Many names come to mind when you mention the name Crystal Palace Football Club. Sansom, Hilaire, Wright, Bright, Johnson, Coppell. And now, dotMailer.

That last one is a recent addition to the list but get used to it – this season dotMailer is proud to announce its sponsorship of Edgar Davids’ away kit. Why the away kit? Well, because it’s the best and one most famous looking kits in football of course!

With those ever present orange goggles, there’s something of the digital about Edgar as it is, so he seems the perfect match for what the dotDigital group (and blog) is all about.  Edgar is also one of the most socially connected footballers you’re likely to find on the web, constantly tweeting and replying to fans.

Indeed, in reaction to Crystal Palace’s recent financial woes, some of the fans tweeted to Edgar to see if they could bring him on board to help. Not only did he call his own 11,000 followers to support the club but ultimately sign up on a pay by play basis, making his debut last night.

While his arrival didn’t herald the showering of glory that Palace needed, it’s still evidence of what can be achieved through social networks and we’re very happy to be associated with the whole phenomenon.  The question is, can this performance be replicated by other teams and will it become an influencer in the future?

Will we see email marketing campaigns attempting to motivate supporters to put such pressure on players? Time will tell, but in the meantime, keep an eye on our man Edgar- we look forward to watching him focus his two big orange eyes on the ball.

P.S. For a limited time only, the phrase EAGLES will get you a discount on your dotMailer order. Give it a try!

Certain dates stick out in the mind. November the 5th perhaps or the 4^th of July.  But until yesterday, 5 July 2010 wasn’t on the list for many people.

Until, that is, some bright spark on Twitter published the following:

Attracting hundreds of status updates, retweets and (in our case) emails, the little mote of trivia took the internet by storm.

Except, some bright spark soon pulled the rug out from under the furore by identifying that the date they travelled to would actually have been 26 October 2010. What’s more, Marty ends up going to the day Doc invented the Flux capacitor instead, thanks to a pickup truck full of angry terrorists.

If this wasn’t already complicated enough, Total Film then released a mockup of what the DeLorean’s time travel panel would have looked like if they had travelled to 5 July 2010 (below).

Predictably, this produced a second wave of misunderstanding, buffeted by an irate backlash from those who were angry enough at its inaccuracy the first time round.  What’s interesting is that a very simple but attractive idea was able to go viral not once but twice on the basis of that simplicity.  It’s a timely reminder that sometimes less is more.

For those keen Back to the Future fans out there, the date you might really want to add to your calendar is 21 October 2015, or the day that Marty arrives in the future in the second film. Until then, we’ll leave you with the sage advice that remains true throughout time; don’t believe everything you read on the internet…

Social media is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry. But social media does not work well in isolation. By integrating your social media activity with your email marketing, you can improve the effectiveness and results from both disciplines, bringing outstanding bottom-line results.

Unfortunately many marketers just aren’t taking this on board. In fact, our recent Hitting the Mark study found that only 17% of email marketers from the UK’s top retailers included social media sharing links in their emails (read the full report here).

Here are my seven top tips to better integrating email and social media marketing:

1. Include ‘share on social network’ links in your email messages – chances are, your email recipients will have many like-minded friends on social networks that could also be potential customers. Encourage them to share your email content with their friends by including ‘sharing’ links in your email newsletters.

2. Encourage social media ‘followers’ and ‘fans’ to sign-up to your email newsletters – the reverse is also true: you probably have lots of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook that would be interested in receiving your email newsletters. Have you asked them? If not, why not!

3. Use blog posts as content for email newsletters – by using your blog posts in your email newsletters, you not only have a great source of wonderful content, you also raise the profile of your blog and encourage your recipients to check it out!

4. Add social network ‘subscribe’ buttons to your email messages – if recipients like the content in your newsletter, then they are likely to be potentially interested in following you on social networks too, so make it easy for them

5. Ask for social media details during sign-up – you ask for a range of contact information when recipients sign-up to receive information from you. So why not ask for their social network details as well? And if they give them to you, make sure you follow them and add them to your CRM database.

