I should be using that Twitter thing for marketing

Should you?

Before jumping on the bandwagon, try to figure out if the bandwagon can get you where you are going (or trying to get to). According to one of more recent researches, ‘the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets’. Does that mean Twitter is fast becoming a one-way communication tool?

Well, yes and no. Again, just like with SEO, it’s all about content and relevancy. If you are putting out tweet after tweet but aren’t really seeing any increases in conversions or even significant traffic spikes on your website, you might as well lay it off and not waste your time anymore, as tweeting for the sake of it (or because ‘everyone is doing that, so it must be good’) isn’t going to help much. Read more

Email campaign open rate statistic is not a good measure of success

Email open rate statistic is widely used as a credible measurable quntifier of success of email marketing campaigns. However, its significance nowadays should be disputed as it represents only a partial outlook on the recipient engagement with an email.

Firstly, email open rate is usually calculated by the amount of requests for a 1×1px transparent GIF image. This means that if a recipient is reading a text version of your email (say, on a Blackberry) or previews the content of the email in an a preview pane of an email client that blocks remote images by default, an open isn’t going to register. There are ways of tracking open rates of text email, but I wouldn’t recommend them.

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Want to grow your email list?

Main rule: DO NOT BUY COLD DATA. EVER.

Even if the cold data is promised to deliver results because it fits your required Mosaic socio-demographic profile, because it has 100% valid email addresses, etc., it is still cold data. Even if the recipients know about you, your company, your products, but haven’t explicitly given you their email address at some point in time, the chance of them hitting a ’spam’ button increase exponentially once they start receiving email from you out of nowhere.

Besides, a cold data list also suffers from list fatigue and level of unsubscribes a lot more than a list of subscribers who engaged themselves in the first place. It also costs more to email to and usually doesn’t provide a good ROI per subscriber.

So, how can you make your money go further?

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The quality of data used in personalisation

With the recent changes in the ISPs and email providers’ email acceptance policies many marketers stress the ever increasing importance of deliverability. Surely, deliverability is one of the things that would enjoy much attention in 2008, but getting an email into an inbox is only half the job done (same goes for direct mail). What happens when an email or a mail piece is opened?

Usually, one of the first and most important things that stand out right from the start are salutations and addressing, so it would make perfect sense to get this one right. After all, this is what the recipient sees almost immediately and it makes a big impact on whether the rest of the message will be read or it will meet the bin.

So, what’s the best way to get it right? While there are no 100% error proof rules, following some guidelines can dramatically the quality of the data used in personalisation, otherwise you will end up with gems like:

Mr. 12345
BOB
jAMES

and others.

It is worth mentioning that more than two thirds of data errors can be corrected during data capture. Since the overwhelming majority of the data collected now is done through the web interface, it makes sense paying more attention to the quality of submission forms. The problem of bad data input on them can be rectified mostly by imposing field validation criteria (much like it is done for email) and, to take it further, automatic field formatting based on the field content.

Qpod Club

Cunninghams Auto is sponsoring a newly set up Qpod Club that is designed to bring Qpod owners and people who are interested in off-roading experiences together.

The Qpod Club is accepting membership requests now and will be getting a word out soon on the membership details and goodies that come with it, as well as the first get-together.