Tag Archives: brian solis

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Email Marketing Tuesday: 5 Attributes to Achieve Engaging Email Marketing

Welcome back to Email Marketing Tuesdays, I have been on a quest to discover best practices for email marketing, and I want to share my findings with you.

What is engaging email? One of the many things I have read includes Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing, and the guide covers 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, and the 5 attributes include:

  1. Trusted
  2. Always Relevant
  3. Conversational
  4. Coordinated Across Channels
  5. Strategic

However, before going into details about the 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, let’s define engagement.  According to Brian Solis author of  What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, “engagement is defined as the interactions between a brand and a consumer, but it is in how it’s measured that counts.”

Now, as you read the details about the different attributes involved in engaging email marketing, think about the actions your brands and your consumers need to take, and then, think about how these actions can be measured.

1. Trusted – To create trust with your target audience, you need to develop and maintain the quality of your list; maintain your reputation to increase deliverability with ISP’s; be consistent in the timing, frequency, marketing messages, who emails are from, and subject lines; and finally, abide by CAN-SPAM regulations.

2. Always Relevant – Say the The crossover between what you what to say in your email message and what your audience wants your email message to say is relevancy
right thing to the right people at the right time.  To accomplish this, you need to segment your target audience and determine what is the most relevant content for each segment within your target audience.  The next Email Marketing Tuesday will talk more about how you can segment your list, so stay tuned!

Two-way communication3. Conversational – the content of your email marketing efforts should spark a two-way conversation between you and your target audience.  You can do this by listening to your audience, adapt to their changing needs, and tell engaging stories.  Segmenting your lists and using dynamic content will help you achieve this attribute.

4. Coordinated Across Channels – According to a recent study by Mckinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than Social Media — nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” However, social media extends your reach beyond your email marketing efforts. Therefore, Digital Marketing Managers need to include both email marketing and social media marking efforts in their digital marketing programs.  Tomorrow’s blog post, Social Media Wednesday, will talk more about social media efforts that you can coordinate with your email marketing efforts.

5. Strategic – First, make strategic marketing decisions that comply with your company’s goals.  Second, with the metrics that you are given, formulate a process to determine your Return on Investment (ROI) for your email marketing program.

Some of the above mentioned attributes are not surprising, but some the details and examples out-lined in Marketo’s guide are helpful.  In my opinion, Marketo put together an excellent guide that contains a majority of what you need to plan and deploy a top notch engaging email marketing program.

Remember: Tomorrow, check out the Digital Marketing Manager blog post, Social Media Wednesday, to find out more about the Coordinated Across Channels attribute mentioned above.

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough

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Potential Vendors to Assist Digital Marketing Managers Achieve Objectives

To help facilitate the Digital Marketing Manager’s job in creating superior experiences for customers, we hire multiple vendors to conduct multiple marketing functions for us, so we can concentrate on making sure our marketing programs are achieving objectives and increasing revenue.

Last weeks Salesforce.com Dreamforce 13 expo featured hundreds of vendors to assist marketing departments. Below you can learn about my visits with Adroll, DocuSign, Dropbox, ReliableCoders, and Twillo, and how they can assist digital marketing managers achieve objectives.

Two of many digital marketing objectives are to increase revenues for your ecommerce site and to attract potential customers to visit your website.  AdRoll can help Digital Marketing Mangers achieve both of these objectives. Adroll’s retargeting platform displays advertisements on the websites that potential customers visit after they left your site without making a purchase.

Each digital marketing effort has multiple components, and some components require a signature for approval. Providing an actual signature requires, you to print and sign a form, and then, you have to fax the form some where. With DocuSign, Digital Marketing Managers can provide their signature for approvals via desktops or smartphones allowing the launch of digital marketing efforts faster.

Dropbox may not provide a solution that directly assists you in reaching your objectives, but Dropbox allows you to access your files at anytime if you are working from a location other than the office. As the role of the Digital Marketing Manager evolves, we can’t always be at the office. Even though you may not be at the office, you can still access your files via Dropbox and work on your digital marketing efforts anywhere on any device.

Recently, I attended a San Francisco American Marketing Association, sfAMA, event where one of the panelists, Brian Solis, said that companies are creating mobile applications for smartphones to create superior customer experiences because companies mobile websites aren’t sufficient in meeting customers needs. Also, the starting point for many customers product research begins with a search on their smartphones indicating the importance for companies to have  functioning mobile websites or mobile applications. Digital Marketing Managers can hire ReliableCoders to create innovative mobile websites that enhance customer experiences. If your company chooses to go the mobile application route, ReliableCoders can also create mobile applications for your organization.

In our digital world, customers want to connect whenever or wherever. Twillo can assist your organization to provide the access your customers demand.  Twillo enables phone, VoIP, and SMS messaging to be embedded into web, desktops, and mobile software allowing customers to receive the access they want allowing you to provide customers with an excellent experience.

All of the vendors mentioned above can assist Digital Marketing Managers achieve objectives in a variety of ways. I hope you reach out to one or more of these vendors to help you create superior experiences for your customers and reach your objectives.

Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Reno, NV, to be with my family for Thanksgiving.  If time allows, I will write a post tomorrow about more exhibitors at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13, but if I’m not able to make a post tomorrow, please forgive me and visit the Digital Marketing Manager blog again.

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough