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Posts Tagged ‘Advocate’

Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HTML email campaigns – is sending them a waste of your time? (inklingmarkets.com)
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This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day… the timing is profound. The stories and images coming out of Haiti are horrific. I’m often an advocate for charity starting at home, but a disaster at this level to a country that continues to suffer blow after blow is too much to watch.

So – I want to do something to help! If we can get 10,000 1,000 followers to Samaritan’s Feet in the next 24 hours, The Marketing Technology Blog will donate $1,000 of its revenue to help Haiti. This will help an incredible charity as well as provide immediate assistance to Haiti.

That’s $1 per follower!

There you have it – it won’t cost you a penny to help! Simply retweet, follow and we’ll do the rest!

Here’s the links to click for retweeting and following: Retweet Samaritan’s Feet Marketing Technology Blog

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Every now and again I come across posts talking about how people don’t want to “engage” with brands on social media and that your brand shouldn’t be there, it should be people, etc., etc.

The latest was a post from Mike Seidle, a local blogger and business person who runs Professional Blog Service. I want to preface that I don’t know Mike and I have nothing against him. I follow him on Twitter and I think he generally has some good thoughts about business blogging and social media, however I still disagree with Mike on this point.

It is OK for your brand to be on Twitter – to be on Facebook – to be active in social media. It really is, and for a couple of reasons.

1. It gives your customers one point to gather news and information about your company.
2. It allows you to monitor the conversation.
3. It allows you to connect with other brands and possibly forge relationships and parterneships based on their interactions in social media.

Mike points out that people want to engage with other people. Yes, this is true, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t carve out a space for your brand as well. Here are some effective ways to do this:

1. Acknowledge who tweets/updates Facebook etc. on your company’s behalf: By providing some real faces it helps humanize your brand. FreshBooks does a good job of this on their Twitter page.
2. Allow your employees to interact on social media on a personal level AND on behalf of your company: I manage our twitter account as well as our Facebook page but I also have my own personal accounts. Many of FormSpring’s customers don’t want to follow me, because well, sometimes I like to talk about sports, or my kids or whatever else is going on.So, much of what I have to say is not great for them. But I also am an advocate and an evangelist for FormSpring, and when it makes sense, I talk about the cool stuff we are doing on my personal accounts. It gives insight to people who follow me on what I do for a living and helps expose them to FormSpring. Empower your brand and employees and it will pay off.
3. Have personality. If you are going to engage as your brand on social media show a bit of personality. We know that brands are not humans, but the more “life” you are able to give your brand on social media the more value you will derive from interacting through the multiple mediums.

Agree? Disagree? Have other ideas on how to use your brand across social media, let me know in the comments!

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