Author Archive: Mallory Hull
You have a list of email subscribers, but are you ready to send?
Creating a positive subscriber experience before your first email campaign
Sometimes you procure an item that you just know will serve a grand purpose later but, perhaps, the timing of its use isn’t quite clear yet. For me, it’s an electric sander for all of the furniture re-finishing I plan to do in the rooms of a house I don’t own yet (but that’s the subject for another post).
For some of the companies I talk to each day, that item is a precious, albeit outdated, list containing the email addresses of all of their closest friends, customers and prospects. You may know what I’m talking about: you’ve gathered a rather impressive email list over time, but now the dust is beginning to collect, and you realize that you’re running the risk of being forgotten by those signups.
You may want to clutch that list in desperation (it’s hard-earned!) and send out a blast (ick!) to all of those recipients. Instead, consider fine-tuning your list, and think about making the experience personal — you’ll begin the email relationship with your subscribers on the right foot.
- Review your list. Your audience isn’t just a list of email addresses – it’s a collection of people who have shown interest in your product or service over time. But, do you remember what you signed up for a couple years ago? Your audience probably doesn’t either, so it’s worth your time to review your email list before sending your first mailing. Start by giving Emma’s Privacy and Permission Policy a once-over, and narrow your list down to folks who have done business with you or opted in during the last 18 months. Next, segment the remaining subscribers by their relationship to you (friend, client, etc) or by their signup date. Consider sending newer subscribers a welcome email, and reintroduce yourself to people who signed up more than a few months back. Remind them that they’ve signed up, explain that you’re going to start mailing to them and mention the opt-out link in case a few recipients’ interests have changed.
- Set conservative sending goals. Consistent communication strengthens the relationship with your audience. But crafting great emails takes time and planning. Do you know what kind of information you plan on sharing, how it’ll benefit your audience and how often you’ll be able to share it? If you establish your content strategy before you start sending, you can spare yourself some major headaches down the road. Next, determine frequency. For many, a monthly newsletter is a sustainable pace to establish. But if you’ve identified a need for weekly or daily emails, you’ll want to set that expectation with your audience.
- Design a preference center. If you’re developing different types of messages (a regular newsletter plus periodical promotional messages, for example), or different audiences to target (like male versus female shoppers), give your audience as much power of choice as you can. By designing a signup form with options that best reflect your audience segments, you’re also setting up a “preference center” for current audience members. This will allow your subscribers to opt down (receive emails less frequently) or opt over (move to a different mailing group) in lieu of unsubscribing altogether. You’ll be rewarded with much more responsive audience groups. For instructions on customizing your preference center, head on over to this nifty page in Emma’s Help Guide.
There you have it – your three-step plan for rolling out a top-notch email experience for the folks on your list. If you have any questions about getting started, let us know.
This is part two in our blog series on audience growth. Read part one here.
+++++
Interested in learning more?
- One of our delivery experts dives into opt-in email marketing.
- Emma’s Director of Content talks about content strategy.
- Molly answers FAQs about email marketing.
+++++
Not yet an Emma customer? Your first 60 days are free!
A savvy agency gets acquainted with Emma’s new API
Tim Frick, founder of Mightybytes, talks about the integrations he's building for his clients
Tim tells us what's next for Mightybytes + Emma.
And we want to help simplify their jobs. As part of our Featurepalooza, we’re releasing a slew of new features to Emma accounts, and our new API is at the center of the action. Tim Frick, founder of Mightybytes, jumped at the opportunity to be an early API beta tester.
As a smallish shop with an eye toward design-driven marketing solutions, Mightybytes has many things to manage on top of their client workload. Tim quickly identified some integration possibilities using Emma’s API, and we were thrilled to have him share the details with us.
What are your clients looking for when they decide to start doing business with you?
We navigate the waters of corporate and nonprofit clients with equal proficiency. A lot of the clients we deal with are cause-driven – we help them prosper, grow and achieve their goals in a measurable way. We work with them on everything from strategic business and digital marketing consulting, which often includes email and social campaigns that build brand awareness, to developing and building online applications for core business function.
Why did you decide to get involved in our API project early on? Tell me about the work you’re doing and planning.
We’ve been exploring web-based product development for some time now. We’ve even prototyped a few things but haven’t brought any of our own products to market yet. The release of Emma’s API and the company’s invite to be part of the beta development program gave us the perfect opportunity to put one of our product ideas — a syncing tool for CRMs (like Highrise, Salesforce, SugarCRM) and email marketing systems — into full swing development.
We are currently working on two projects using Emma’s API. The first is an integration app called Swapley, which will manage communication between Highrise and Emma. We’re about 50% complete for version 1.0.
The second, which we’re mapping out now, will be an Emma module for a content management system (CMS), Drupal. The Drupal module will help us expand our service offerings and give customers better tools to integrate content marketing strategies with easy-to-use tools that support integration of multiple systems.
What are some of your goals for the Swapley and Drupal projects, and how do you see them working for your current clients?
Our clients turn to us for online solutions that integrate good marketing, design and content with other core online business functions (like a CRM, donations, content management and so on.) Having the ability to integrate Emma and Highrise features will not only help with our internal prospecting, but will also streamline efficiencies on solutions we build for clients.
Specifically, with our proposed Drupal integration, our clients will be able to easily create Emma-based mailings with branded templates from within a content management system. Also, many of these sites and tools have registered users. We envision the Emma/Drupal module offering would help customers cross-reference those who have registered on their site versus those who are email recipients. Eventually, it would be nice if this information could be easily shared with a CRM as well, so all systems are in sync.
How will this integration affect the way you think about on-boarding new clients and prospects?
Having access to the Emma API will definitely increase our productivity and allow us to build tools that make it easy for clients to choose Emma as a preferred ESP alongside other services we offer. Before, as a firm with a reputation for implementing technically challenging yet design-driven web solutions, we often wrestled with how to roll Emma’s great email marketing services into our process. The release of Emma’s API definitely set off light bulbs above our collective heads. We see huge opportunities to integrate Emma’s services directly into the solutions we build for clients via the API and apps we build with it. Mightybytes has already lined up several potential clients for our Highrise integration app and interest seems to be great there. Several other ideas for using the Emma API to build web apps are piquing our interest as well.
Do you have any advice for other Emma agencies that are considering whether to dedicate resources to API integration?
The new API documentation and forums should go a long way in helping developers understand the application development process. Using Emma’s tools makes it easier for them to bring new integrations to market. You all (Emma’s tech team) have been very supportive as we develop our own apps. We appreciate Emma’s commitment to good design and excellent usability — these are traits we share. With that in mind, agencies looking to create their own integrations should undergo thorough user testing throughout the entire development process to keep standards high and apps usable.
Learn more about Mightybytes:
- Visit their website.
- Signup for their newsletter, Mightymail Quarterly.
- Check out their blog.
- If you’re currently using Highrise and are interested in connecting with Emma, sign up for more information about Swapley.
+++++
Ready to try Emma’s API?
We’re rolling out Emma’s new platform and brand new API on a limited basis. If you’d like to be first in line, let us know.
Growing your email audience
A primer to start building your email list easily and effectively
Taco Mamacita wisely mixes required and optional fields in their signup form.
It’s a frustrating feeling to have a great announcement to make, but no audience to hear it — just ask any business owner who’s just beginning to build their email audience list. Your news may be more about software updates or new product lines than cupcakes, but the challenge remains: If the classroom doesn’t come to you, how do you find the right folks to share in your celebration?
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to find the right audience members and play well with Emma’s permission policy, too. With a little advance planning, you’ll set yourself up to share your brand with the right folks — and engage them from the start.
If you’re new to email marketing and not sure how to attract subscribers, follow these tips to get your program up and running:
- Create a strong signup form. Your signup form is the perfect place to gather all the subscriber information you need to know. Make a clear distinction between what you must have (mark it as required) and what can be shared at your subscribers’ discretion. You might need to know their zip codes to send them accurate info about a store in their area, but you don’t need to send birthday coupons to everyone — just the folks who choose to fill in their date of birth. Remember, subscribers may abandon your form if they feel that the process is too long or intrusive. Also, let your subscribers know what to expect as a new member of your list. Will you be sending daily, weekly, monthly or on some other schedule? Will they see promotions along with newsletters? Can they pick and choose the news types they want to receive?
- Identify all of your customer touch-points, and get used to asking folks to join your email list. Think beyond your website for a moment. Does your company send transactional emails? Do you tweet? Have a Facebook page? You’ll reach the biggest audience by making your email signup forms as visible as possible in as many places as possible, so identify your points of contact. And think beyond your online presence. Put a fishbowl near your store’s register so customers can sign up by dropping in their business cards. Encourage your sales team to bring up your newsletter in their daily calls or demo classes. Even include a link to your signup form in your own email signature. Every interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship.
- Create a welcome trigger. Catch your subscribers when their curiosity is piqued: right when they sign up. Your automatic welcome emails can net four times the normal open rate and five times the normal click-through rate. A welcome email is the perfect time to reinforce the benefits of your newsletter, give subscribers a discount on their next purchase or simply thank them for signing up.
