Christmas only comes once a year and it is fun to see the children tear off the paper and unwrap their presents.

It is more like a destruction derby than a party! Paper, string and wrapping fly in all directions as the journey of toy discovery unfolds.

Parents and grandparents watch the unfolding scenario like the Super Bowl or the Football World Cup, cheering from the sidelines.

The Christmas card and the “thank you”  is often forgotten and the focus is on discovering what exciting new present that Santa has delivered!

The toy is seized with shouts of glee and overt unbridled enthusiasm and for the next 10 minutes it is the centre of attention.

Soon the next toy is unwrapped and the now “old” toy is discarded, maybe to never be used again.

The Shiny New Toy Effect

Social media marketing is the “shiny new toy” and it has been unwrapped and it has us all enthralled and excited. The Facebook marketing, Twitter tweeting and YouTube videos have us running in all directions as  we play with the social networks trying to work out how to make it all work effectively.

Amongst all the social media glitter there is a one little marketing tool that should not be forgotten, in fact it should be embraced and integrated into the new social web.

The Humble Email

What shouldn’t be forgotten in the “Christmas Present Effect“, is that the user base of  email far exceeds Facebook with over 3 billion users.

The two major advantages that a business or organisation email database has over Facebook is ownership and control. You own your email database, it is yours and you can send it out anytime you like. You are not dependent on the Facebook “Edge Rank” that controls who sees your Facebook updates in the Facebook “Timeline”

One plus One Equals Three?

The savvy marketer should take the power of the email and combine it with the power of Facebook and social media to synergize the exponential power of sharing.

Recent research by Get Response, obtained by analyzing 2.2 billion emails sent by their customers, has revealed that including sharing buttons with emails can increase the email “Click Through Rate” (CTR) significantly.

• The average click-through-rate (CTR) was 115% higher for emails that included any social link
• 5.6% CTR for emails including social sharing icons
• 2.6% CTR for those that do not include social sharing buttons

It actually looks like one plus one could actually equal four!

So have you socialized your email?

The Synergy of Email and Social Media

Via: GetResponse Email Marketing

More Reading

• 5 Steps to Optimize your Email for Social Media
• Do Marketers Prefer Email or Social Media Marketing?
• 10 Ways To Integrate Your Social Media and Email Marketing
• How To Increase Your Blogs Email Subscribers by 1,833%
• Is Facebook Destroying Email?

Image by Adrian S Jones

In the corner of my office sits a dull dedicated technology device called a “Fax Machine”, its real name is in fact “Facsimile”. It’s presence is tolerated in case we need to communicate when Facebook fails, the SMS feature on my phone implodes or the email goes down. It occasionally does make whirring noises and prints off a page from a marketing company or business that hasn’t heard of email or the internet.

I am sure that if I asked my teenage children what a fax machine was I would get a quizzical look with a raised eyebrow. They were  popular in the mid 1980′s and were a “must have” for every office and even came with the amazing ability to print in color. Marketers were quick to use them to bypass snail mail with calls to action and produce leads for sales teams.

Email replaced fax machines as the Internet became ubiquitous. It is still the prime communication tool for companies and Chief Marketing Officers have email marketing right at the top of their list for effective and efficient marketing. According to a Study by the Center For Media Research CMO’s had email marketing at the top of the list in their plans for 2010.

But there is a trend emerging that should give people pause for thought to not sit on their laurels but continue to evolve their messaging habits and marketing tactics as the way we communicate continues to morph .

The Comscore  report “The 2010 Digital Year In Review” reveals that email is in decline for every age group category except  those over 55 and email usage by12-17 year olds is down by 59%.

Facebook’s chat and instant messaging is quite often used instead. In November the Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced a “Modern New Messaging System” that would address emerging trends in communication announcing “High school kids don’t use email, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other.”

A comment I read on a blog recently by a university student reflects the winds of change ” I’ve never sent a proper email in my life, email is too formal”

So when we are looking at how we communicate we really need to think about what our audience’s preferred channel for receiving  and sending messages is and consider messaging with Twitter, Facebook or even YouTube. There is now more than one way to get your message out you just need to find the right selection of  communication channels for your markets.

