10.12.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #4

Tactic:
Implement an educational email campaign (not one that is filled with thoughtless marketing messages).

Why it Works:
As long as you provide content that your subscribers can use or that they find thought-provoking you shouldn’t have to worry about your newsletter being considered junk or spam. An occasional ‘hey look what we did’ marketing message is fine, but for the most part newsletters work better when they meet the information needs of those to whom they are sent. Services such as MyEmma or Constant Contact let you track user behaviors and feed customized information appropriately. If everyone clicked on the newsletter story about online video but no one looked at the blog entry on house training your cat you might want to consider providing more information on the former and perhaps curbing the cat fancy pontifications.

Resources:
Constant Contact, PatronMail, and MyEmma are just a few of the large number of online resources that make it easy to create email campaigns, manage recipients, and analyze metrics data for a successful email campaign. Before you decide on one particular solution, come up with a list of ‘must have’ features and make sure the solution you are considering best fits your needs.

Most online email campaign tools charge based on number of subscribers and the three mentioned above are comparable in pricing. They also provide sign-up widgets to use on your site for bringing in new subscribers and offer many options for sorting campaign data and using that data in future mailings.

How We Have Embraced It:
MyEmma is Mightybytes’ particular email management tool of choice and we really like the ease with which it allows us to manage our campaigns. With Emma we can create our own custom-designed HTML templates (important for a design firm), glean relevant data regarding how our campaigns are received, and target particular users with very specific content. For instance, we can save everyone who clicked on a story in our last email about online video as a group and target those particular subscribers with video-specific content.

As a general rule, we only send out e-mail newsletters when there’s enough useful information to make for interesting reading. Sometimes that’s once per month, sometimes every other month. Our standard newsletter, which we’ve dubbed the Mbulletin, typically contains a blend of tutorials about how we accomplished a particular task for a client or project and relevant marketing messages about specific accomplishments, such as awards or recent projects. 

0 Comments » | Post a Comment »

Page 1 of 1 pages