All about email, Message Compass

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Q: Steve, I appreciate all of the low-cost marketing methods you have been sharing lately. For my business, we have found that doing a lot of online social networking makes a big difference. But most of my friends who are self-employed are not doing this. I think it’s a mistake. — Mike

A: Last week, I wrote about how critical it is today to have, not just an online presence, but a professional, robust, powerful Internet presence; how you need to embrace social networking, and how your website is as “important today as a business card was in the last century” (Rod Kurtz, Inc. Magazine)
This week, I would like to drill down into maybe my favorite e-marketing tool – e-mail marketing. There are all sorts of ways to use email to grow your business, but for my money, the bread-and-butter, best ways are e-newsletters and actual emails.
But don’t just take my word for it. When it comes to e-mail marketing, there may be no more knowledgeable a source than Gail Goodman, the dynamic CEO of Constant Contact, one of the top email marketing companies in the world.
Goodman started running Constant Contact in 1999 and has since grown it into a business with more than 250,000 customers. She was named the Best Entrepreneur in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and her company was number 16 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 50 fastest-growing women-led companies.

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Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Twitter…(must I go on?) Social networking websites such as these have taken the world by storm. At present time, Facebook and MySpace alone are currently attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Could Social Networking sites help (or hurt) your case?

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More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated. Online video advertising is really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment. It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates.

Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider. Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.

Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising. Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups. Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.

Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.

Whatever you come up with, don’t forget to make it easy to open and distribute. File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?

Also, if you’ve made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It’s cheaper and, if you’re not hosting it, it’s more viral, too.

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1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – Small business owners and entrepreneurs like to jump right in and get started, which is crucial to success, but it’s also important to prepare and plan and set objectives, especially when it comes to email marketing. When you’re getting started with email marketing make sure you step back and think through what you’re trying to accomplish. The best way to do this is to try and see things through your customer’s eyes.
Ask yourself what type of information would attract attention and get people to open, read and act on your email campaigns.
Do they want coupons, special offers or promotions?
Would they respond better to valuable information and practical tips they can use?
Often the best e-newsletters include a mix of sales with expert opinions and advice.
2. Make a plan – Once you’ve established your email marketing objectives, you can build an email marketing plan for the year. Look at the calendar, again from your customer’s perspective.
3. Start building your email list
4. Create an email template that reflects your brand image
5. Begin the conversation with your inaugural campaign – Now you’re ready to launch your first email campaign! Kick things off by introducing yourself and setting expectations. Let your audience know the type of information they’ll be receiving and how frequently they can expect to hear from you.
In your first campaign, don’t just sell, but also offer valuable information or tips your audience can use.
Encourage feedback so you can begin an ongoing dialogue with your customers, allowing you to continually gather more detailed profile information to improve the targeting of future campaigns.

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DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Fraudsters are using the logo of the Internal Revenue Service combined with the promise of federal stimulus money to dupe cash-strapped people into divulging credit-card information to a phony Web site, the International Trademark Association warns.

It’s the latest example of attempted identity theft rising amid the current economic turmoil, hitting a range of areas from mortgages to tax returns.

“It’s unfortunate, but we are seeing counterfeiters take advantage of people at the worst time, economically speaking,” said Alan Drewsen, the group’s executive director. “We want people to remain vigilant online.”

The so-called “phishing” email, which also displays photos of U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, claims to offer people their portion of the recently approved stimulus bill. Recipients are instructed to click an email link and enter their personal financial information into a counterfeit Web site, the association warned.

Such scams”are effective because they take advantage of a consumer’s relationship with a trademark, brand or logo – in this case, the governmental brand of the U.S. President and the IRS,” the group said.

The Federal Trade Commission says the IRS doesn’t ask for personal information via email. It urges consumers to forward any such email – unopened – to phishing@irs.gov, then delete it immediately.

The FTC and the trademark association added the scammers in general may request small “processing” fees in order to gain access to credit-card numbers. Other efforts to obtain personal information include requesting a bank-account number for the alleged intent of fraudsters making a “deposit” for you. As well, any links people are encouraged to click on can be installing harmful spyware software and viruses on a computer.

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1. When new subscribers sign up, I should treat them just like my old subscribers.
2. All my subscribers are the same, so I should just send the same messages to all of them.
3. When a reader clicks on a link from my email, it doesn’t matter if they end up on a page that looks nothing like the actual email.
4. My email recipients may enjoy my messages, but they don’t really want to share them with their friends.
5. After I send out my email campaign, there’s nothing left for me to do. If you look at it that way, you

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What can you say using only 140 characters? Actually, quite a bit, though you wouldn’t know it from the recent print media coverage of Twitter, the social networking tool that delivers user updates in 140 characters.

Except for a few tech-savvy individuals, this group seems to be in the early stages of engaging social media and has offered up little in the way of analysis about the evolution from personal broadcast system to community network system. The truth is, though, as more and more people make social media a part of their lives, the more our lives are being changed by it.

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Indeed, t’s far simpler to archive everything than to decide, on a case-by-case basis, which messages deserve should be saved and which should be deleted. Some e-mail clients even let you automatically archive all messages past a certain date (see this link for instructions on how to set this up in Microsoft Outlook.)

So don’t worry — let old mail pile up in your archive, and spend your free time cleaning up your garage.

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Can Microblogging Platforms Help Reduce The Email Glut?

Twitter’s meteoric rise in popularity – particularly over the last year – has been widely covered, and indeed the simplicity and flexibility of the 140 character-based microblogging platform continues to attract people all over the world in huge numbers, while a thriving community of developers build add-on services using its open API. We’ve also heard a lot about the power of Twitter as a communications, promotional and marketing tool.

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Not unlike explorers, lawyers also experience challenges in making their discoveries and within a decade, firms have increasingly shunned paper-based discovery methods in favour of electronic aids. ALB finds that ediscovery systems are capable of a lot more than just searching through documents

Discovery can arguably represent a significant part of a legal matter and only 10 years ago, a large discovery was considered to involve tens of thousands of documents. Nowadays, however, a major one is considered to amount in the hundreds of thousands.

According to Elaw founder and executive director Allison Stanfield, ediscovery is changing rapidly and these days, an enormous amount of electronic data is created – in e-mails particularly. “There are a lot more electronic documents in their native format that are required to be discovered and presented at trial, and this is what is causing a lot of issues for lawyers and their clients,” she says.

In fact, the federal court just released a practice note which essentially mandates the use of electronic discovery, and this will create a greater need for firms to enlist the services of experts in the field. According to Stanfield – whose company provided services for the HIH and Building and Construction Industries Royal Commissions – the team at elaw has some of the most in-depth experience in ediscovery solutions in Australia.

Traditionally, firms would undertake paper-based discovery and this would involve allocating staff to search filing cabinets. These days, however, firms are often dealing directly with client in-house counsel and IT departments to collect documents from their computer systems. “On one hand it’s making life easier, but on the other, there’s a lot more evidence to go through when a party is involved in litigation because 100% of all documents are created in electronic format,” she adds.

Allens Arthur Robinson director of applied legal technology Beth Patterson agrees. “We helped our clients prepare for ediscovery proactively by utilising technology that searches out and collects data on their IT systems. We use data maps, which allow them to know quickly where documents are, in the event of litigation,” she says.

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