Don’t expect email to disappear as my 1980′s generation fax machine device still has a place in my office it’s just that it is not as relevant as it used to be.

Email is not going away any time soon but things “are a changing”

What do you think?… is your communication relevant?

Image by Chris_Carter_

In the past marketing was easy. You advertised in the yellow pages, you sent letters and catalogs using direct mail, cold called and you placed ads in trade magazines and local newspapers.

If you were a larger company you used television, radio and national newspapers. It was known, comfortable and expensive.

The arrival of an increasingly digital economy and new media is chipping away at the familiar and known and replacing it with marketing platforms, channels and tactics that didn’t exist 5 or 10 years ago that companies and marketers are still trying to get their heads around.

The ageing “baby boomer” CEO’s and senior management are afraid to embrace it because it is new and scary.

The “Scary” New Media

We now have Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, email and search engine marketing and they all reach out to different demographics and markets. Musicians trying to get a break and get a record or DVD deal in the past had to engage an agent to help to secure a record deal with a music label. They then waited and prayed that the agent and the record company would work on their behalf. Their future was in some else’s  hands.  Today they are going direct to the market themselves without those intermediaries in between them and their audience making their own YouTube video and going to straight to the market themselves. This web trend is called “Dis-Intermediation”

A Musician’s Case Study

An example of this trend is Kate Leahy who with a budget of $20 and with some creativity and hard work made a YouTube video from her bedroom in outback Australia and marketed herself to the world (without an agent or a record label) and ended up touring Europe for 4 months and performing at shows across 4 countries only 3 months after producing her video “The Life Raft“. Kate made a stop-motion video using over 900 compiled photos that  took her an entire month to produce but it was done on time and she didn’t go over her budget but she had control and she was able to do it herself.  If you are passionate and committed you can achieve amazing things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Insightful and Revealing Cost Saving Comment

The cost of lead acquisition is also another reason to use the new digital media for marketing as it reduces the cost of those sales leads. A recent comment on the article “The World Is Hanging Up” by the Johan the marketing manager for the telecommunications company Telefonix.co.uk in the UK revealed that after tracking and counting the cost of acquiring sales leads that Web and Organic new media marketing was the most cost effective lead generator.

• Exhibitions cost per lead  - 1,500 pounds
• Telemarketing cost per lead – 900 pounds
• Pay Per Click cost per lead – 150 pounds
• Web/Organic cost per lead – 30 pounds

The Survey Results

So where is the smart money being spent by the top companies to make the best use of their marketing budget? StrongMail have released the results of a survey of 925 marketing and business leaders showing that the top 4 investments companies are making in marketing are

1. Email marketing is the top area of investment growth (65%)
2. Social Media (57%)
3. Search (SEO & PPC) at 41%.
4. Mobile comes in at 4th at 35% and you will continue to see mobile marketing continuing to grow strongly in the future as smartphones and high speed wireless networks and apps continue to grow strongly.

So this is where the smart money is going. Where are you spending your marketing dollars?

Image by Truthout.org

Email is not the cool trendy marketing tactic as the the current flavor of the month, social media. In fact some  companies, notably a major brand ‘Ben & Jerry’s,  are making the brave step of dropping their email marketing and going totally social in the UK.

Despite this email is still an important part of the marketing mix and  should be included in your marketing plan. Top bloggers also use email acquisition strategies to build their list to ensure that they keep their information, content and products in front of their subscribers.

Integrating your social media with your email can provide the best of both worlds and there are various ways you can integrate your email with social media (Read more on “10 Ways To Integrate Your Social Media and Email Marketing“.)

A recent report in June 2010 revealed by eMarketer reveals that 71% of companies are using email. to promote their Twitter , Facebook and other social media channels.



What were some of the other findings from the the study.

Facebook was the favorite for integration with email efforts, Twitter was the second ranked with LinkedIn third and YouTube placed fourth. The others were basically nowhere  at this stage in social media evolution.

Some of the benefits of integrating your email with your social media?

