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Some Thoughts on Email Arrival Timing

June 28, 2011 By Sam Beamond Leave a Comment

Like most people, I have several emails or blogs that I have subscribed to for information about topics that interest me. As I have begun to pay more attention to email marketing strategy I have noticed that I have different reactions to emails based on the time of day I receive them. Let’s look at a couple of different email subscriptions of my own in particular. To make a fair discussion, the content-type of both of these emails are equally as important to me.

Email 1

I subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog update email. Chris’ email usually arrives over night and is in my inbox the next morning, when I open up my computer. It appears with around 30 other new emails, a mix of important “to do’s”, junk mail, and low priority review-type content. Although, Chris’ email falls into the low priority category, I do still at least scan the subject and read on if it interests me. Subscribe to the Chris Brogan blog here.

Email 2

On the other hand my Social Media Examiner email from Michael Stelzner arrives usually around mid-day. Just before lunch and right when i’m either in the middle of something or attempting to finish what i’m doing before I break for lunch. By this time, my working day momentum has worked itself up and I am less likely to stop for a blog update email. For this reason I find myself sometimes feeling negatively towards it. I don’t unsubscribe though, because I know that Michael’s content is just as relevant and interesting to me as Chris’. More often than not, I will read on at some point during the day, but it does not have the same “punch/excitement” (thus less likely to engage or react), when I open it as I would the morning email. Subscribe to the Social Media Examiner blog here.

In conclusion, these are just some of my thoughts regarding email sending strategies. I have no doubt in my mind that each publisher listed here has thoroughly researched their send frequency and tested time of day sending and are indeed pushing their content at the optimal time that works for them. Both parties have great content and continue to teach me about online marketing each day.

What do you think? Do you find similar “feelings” towards emails that ping you during the day and interrupt your workflow vs. those that arrive over night?

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Filed Under: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With:

Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis Roundup

June 10, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

It was great to have the opportunity to attend Online Marketing Summit earlier this week for Day 2 and the Social Media Workshop on Day 3. It was unfortunate that the workshop was reduced to half day, but that’s ok. Generally speaking, the event appealed to me with its serving up a variety of topics and discussions that i could identify well with having had my hand many different online channels for several years. From social media, to paid search to email marketing, OMS had something for everyone.

On top of the insightful sessions, I had an awesome time connecting and reconnecting with fellow industry peers from the area.

Aaron Kahlow did a great job putting the event together and engaging us all.

I’ll attempt here to give a quick overview of the days I attended.

Day 2 – June 7, 2011

The day began with Gina Debogovich, Senior Community Manager of Best Buy, giving us a run down of how Best Buy have been successful in the social media campaigns. I believe, their success has not only been because of their involvement, but is largely driven by their willingness to participate across the board. Essentially, everyone engaged in social media is a marketer to some degree as they are publicly representing the brand online.

The next session I chose to attend was led by Lee Odden, I hadn’t heard him speak before, but had heard a lot about him. Now I know why. He really knows his stuff when it comes to SEO and Social Media and really spoke to my interests giving me an insight into areas I can develop. His presentation style certainly helped keep attendees engaged.

I’ve recently began experimenting with QR Codes both in print ads as well as signage. It was good to learn more about them in Angie Schotmuller’s session. I appreciate your time Angie after, talking over my specific ideas!

In the afternoon I attended the Social Video Marketing, Social Email Marketing sessions, along with Integrated Marketing Success with Adam Proehl. Adam shared some great tools for analytics and testing, and although they are probably beyond what I have the capacity for right now, they are certainly intriguing and warrant a closer look. A few he shared were:

usertesting.com

feedbackarmy.com

fivesecondtest.com

theclicktest.com

The last couple of sessions that I attended were SEO Best Practices with Chris Aburime, who offered some great advice on using title tags on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. While the closing panel discussion warranted some interesting takes from various angles, that included, Kim Albee, Marie Lettman and Julie Heltunen. My main take away from this discussion was how to segment your social media (personal) from social media (business). The simple approach of using Twitter and LinkedIn for business and saving FaceBook for personal seemed to make a lot of sense.

While I attended these sessions in person, it was fun to “virtually” attend the other sessions by following other attendees on Twitter and monitoring their Tweets. This was an unplanned bonus, that i’ll use again no doubt!

Social Media Workshop

June 8, the last (half) day of Online Marketing Summit, was a lot different to previous event days. The attendance was much smaller and split into two workshops to choose from. I chose “Managing your brand within Social Media Outlets” with Julie Heltunen and Amy Kilgour. The setup made for great discussion surrounding social media outlets, included, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and blogs. Various levels of social media experience in the room. Julie and Amy did a great job of keeping the discussion alive and providing something for all levels. I will certainly be maintaining a connection with them.

While writing this it occurred to me that there will likely be several “round up” type posts across the web from the summit, it would be great to aggregate them here, to learn what others got out of the event.

I’ll begin with a post from SpyderTrap here.

Know of any others? Post them in the comments below, thanks!

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Filed Under: Blogging, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Advertising, Online Video, Reviews, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Make the Most of Your Email Real Estate – Use a Preheader

May 18, 2011 By Sam Beamond Leave a Comment

Email preheaders are often overlooked by email marketers. With the massive amount of emails received by professionals today, its essential that you utilize every piece of valuable real estate you can when marketing via email. This is important to get the highest email open rate possible.

Before I get into the meat of this post, here’s a quick rundown of some “real estate” email features that you should make sure you are utilizing:

  1. The from name
  2. The from address
  3. The subject line
  4. The preheader text

I could add more points to this list, but there is something that these four points have in common, any ideas?…. yep, they are all visible BEFORE your email subscriber has to actually open the email. Thus, these are all areas that should be paid close attention to if you are to maximize your open-rate.