- Ask subscribers to share your emails with their networks. Then, provide unique and entertaining content so they can’t help but do so. Incentivize the share, too. Reward those who share with a special coupon or unique content from your brand. That’s a built-in loyalty program!
Give a little thought (and a lot more action) to these four tips, and you’ll be growing your email list in no time.
This is part one in our blog series on audience growth. In our next installment, we’ll talk about more ways to maintain a healthy, engaged list.
++++
Want to read more?
- Learn how to create a smart signup form
- Meet your customers where they are (and ask for their email address)
- See a few welcome triggers that work
- Read about Emma’s Social Sharing feature
Open rates, simplified
Practical advice for boosting your email opens, just in time for the holidays
If I had a nickel for every time I was asked, “How can I improve my open rate?” I’d probably have all my holiday shopping done by now (okay, that’s wishful thinking). But it’s a question on all of our minds as we put valuable time and resources toward creating and sending email campaigns. And while many variables play into the open rate of an email (time of day, time of year, even the weather), I’ve got some practical tips for boosting opens you can apply to your own email strategy today.
A 40% open rate? Not too shabby.
Brand your from name, from email address and your subject line
These are the first things that folks see when they receive your emails, so your “from name” and email address should be instantly recognizable and branded. Unless you’re Mark Zuckerburg, it might make sense for you to send emails from a more brand-specific email address like, info@yourcompany.com with your company’s name listed as the “from name.” Not sure if changing your sending details will help or hurt your brand? This Mark Brownlow article will walk you through a little self-analysis.
Next, let’s talk subject lines. Here’s a simple subject line axiom: They should be concise and feature your most important or most interesting information. Don’t forget to add your brand voice and personality in there, either. Oh, and by all means, steer clear of the ever-so-boring “December Newsletter,” and be sure to check out Molly’s post on holiday subject lines that work.
Segment your audience and send relevant information to the right people.
The art of segmenting and sending targeted messages will determine the fate of your open rate. While the old “batch and blast” approach may work for some companies, segmenting is key to getting the most out of your email marketing. Here are two ways to try segmenting.
1. By demographic data
- Location. If you’re collecting postal code during signup, you can find members who are closest to your brick and mortar location. Send these folks a campaign that highlights an in-store event or promotion.
- Age. If you’re collecting the birthdays for your new audience members, you can easily segment them by age and target a specific age range with your new product.
- Gender. If you have separate product lines for men and women, have new subscribers choose their gender on your signup form. Send targeted messages by dividing those guys and gals into separate groups.
- Customer status. The types of messages you send prospects should be different from those you send to established customers. Track where audience members are in the customer lifecycle as a custom member field so you can send prospects more promotional messages and send existing customers a feedback survey or event invitation.
2. By response information
Divide your subscribers along activity lines. Audience activity is a good representation of how engaged your subscribers are, and you can treat your most engaged subscribers a bit differently. Since engagement is monitored in the response section through opens and clicks, you can create segments based on those numbers.
The benefit of response-based segmenting is that you can connect with your more engaged groups more regularly, or with special VIP offers. It also highlights which audience members are less engaged, and you can decide whether it’s time to drop them from your regular mailings or attempt a re-engagement campaign to get them back in your good graces.
Keep in mind that each year up to one-third of email addresses become inactive or turn over due to job changes and deleted email accounts. Emfluence Insights has some handy tips for reconnecting with subscribers who hard bounce, but try not to take it too personally if audience members don’t re-engage. You’re better off reserving your marketing efforts for those who already care about who you are and what you’re doing. Check out Mary’s series on engagement for more advice.
Want to share your own secret to great open rates? Comment here and let us know your success story.
This is part two in our holiday series where we answer email marketing questions provided by our customers. To see part one, click here.
+++++
Request a holiday design from Emma’s design team before December 12th to avoid the rush.
Things we love: Themed email newsletters
See how Choke Design Company introduces their new monthly mailing
Have you found yourself in this situation? You’re so busy designing and developing great campaigns for your clients that your own marketing efforts suffer from lack of attention. I’ve encountered it more than a few times while working with Emma’s agency partners, and I hate to see an agency with a rare gift for email design neglect their own inbox presence.
CDC's Monthly Mix Tape premiered this month. (Click through and scroll to sign up!)
As Choke notes in the introductory email I’ve featured here, they’ve found a stylish way to share their passions for design and music with their audience: by introducing a handful of content pieces organized around a theme, then coupling them with a complementary (and complimentary!) music mix. It’s a great way to break the “updates from the office” doldrums, and they’ve arranged their content in a way that’s tidy, digestible and easy on the eyes.
For agencies that specialize in design and content creation, sending a regularly scheduled newsletter is the perfect way to showcase your expertise. You’ll stay top-of-mind with your audience, and you might just hit the inbox of a prospect the next time they’re considering updating their branding and strategy.