1. Improve your SEO by promoting and creating inbound links
2. Drive traffic to your website and blog
3. Spread Your blog, website and social media channels content

Are you integrating your social media with your email marketing or are you already just social ?

I have recently upgraded my blog and added new features as part of a continual optimization of the platform. Optimizing is a journey and not a destination and adding new features such as Retweet buttons and Facebook share are some of the elements that can make a big difference.

Part of the fun of tweaking the blog is measuring the before and after figures to traffic and subscriber numbers. Different strategies will produce varying degrees of  success and part of the challenge is to implement the options that provide the biggest benefit for the least amount of effort .

In a recent post “How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 55% with One Button” (shortly after transferring my blog from WordPress.com to a self hosted platform on Hostmonster)  I wrote about how effective a ReTweet button had been by measuring the difference in the blogs traffic before the addition of the feature compared to after.

One of the marketing tools that most blogs and websites use to spread their content and continually market their services is to build up a list of email and RSS subscribers that you use for newsletters, announce special offers and launch new products. Most blogs have a passive feature that is mostly in the right panel near the top of the website that provides a subscribe option for readers. This feature on my blog is powered by Feedburner which is a free service and also provides a RSS subscriber option as well. As a blogger I am always looking at what the top bloggers are doing and trialling as they continue to evolve their blogs and increase their traffic and subscribers.

The latest and so far successful addition I have just added to this blog is an email service provided by Aweber. One of the features of this is that you can provide a ‘Lightbox’ option to your blog once you have setup the service. The Lightbox feature is a fade in box that offers a free eBook or Guide to people for subscribing  to the blog, this can be setup to appear every time someone views a post or page or it can be customized so that it only appears every ‘X’ days ( I currently have it set at 7 days).

To make the strategy effective you will need to offer a free eBook or Guide as part of this feature. So far the email subscription rate on this blog is up by 1,833%!!

What that effectively means is that I am increasing the same number of subscribers in  two days that used to take me one month. It is early days but I think it something worth considering.

Social media marketing is the latest hyped business marketing method and it is proving to be a very effective way of marketing your business when done correctly.

Most chief marketing officers know that e-mail marketing is still a very effective marketing tool and in fact last year a survey revealed that CMO’s still consider it as a top priority in their marketing plans for 2010.

Omniture and The CMO Club conducted a Digital Marketing Survey in May of 2009, asking 102 CMOs to rate the relative effectiveness of digital-marketing media. Most respondents, 78%, found email marketing most effective, while 33% had success with online communities and blogs.

The real benefit of social media is it’s ability to leverage your message and amplify your content as people take your message and spread it on their social networks. GetResponse conducted a survey and found that integrating social media and e-mail produced a greater than 30% improvement in click through rates.

So if you could integrate  your social media marketing with your email campaigns and email acquisition strategies you can synergize and increase your marketing effectiveness.

Here are 10 ways to integrate social media and e-mail marketing

1. Broadcast your blog entries via e-mail
2. Add social media channel subscribe buttons on your e-mail newsletter such as “follow us” on Twitter
3. Place a link to your e-mail newsletters on your social media pages such as Facebook
4. Send out e-mail newsletters that are excerpts to your blog with links to each post
5. Include social media share options in your e-mail newsletter
6. Provide e-mail sign up options in your company’s social media channels such as your Facebook page
7. When asking for an e-mail opt-in option at your company call centre  also offer a social media opt-in option
8. Use the sidebar on your e-mail-marketing newsletter to list and link to all your company’s social-networking profiles
9. Use your ‘purchase is successful’ confirmation e-mails to link to your social media help forums or YouTube video tutorials
10. Provide an option for customers to join your social media networks on your e-mail newsletter registration page

These are some options but it comes down to continually trying different ways to communicate to your customers to optimize your marketing programs and tactics.

Have you integrated your social media with your e-mail marketing or thinking about it?

Research and surveys are continuing to show the growing importance of Social Media for marketers in 2010, with nearly six in 10 planning to include social-media spending in their next-year’s marketing budget, according to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” from the Center for Media Research.