On to Email Preheaders

For those of you who do not know what an email preheader is, I would define a preheader as the first piece of text within the email body. From my research, preheader text shows up under a couple of circumstances, as follows:

  1. In MS Outlook when the email software notifies you of a new message. The popup in lower right of your screen shows, the sender, email subject AND the preheader text
  2. When reviewing your email inbox within Gmail or on some cellphones, Google actually displays the preheader text after the subject on the message line whilst in the inbox view.

Since a large percentage of email users utilize one of the above methods for email management, optimizing your preheader certainly should not be overlooked.

Commonly, email send software sets your preheader as something like “Click here to view this email as a webpage” as default. This tells the recipient nothing about the content of the email. Sure, its useful once the email is opened and the subject line will give them a good idea of what the email will be promoting, but wouldn’t it be better to add some relative text into the preheader area? The “Click here to view this email as a webpage” piece can be moved along abit?

Example of Preheader Use

Your email might be promoting a sale that you have at your clothing store. The sale might be 20% off women’s clothes. So your subject line could go something like “20% off women’s clothing at XYZ clothing store – Shop now!”. This might be a good incentive for email opens, but what if you add preheader text to read, “Save today on Shirts, Pants and Jackets by Ralph Lauren”? Do you think the additional promo text would warrant additional click? I think so.

By utilizing the email preheader, you are essentially creating a “Sub-subject line” providing you with a further opportunity to incentify a click and increase your email open rate.

So, do you utilize email preheaders? What are some of your experiences? If you haven’t made use of preheaders before, now is the time to start.

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Filed Under: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,

How I Got a Free Kindle 3

April 7, 2011 By Sam Beamond Leave a Comment

I recently received a free Kindle 3 as a result of a very unique marketing strategy employed by strangeloopnetworks.com, a web site accelerator/optimizing service company.

Here’s my story…

When I arrived at my office, I popped open Outlook as usual and began sifting through the junk and “keeper” emails. I came across one particular email with the subject line “now you have the empty box, your kindle 3 is waiting”. I didn’t recognize the sender but previewed the note anyway. After reading the first line, it indicated that I should have received an empty Kindle box by mail… blah blah. I hadn’t so I deleted the email, considering it junk, and thought nothing more of it.

I don’t check my regular mailbox every day since its on a different floor to my office, so a couple of days later I was in the vicinity and approached my mailbox. There was a package in there, nothing too abnormal there, except when I opened it up, sure enough it was an empty Kindle box! Next, I quickly scanned my deleted items and read the message. The company was claiming to send me a free Kindle 3 if I schedule a phone meeting with their CEO to learn about their web accelerator service. Since the snail mail and email “matched”, I figured they were worth my time, so I scheduled the meeting.

A couple of days later, I had my 30 minute conversation with the Strangeloop CEO, during the call learned a lot about web speed and a nifty website speed checker/comparison tool: http://www.webpagetest.org. The site actually allows you to compare your site to competitors web sites and produces a nice little chart and optional video that shows how your page loads. Cool.

A week later, I received my brand spanking new Kindle 3. No joke. Now my wife soon intercepted the gadget, which is ok, since i’m not much of a reader anyway.

I guess free deals do exist, be sure to research them thoroughly to avoid the cons.

Do you have an interesting marketing strategy to share, or experienced something similar? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

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Filed Under: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With:

Video in Email: How to Embed Video in Email

June 29, 2010 By Sam Beamond 3 Comments

Today, the simple ability to upload videos to the web has created an influx of online video activity that has reached extreme proportions. This trend has been led by YouTube, Vimeo and other online channels. So now you have uploaded some video content to one of these networks and you want to show off your masterpieces or use them as a promotional tool. A quick way to reach your audience is via email. You can create a message and blast it off to your list in no time. In fact email messages that include the promise of video clip have a much higher open rate and click through statistics that a “regular” formatted email. These facts alone suggest that this is a great method for getting your freshly uploaded video out to the masses.

Unfortunately most email applications, either web-based or locally installed, will not allow you to take the video’s code and embed your video right into your email message. Instead you could opt for a screenshot or frame capture of part of your movie and embed the static image into your email message. This is better than no image at all but wouldn’t it be better if you could simulate the video and engage the reader with a better chance of them clicking through to your video?

Yes, But How Do I Simulate a Video Embedded in My Email?

While flv or other web-based video file formats cannot be embedded in emails, more standardized imagery can, such as gifs and jpgs. The wonderful element of gif images is that they can be saved as animated gifs. There are many pieces of software that will allow you to create an animated gif file some paid and some for free. A simple Google search will yield many results. I’ll leave it to you to sift through and find a solution that is right for you needs. With your new animated gif capable software installed, you will need to play your video and take a screen shot/frame capture at various intervals throughout your video playback. I would suggest no more than 10. Now take your frame captures, crop them to size and add them to a time line in your gif software. (Note, for added effect, I suggest leaving the video player frame around your screen shots/frame captures so that the email reader can see that the animation is indeed a video and not some random image sequence thrown in there. Playback of your animated gif will show a somewhat jumpy sequence of your video clip, that tells the story of your video while capturing the attention of the viewer.

Now that you video is in an abbreviated format and exported as an animated gif, you can freely place the file into your email newsletter just like you would a static image. Now once in place you can set your image to link to the live version of your video on youtube or wherever you placed it, when the user clicks the image (animated gif).

Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments!

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Filed Under: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Video Tagged With: , ,
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