If you’re thinking about launching your own newsletter, keep these three tips in mind:
1) Send consistently
You may decide to send weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly (or some other sending schedule that meets your audience’s needs). Sticking to your sending schedule builds trust with your audience.
2) Speak to your audience’s interests
A newsletter doesn’t have to just cover the news. Engage your subscribers by providing interesting information, helpful advice or exclusive material.
3) Break your content down into bite-sized pieces
Newsletters can easily get wordy, and big, unbroken blocks of text can appear daunting to a reader at first glance. Include images and arrange the layout to allow the reader to skim or zone in on the parts that are interesting to him or her.
Have you been looking to start marketing your own agency through email? My fellow Agency Relations associates and I are here for you — we’d love to help you dream up ways to showcase the best parts of your brand.
Meet Mike Lieberman of Square 2 Marketing
5 questions with a twist: Read or watch our interview with one of Emma's agency partners
Mike is the co-founder and president of Square 2 Marketing.
I had the pleasure to chat with Mike Lieberman of Square 2 Marketing, a strategic marketing consulting firm focused on small and mid-size businesses. They help clients refine their brand identity and marketing goals through “Reality Marketing,™” the process from which they build unique strategies for all of their clients.
We covered everything from how email helped one of their clients land a $150k job to the best running shoes on the market. Read on to see how Mike handles Emma’s 5 questions, and if you’d like to watch part of his interview on video, you’ll find a link to do so below.
Tell me a little bit about your role at Square 2 Marketing.
My role has changed a bit over the past couple months — primarily I’m focusing on helping our company increase its national footprint. We already work with clients across the country, but I’m currently working on building some strategic partnerships with companies like Emma and a few other technology companies out there that will help Square 2 Marketing become a real national player. In addition to that, I’m the Chief People Officer here at Square 2, so my goal is to bring in the best and the brightest people and make sure they have a remarkable experience with our firm as well as providing our clients with a world-class marketing experience when they engage with us.
What do you see changing and evolving in the marketing industry?
If you readers want to *hear* what I think about the marketing industry, they can head on over to our site to watch the video. When I went to college and when most people think about marketing, they think about what they learned in school, which is, “reach and frequency.” (“Tell as many people about your company as much as possible and eventually when they need you, they’ll remember you.”) That model is so far from effective these days, that when I mentioned how we help people think differently about their marketing, a big part of what we do is try and help our clients understand why that’s no longer effective.
I read an article that said, “Consumers are inundated with something like 3,000 ads a day.” We’re all just numb to advertising. It’s interruptive, and there are so many tools out there to eliminate advertisements from our lives, so the “reach and frequency” approach is no longer working. When you throw on top of that the things that have happened with the internet — social media, Google’s dominance of search and the natural occurring conversations that are so popular these days in social media — you’ll see that marketing has become an exercise in creating remarkable experiences for your customers and the kind of stories that they can share with other similar kinds of people. Then, those stories become the content that you use to leverage through social media, search, email and your website, which all facilitates sharing. There’s a huge movement about how to re-educate people on how to market their companies. It’s challenging because it’s not easy to do it this new way. It’s much easier to buy an ad placement and hope the phone rings, but it’s no longer an effective use of your marketing dollars.
With Reality Marketing, a high return on marketing investment is one of the tenants. This new kind of marketing fits in very nicely with the kind of marketing strategy we create for our clients. It doesn’t cost a lot to do a blog post. It doesn’t cost a lot to do an email campaign, and they’re very effective if you have the right content. The content is where we see a lot of clients falling down, and why we talk to our clients so much about marketing strategy, and why we have started an initiative to work with other agencies to help them with their strategy. We want to help agencies improve the performance of email marketing and other marketing tactics so that their clients are happier and offer more referrals. We’ve even created an eBook to teach them how. Agencies can be good at what they do — building websites, creating email campaigns, doing search marketing — and we can provide the strategy that guides the content and creates the stories that makes those businesses remarkable. I think that’s the core difference between marketing now and marketing even two or three years ago.
How do you implement that marketing strategy into your clients’ email campaigns and surveys? Do you have any success stories?
We implement our Reality Marketing and Marketing Machine™ approach the same way with all of our clients, and it’s a requirement to doing business with us. We’ve literally turned down business of clients that don’t want to do it our way because we know “our way” is effective, and we have a track record of making it successful. We know if we don’t do it our way, we’re not going to be doing our clients justice. When it comes to email and surveys, they all become components of our “marketing machine.” Planning for that marketing machine is done within the first four to six weeks of all of our client engagements. Going into it we already know our email campaign topics, the voice of our client, the messaging strategy and the differentiating factors. When it comes to doing the monthly, weekly or bi-weekly emails, everything falls in line.
