marketing Association intends to name the best online newsletters of 2011, and up until the deadline of January 28th, the organization is seeking nominations.
For those who rely on newsletters for their marketing campaigns, in turn, rely on email. There has been a lot of back and forth between marketing experts about the effectiveness of email, in this social media world. Can email keep up with the direct connection social media services like Facebook and Twitter offer? Now, Facebook has thrown an interesting twist into the mix, they’re going to provide their own email service.
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