Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a computer company, and the people who got our email were mostly people who had purchased our products. They were happy to get a notice from us about a new toy they could buy to add to their system, or a new software product that was Read More
Why Distributed Marketing Needs Naked Conversations
Technology industry journalist Tom Foremski wrote recently that social media is not corporate media, and that the current gold rush among consultants and social media experts who are exhorting corporate marketers to turn social media into a powerful sales channel will ruin social media. The trend, he said, is inevitable and sad because as the corporate presence becomes more pronounced, social media will cease being a valuable source of naked conversations about companies and brands and become simply another channel for multi-channel marketers to use to deliver a message. When that happens, consumers will find another less accessible place to Read More
Friday Roundup: Twits Ruin Social
Twits Can Ruin a Social Media Strategy– A campaign advisor to Senator Scott Brown and presidential candidate Mitt Romney stirred up a media firestorm for his bosses when he created a twitter account using the name @crazykhazei to make fun of Alan Khazei, who is running against Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat that Brown now holds. The campaign aide, Eric Fehrnstrom might have stayed under the radar with his tweets – which Senator Brown says he didn’t know about – except that he made a mistake: he sent a tweet from the wrong Twitter account. The lesson for marketers: One of Read More
What to Do When Customer Service Meets Social Media: 5 Basic Lessons
In June 1984, the first online customer support forum for computer users sponsored by a computer maker opened its virtual doors on CompuServe on a Tuesday morning. Around noon on Thursday, the volume of inquiries was running about five times what the company planners had projected, and by the end of the day on Friday, it was over 8 times the anticipated volume. Although the volume has been going up steadily ever since, less than 20% of customer service inquiries were submitted digitally before 1998, and as recently as 2005, just 45% of technical support inquiries were submitted via email or landing page. Read More
Defining Measurable Value for Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
Guest Blog By David Potter, Vice President, Professional Services, Distribion, Inc. One of the basic assumptions this blog makes is that its readers are marketers who are interested in improving their multi-channel marketing results through almost any means possible. Another is that there is a place for technology in almost any distributed marketing organization – that it in any situation where there is a centralized corporate marketing department and one or more field or local marketing and sales organizations that use marketing materials created by corporate marketing to reach local prospects and customers. But is that an accurate assumption? Can Read More
Friday News Round-up: Tweet Success, Made-to-Order Marketing
Tweet Success = Right Tweet, Right Time – Social Media Today posted an excellent blog post this week on the best post times for various kinds of social media. The blog said that posting to Twitter at noon, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. midweek and on weekends was optimal. For Facebook, Saturday morning is the optimal time for any post, although those posted around noon also get more traffic. As for blogs, Monday morning is the best time. The lesson for marketers: Social media (like email) has become a kind of adult homework. The optimal times match the times when Read More
New Multi-Channel Marketing Priorities
In July, The Distributed Marketing Blog completed its first survey of marketing executives. We asked about their current spending priorities, spending plans for 2012, their view of how effective various marketing channels were, and how they selected different marketing communications tools. So far, we’ve published three sets of data tables that detailed some of the findings. The first looked at planned 2012 spending , the second reported on marketing spending by channel, and the third rated marketing communications channels on their effectiveness. As we have continued to analyze the results, as well as the emails and feedback we’ve gotten from the Read More
Marketers Rank Email #1 in Effectiveness
Multi-channel marketing means delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, through the right communications channel. All without blowing the budget. So how do marketers rate marketing channels when it comes to effectiveness? According to 95% of the CMO’s* who responded to The Distributed Marketing Blog’s survey in July, 2011, email is somewhat or very effective. * 190 marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of marketing answered a July 2011 survey conducted by The Distributed Marketing Blog. The chart shown here summarizes responses to the question: Please rank the marketing communications channels below Read More
Friday News Round-Up: Size Doesn’t Matter in Marketing, Facebook Takes on Telcos
Here’s this week’s round-up of “must read” news stories for marketers. What makes these stories stand out? They offer key information or lessons that multi-channel distributed marketing organizations should take to heart. Facebook Launches SMS Service – This week, Facebook launched Facebook Messenger, a free app that lets users access Facebook messages from their phone without installing Facebook Mobile. It’s the first time Facebook has unbundled one service from the rest of its services, and the media reaction has been mixed at best. Some love it, because it simplifies the process of checking for messages without waiting while your friends photos attempt to load Read More
Keeping Up with Social Media As It Evolves, Changes
Social media is evolving, changing, and growing every day. Even seasoned marketers who’ve been involved in social and digital marketing since the beginning have trouble keeping up with the fast pace and new opportunities it presents. That’s why webcasts like the presentation from Distribion, LIMRA, and Socialware are important, regardless of how successful your current social media marketing efforts are. Here’s a summary of the jam-packed webcast: The 5W’s of Social Media Marketing How they evolved & why they’re different than what you learned in college Why, who, what, where, when: the 5W’s Why? Word of mouse replaced word of mouth Read More