One of the things we learned from our clients early on is that it’s not the desire to do emails or surveys that holds them back, it’s the uncertainty of what to write about. That can be a big road block. When you’re a business owner, or even a marketing person, and you’re in your day-to-day, and realize it’s time to do an email, yet you don’t know what you’re going to write about or how it fits in your overall strategy, it becomes a more daunting task. Typically what ends up happening is it gets put off and gets put off some more, and now what was supposed to be a weekly email campaign is now a bi-weekly email campaign, a monthly email campaign, or, even worse, it comes out sporadically — all of those things are ineffective when it comes to building up trust within your client base, sharing stories and getting them to think differently about your company. They have to see that you’re organized, showing thought leadership, and that you have stories that are compelling. Then you have to educate them and advise them, giving them information that’s going to help them do their jobs better or make their lives easier. All of that work has to be done upfront because when it is, the email campaigns become quite easy — we already know what we’re going to say.
One of my favorite stories is of a client that we worked with very early on that was a little skeptical about email. This client builds very large additions or extensions onto fairly large homes. So, if you have a million dollar home, they would come along and put the $200k addition onto your home. We started working with them, had the strategy created and knew it was going to make this business special. Our client already had some fantastic stories that we were going to leverage. When it was time to do the first email campaign, he sent over his email addresses and was a little shy that he only had about 150 or 200 emails. He wondered if he should even do this, if we thought it was going to be worthwhile. Our advice was absolutely. We had to get started somewhere, and who knows what was out there with these 200 email addresses. We designed his template, wrote his email and then sent it to a couple hundred people. Within four or five hours, our client got an email from an older client, who he had done a $150k barn renovation proposal for. The guy replied to our client’s email and followed up with a phone call to say that he was so glad our client had reached out to him, that he was ready to move forward with his project and he really appreciated our client’s patience. Our client saw right away the value of having that ongoing communication with clients. In his particular situation, it resulted in a sale of $150k.
Who is a company that you think really knocks it out of the park with email marketing and branding?
My brand crushes are probably more related to the remarkableness of a particular company and product because I find that when it comes to tactics (we didn’t invent email marketing or websites), a lot of companies execute them very well. When I’m impressed by a brand, I’m impressed by their ability to stand out in the market. For this question, I have an obvious choice and then a more obscure one.
My obvious brand favorite is Apple. They don’t need to do any marketing. I think they do it simply to keep the board of directors happy. You don’t need to see an advertisement for an iPhone or an iPad. Everyone is talking about them. Everyone is chatting and tweeting about them. The lines are out of the door for people to buy these products. They have a remarkable product and experience. When you go into that Apple store, the workers in there are using their own products, taking your name on their iPad to serve you. You barely have to wait, and when you do wait, you’re entertained by their products and what’s going on there. The amount of activity in those stores is unbelievable. I’m attracted to the Apple brand simply because of the remarkable nature of that business. But, that’s an easy one.
My more obscure brand crush is Vibram Five Fingers. I’m a runner, and they make a pair of shoes that make it appear you’re running barefoot. They’re actually becoming more popular because a lot of articles are being written about them, whether they’re good or bad for you. But, when I saw these, what my kids call “toe shoes,” in a camouflage color, I couldn’t help but wear them all of the time. It’s a remarkable experience. I feel fantastic when I run in them. I can run farther distances, and my feet feel great. It feels like I’m not wearing anything at all, and no matter where I step, my feet are safe and secure. I’m hugely impressed with Vibram’s ability to create a remarkable product and then get the word out purely through buzz. They don’t market. They have a great website, but it’s conversations on social media, referrals through friends and articles that people have written about them. They’ve taken the concept of being remarkable and leveraged it from a marketing perspective. They’ve created the space, and now the other sneaker companies are stealing their idea, which is fine — the more the merrier. I’m impressed with their ability to create a remarkable product and do something special with it.
Forget about marketing, most importantly — plain or peanut M&Ms?
Peanut M&Ms. No question about it.
5 questions with Lucid Marketing
Kim is the founder of Lucid Marketing, a Nashville-based agency.
Describe your agency and what makes you different.
We’re a one-person shop that helps small and some not-so-small companies take advantage of all their communications options, from social media and website content management, to old school, tried-and-true solutions like direct mail. It’s kind of rare to get strategy, writing and design all in one place, without using a large agency.
What’s the most interesting thing you see changing and evolving in your industry?