The Top 3 were

1. Email 57%
2. Social Media  56%
3. SEO (or Keyword search) 50%

The Last 2 (interestingly) were Traditional National Mass Media 

1. National TV  18%
2. National Newspapers 15%

Note: The study was conducted conducted between July 17 and Aug. 10, 2009 and is based on a survey of 1,972 MediaPost subscribers, including 1,164 who report that they have planning, buying, approving responsibility for 2010

Another recent study by Alterian found a similar phenomenon in terms of the importance being placed on social media, with similiar results to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study”. Despite the acknowledgement by marketers that email provides the most measurable ROI, social media continues to receive a large  portion of marketers’ attention because of its potential influence on consumers.

In another study that examined the complex relationship between email and social networks, The Nielsen Company found that the high Social Media consumers had high levels of email usage, likely because of the multitude of “status update” messages that flood social networkers’ inboxes.

Another study reveals that Social Email Campaigns are increasing in this current year(2009) by nearly 400% (A record number of email marketers are planning to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns, and the number of social email initiatives is expected to grow 367% this year, according to new research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget.(for further reading on this have a read of a white paper at Exact Target “Expanding the Reach of Email Through Social Networks Whitepaper“)

Note: The complex relationship between email and Social Media is being further investigated by The Nielsen Company and could prove to be interesting when its results are revealed.

So with the opportunities for marketers with the new medium of Social Media, there are still obstacles with the survey from Alterian revealing  ”4 Challenges” in implementing Social media Marketing.

So what are the major takeaways from these studies

1. Social Media Marketing is to be ignored at your companies marketing peril

2. Traditional “Email” is still one of the most important marketing distribution channels

3. SEO is  vital in being found online and is still a core marketing strategy

4. Investigating and capitalising on the surprising but interesting relationship between Social Media and Email

So are the first three the major part of your marketing strategy?

Email and Social Media

The popularity of  social media has not reduced the need to to have an email marketing plan as part of your Internet marketing strategy, but there does need to be a reassessment of how you  integrate and optimize the strengths of each of these 2 internet mediums as part of  your marketing planning.   

It’s no secret that email marketing is an effective and inexpensive lead generation channel. But while email is effective, it is limited by the size of your email list. This may sound obvious and unexceptional, but social media does not experience the same limitation.

Whereas with email, your reach is equal to your list size, with social media, your reach is equal to your followers, fans, subscribers plus all of their connections, which gives your campaigns more leverage through people consuming and sharing content.

If an update is placed in a Facebook page, all your friends see that update and comment on it and then share it with their friends. If you post a blog post on Twitter then your followers retweet it ( send it onto their followers as a broadcast) this multiplies and leverages  your content in a way that a standard email cannot achieve as it is only seen by 1 person.

In essence, social media gives leverage to your content to expand your reach beyond your existing database. Now, how can you leverage social media from your email marketing?

What are the 5 Steps that Hubspot says need to be taken to optimize your email for Social Media.

Step 1: Figure out which social media sites your customers and potential customers use. Whether you believe it or not, your customers are online talking about you and your industry. Figure out which sites they use the most. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great places to start for most businesses.

Step 2: Set up profiles on each of these websites. It’s free and just requires your time. And, it’s best to reserve your company name on all these sites immediately , before someone else takes them.

Step 3: Add links in your emails to follow or subscribe to your social media profiles. The people already subscribing to your emails are great candidates for following you in social media, you just need to let them know that you’re there. Social media also gets a leg up on email in that an email address may not stick with someone as they move from one job to another, but social media profiles and subscriptions will.

Step 4: Add links in your emails to post your content to these social media sites. Make it easy for your recipients to share the content with their networks on these social media sites.

Step 5: Integrate social media at all stages of the communication. Follow the user from the email to the landing page and conversion.

3 Typical Results when Integrating and Optimizing Social Media with Email Campaigns

1. An increase the number of mentions in social media
2. The number of subscribers to our social media profiles will rise and
3. A jump in the amount of traffic and leads from social media sites (for this lead generation type of content) due to that buzz on these sites.

So don’t ditch the email marketing, keep fine tuning and tweaking your marketing to utilize the latest web technologies to leverage your marketing strategies.