By far, the most interesting thing is how technology is giving businesses of any size the ability to do the same kinds of marketing that used to be reserved for places with bigger budgets. Change is the operative word — daily, even hourly, new tools pop up. It’s a whole new world, every day, and it’s never boring.
How do you stay on top of trends so that you’re a go-to resource for your clients?
Mainly, we stay curious. We subscribe to blogs by the experts in various aspects of online marketing, and we watch how others use technologies and techniques to see how they might benefit our clients. We network via social media, and we utilize partners for highly specialized and deeply technical work.
How has Emma helped you grow?
Being able to offer a technically rich and visually stylish email platform like Emma makes our job easy. We especially appreciate the metrics that are built into Emma, because they help us to analyze what our clients’ readers are most interested in. It’s so much more than the “open rate;” we track every link and use the information to create more content like that.
Of course, we use Emma for our own marketing in the same ways we use it for our clients. We try to cross-pollinate between all the ways someone can encounter our brand — through our website, blog, email, social media, direct mail. We repurpose and revise to reach people in the way they want to be reached. We use all the social sharing options; haven’t used surveys yet, but soon!
Where do you draw inspiration?
Honestly, from our nonprofit clients — the combination of a tough economy and a mandate to spend donated dollars wisely makes it doubly important for nonprofit clients to be creative in how they reach people. They have to work really hard to understand what will move the public to get involved, to volunteer, to donate. The competition for philanthropic dollars is fierce. Luckily, technology has made it possible to reach a lot of people fast, like with email marketing and social media. We just have to get the messaging right.
Lastly (and maybe most importantly), what’s your karaoke song?
Well, I don’t do karaoke — but if I did, I could totally get behind Aretha Franklin’s version of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.” I even accidentally sang to an entire Wendy’s restaurant because I didn’t realize the drive-through mic was on.
Things we love: Smartly using Facebook to gain exposure and grow an email list
How the Thunderbird Inn and Travel Retro cross-promote their brands and gain new fans
I’m a big fan of modern-day time traveling (I may or may not be currently seeking a DeLorean). But until I’m able to dial myself back to 1961, I take comfort in knowing that the Thunderbird Inn is ready for me whenever I’d like to make a reservation for “fifty years ago.” The Thunderbird Inn is a retro roadside motel billed as “the hippest hotel in Savannah.” It’s no stretch to imagine that simply checking in would transplant me into a universe of Beach Boys music, poodle skirts and dry martinis.
I’m not alone — in fact, we road-tripping time travelers are our own niche. And organizations are springing up to serve us. Take Travel Retro, for example, a newer travel site for folks in search of that nostalgic feeling. They’re the “Expedia” of vintage travel accommodations.
Travel Retro and the Thunderbird Inn: a match made in heaven, right? If I like one, I’m sure to be interested in the other. But how can they take advantage of their natural kinship?
Brands can be great friends
Travel Retro and the Thunderbird recognized that they could gain fans by working together. They may have already been using some tried-and-true methods to grow their audience lists, like website signup forms, the old fishbowl by the register, and the like, but how could they gain subscribers that knew about one company but not the other? They turned to the most social of online spaces: Facebook.
The Thunderbird Inn encouraged their fans to “like” Travel Retro, and, in turn, Travel Retro shared the Thunderbird Inn’s email newsletter with their fans. Simple, but effective.
The Thunderbird Inn raved about Travel Retro.
In turn, Travel Retro shared the T-Bird's email campaign.
I love this strategy. As a fan of the Thunderbird Inn, I’m happy to find out that a similar company “gets” me and my travel preferences. But if weren’t a fan of the Thunderbird, I may never have discovered Travel Retro.
How can you incorporate these tactics in your social strategy? Is there a company in your industry that’d make a natural partner? You may be surprised at how willing other companies are to align with you and cross-promote. Here are a few questions to ask yourself while you seek the right partners…
How can you find a partner brand to help grow your email list or Facebook fan base?
- Consider brands you’re already working with that fuel your business. Maybe it’s your coffee supplier or even the bike delivery service in town. It’s likely there’s already an overlap of some fans — by nature of your location or business practices — and the potential for more.
- Check with your sister stores and affiliate groups. Does it make sense to partner during certain times of year, such as leading up to your annual fundraiser? Do you have expert knowledge that would appeal to one of the groups?
- Ask your loyal customers where else they frequent. Odds are the things they love about your business are some of the same reasons they go to other businesses.
How can you make the most out of cross-promotions?
- Create a special signup form and audience group for these new subscribers.
- Offer an incentive to join your list, like a coupon or a special downloadable resource.
- Create a custom triggered welcome email to engage them right off the bat.
- Be transparent about the partnership. Some partnerships are built on goodwill; others may involve an exchange of services. In either case, be honest with your fans. Let them know why you’re cross-promoting the other brand and what makes them so fabulous.
Of course, Facebook isn’t the only way you can work with partner brands to help one another grow. Try exchanging fishbowls in-store, making a call out to the Twitterverse, swapping ad spaces in your newsletters and more. If you could go back in time even just a year and lay the groundwork for these partnerships, think of how much more exposure you might have seen by now. On the other hand, one day you may find yourself wishing you could go back in time to today, so why not get started?
If you’ve had great success growing your fan base by partnering with other brands, let us know in the comments section.
5 questions with Hamilton Wallace
Hamilton's based out of Scottsdale, AZ.
Describe your role in six words.
If you can believe it, I can narrow it down to five: Story finder and story teller.
Tell me about a success or two you’ve had using email to engage your clients’ customers.
Even though it might not seem “sexy,” one of our recent Emma successes is with a client that sells software, and they sell a relatively inexpensive piece of software to a small niche of customers.
When they first hired me, I took a look at how many customers they had. They ended up having over 250,000 registered users, but they never talked to them, and didn’t give them opportunities to talk back. On Google Analytics, it was clear that a big chunk of their conversions were coming from people who were typing their domain name into a search, which indicated that a current customer had referred this new customer to them.
We helped them use Emma by sending 70,000 emails to current customers every month. The first time we sent, the president of the company got an irate email back from one of his customers that said, “You guys have got to be kidding me! You don’t offer a Mac version of this product? You should be embarrassed. You all are the industry leaders. What’s going on here?” The president forwarded the email on to the lead developer. Then, the developer took a weekend to figure out how to make it happen.
Before this, they’d come to the conclusion that creating a Mac version of their software would be this gargantuan, expensive and time-consuming thing. But, because the company sent an email through Emma — giving the customers a channel to speak up — the developer came back to the president after that weekend to say that they could do it. And the happy ending to the story is that four months after the customer spoke up, the company is going to have a Mac-friendly version of their software available. It’s one of the biggest, most positive things that could happen to them.
Another client I have does training for business writing. He was hesitant to communicate with his contacts at first because he isn’t a “sales guy.” So, we decided to take his two-day business writing seminar and break it into 52 parts, sending an email a week for the year. Our goal wasn’t to try and sell anything, but to help people learn about business writing. He’s been sending an email a week for almost six months now, and has never included a price, talked about a seminar or tried to sell a DVD.
About a month ago, a government agency — that had inquired two years ago and never followed through after inquiring — responded to one of his emails letting him know they were now ready to take advantage of his training. They signed a contract, and this new customer will account for about a third of his business in 2011.
How has email helped you grow your business?
I don’t know that I can point to a client and say that “because of email, they’re a client.” I just think that the entrepreneur of today, who is my primary client, needs to be able to carry on an engaged conversation with their customers. This means they need to be able to attract traffic to their website and convert that traffic into leads or sales.
I’m probably as much of an emailer as I am an email coach. I believe that email is now and will grow more and more to be one of the fundamental skills that a business owner needs.
I’ve tried the approach of letting my clients choose which email service they want to use, and when the client chooses an email service other than Emma, they never send one email. And, when a client chooses Emma, they send emails. That, to me, is gigantic. I can’t say that there is one reason why, though. It’s like saying, “Why do people buy iPods?” It’s not one thing — it’s everything about the iPod. It’s everything about Emma: You can talk to a human being. You guys do good design. Your interface is simple. There are times that I wish I could do more in Emma, but I think that you all do a good job at keeping it simple.
How do you stay on-top of trends and be that go-to resource for your clients? Where do you draw inspiration?
I’ll answer you in two ways. One thing I try to do is follow people who, in my opinion, are smarter than I am and are doing similar things to what I do. I follow them on FriendFeed, Twitter and I subscribe to their blogs.
I also push myself to push my clients forward — to always test and continue testing. It’s a constant battle to be courageous and continue to move forward. But, when my client and I stop being afraid for a moment, we come out knowing a lot more than we did before.
I have always considered myself a direct response marketer who generates leads and sales. The internet is the biggest direct response platform ever imagined. A fundamental part of direct response is testing. The wonderful thing about the internet is that you can test one thing this week, but completely change it the next, which is completely different from how you would have to test not too long ago.
Who is your brand crush?
Looking at someone who is generally in the same business as I am, I’d have to say Seth Godin. Everything he does is so focused on others, so genuine with zero manipulation, and that’s his ethic. There’s so much to aspire to there.
Company-wise, it’s a tie between IKEA and Google. A lot of folks can relate to IKEA, and the reason they’re my brand crush is that when you walk into a store, their ethic of “simple, practical and intelligent” is everywhere, from how you put the furniture together to how they communicate the products in the store, to, literally, how you put your dirty dishes and trays away in the cafeteria. Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about what we want people to do on our websites, and when you walk into an IKEA — they want you to go up an escalator, or drop your kid into a play area, and those really are your only two choices. It’s very rare when you see a company that has such congruency in everything they do.
I have to say Google, too, because they are a “listening company.” I would bet that their next quarter plan is the same as their five-year plan, and that is to intently listen and watch what people are doing, and give them a platform to support those things. They push products out into beta and watch. They kill the things that don’t catch on and amplify things that do. I think this is what every company needs to do.
I want to relate that right back to email. Send regular emails to your customers, even if they have nothing to do with selling a product. It’s just about communicating with them and getting that conversation going. Because if you do that, every once in a while you might just a get that customer who tells you how it is, that tells you what’s wrong with your product – and they’re right! Email is the best way to listen like that, and it’s the communication of choice for most people.
Okay, let’s switch gears. Which baseball team are you rooting for this year?
Ha! As close as I could get to answering you is to say the San Jose Sharks, which is a hockey team. I have to say, I don’t really follow baseball.
Well, it looks like I struck out with that question, didn’t I?
5 questions with Suzanne Ryan
Suzanne takes off her many AimCoR group "hats" to try out new styles with her daughter, Heather, at Disney World.
Can you start off by telling me about your role at AimCoR group? From my experience working with you, it seems like you wear several hats there.
I’m kind of like the “girl Friday” from one of my favorite movies with Rosalind Russell and Carey Grant, His Girl Friday. My primary focus is marketing. We’re a very small company, with 40 BGAs around the country, but there are only four of us in our corporate office — we all do a lot of different things. My title is Marketing Director, but then I also do a lot with member services, getting them up and running. I help plan a lot of the events, too. We have three events throughout the country each year.
What is one of the most interesting things you see evolving in the insurance and financial industry? Are there any trends you’re seeing this year?
I think the number one thing we’re seeing has to do with recent legislation passed in December, which began on January 1, 2011 and ends on December 31, 2012, and deals with changes in estate taxes. There’s a lot of changes in opportunities within that two-year window for estate planning. We are helping to provide advanced marketing solutions to the agents and the financial planners for when they go out to their customers and try to get them to take advantage of this short window of time.
The second biggest thing we’re seeing is the tremendous amount of change within the life insurance industry. There has been so much competition among providers with what they offer due to the medical and technical advances. People are living longer. The recent census shows that women are living into their mid-eighties and men into their lower-eighties, so that really affects the type of risk class a person can fall into. And with all of the advances in health care, it’s making it easier for people to qualify for a better risk class. You can’t just buy a life insurance policy from twenty years ago and be set. People should be constantly evaluating either on a yearly or bi-yearly basis their financial needs, especially their insurance needs. I think that’s the key point in what I’m trying to say: Life evolves, and insurance has to keep up.
How do you use Emma to communicate those needs and trends in the industry?
We’ve got close to 40 or 50 members with accounts set up in Emma. What we do on a monthly basis for each member is set up a four-part communication series (with one campaign each week).
We’ve got two Carrier Connections each month, where we highlight what’s going on with our core carriers. The first Carrier Connection goes out the first week of every month, and we highlight six of our core carriers there along with a feature on our monthly agent webinar. The second week we send out the Underwriting Connection, where we highlight underwriting trends. On the third week, we’re back to Carrier Connections, and we use this campaign to highlight the other half of our core carriers. And then the last week is the Sales Connection. That’s where we feature new sales and marketing techniques and the new ideas we have.
These mailings that we set up for members are just a starting point for them. They go in to edit and customize the campaign, then send them out to their agents. Ideally, we should be reaching close to 50,000 people a week through this monthly series.
Obviously, you spend a lot of time in Emma. What is the one Emma feature you or your clients couldn’t live without?
The very best part of Emma is the audience component and the audience maintenance. I think it’s one of the best in the industry. We really take advantage of the ability to easily group our members, and we’ve started experimenting with audience searches. The signup forms are also very powerful so that you can have links on your website for new additions.
I noticed that you all are located in Maple Grove, Minnesota, which by name is very similar to Walnut Grove (also in Minnesota), the former stomping grounds of Laura Ingalls-Wilder. Do folks ever show up there looking to re-live the prairie days?
That’s actually south of where we are, so we’ve yet to see anybody get lost and end up here. Maple Grove is a nice, family-oriented suburb of Minneapolis. We are big fans of Laura and Little House of Prairie, though.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
Copyright © 2003 - 2012 Emma. All rights reserved.