6. Use metrics from email campaigns to identify most popular social networks – your email platform should be able to give you a range of metrics, allowing you to see which of your recipients added your content to which social networks. This will give you very valuable information relating to the social networks that are the most popular, helping you to focus future activity.

7. Ask for feedback – stuck for content for your next newsletter or just keen to get some reaction to your latest email? Why not ask your community on social media? Get them more involved and make them feel part of the process.

Have you tried any of these? Are there other tactics you find work well? Let us know in the comments!

Why not follow Tink and/or dotMailer on Twitter!

In order for social media to be ‘social’ it needs be driven by ‘engagement’. It should drive conversation, customer feedback and thereby develop customer loyalty. However a recent study by US-based ForeSee Results suggests that all customers really want is information about sales and new products.

The research paper, which focuses on the top e-retail sites in the UK surveyed over 10,000 retailer visitors to measure their purchase intent, loyalty and recommendations.

ForeSee’s VP of Retail Strategy, Kevin Ertell, reveals, “what surprised us most was how many customers say they really wanted to hear about sales and products.”

Victoria’s balancing secret

So what is the answer? Victoria’s Secret seems to have struck the right balance between promotion and engagement. The ForeSee study found that 40% of those who follow their favorite retail brands through social media want to hear about deals, and 54% want to see products. Customer support was only a prominent issue for 6% of users.

Victoria’s Secret has close to three million Facebook followers and a quick look on its fan page shows that it’s largely driven by new product launches and events, as well as playing host to an active discussion forum.

Ertell suggests that “the most satisfied and loyal customers are seeking out their favorite stores’ pages, and then if those experiences are rewarding, they become even more loyal.” It’s quite clear then that a mixture of new products and special offers, supported by a sense of engagement is crucial for the social shopper.

Is Facebook the key for retailers?

The ForeSee study tells us the most important social media tool is by far and away Facebook. A staggering 81% of online shoppers who use social media regularly use Facebook compared to Twitter’s 12%. Ironically, our recent soCommerce study found that more brands are using Twitter as their online presence (26%) rather than Facebook (24%).

What’s also interesting with the ForeSee research is that the 74% of those who friend, follow or subscribe to a store will follow less than five brands, suggesting that social media users are highly selective of the brands that they do follow. Take it with a pinch of salt, but it suggests that if a person is following you then they are likely to be a big fan and an influential customer.

A major ecommerce solutions benchmark research report published last month by dotCommerce found that of the 100 online retailers sampled, only 26% had a Twitter account – slightly more than the number that had Facebook accounts (24%).

What’s more, of those with a Twitter account, only 23% provided a link to the account on their website (all those who did were larger retailers).

So it looks like in many cases online retailers and marketers are proving slow if not reluctant to build Twitter into their marketing mix.

Our Star Example

Check out the eSpares Twitter account for a great example of how a retailer can build up a following and really connect with its customers and prospects in a natural and engaging way.

The tweets are a mixture of offers, competitions, product information, customer service, and general advice and chit chat.

This approach helps to create a human face for the brand and keep followers engaged. The result is a follower base of over 761 to date – not bad for a retailer selling spare parts!

Top 10 tips for retailers using Twitter:

1. Make sure you register your brand name ASAP! – with the popularity of Twitter increasing at a phenomenal rate, it’s vital to claim your ID before someone else gets in first.

2. Write a biography – think carefully about what you want to write in the biography section; this is your opportunity to sell yourself.

3. Add your logo and design a background – creating a customer Twitter background and featuring your branding and logo will help to strengthen your online identity and encourage recognition in the busy Twitter ‘market place’.

4. Use hash tags in your tweets – users can track tagged keywords (eg #iPad), so if you use a relevant tag that is trending you will increase the likelihood of people coming across your content.

5. Encourage ‘retweeting’– getting your followers to retweet your posts is a great way to spread your influence. Keep your tweets short and engaging to maximise retweet potential and don’t be afraid to ask followers to retweet a post.

6. Engage – rather than using Twitter solely as a broadcast tool, don’t be afraid to engage with followers.

7. Use @replies to respond publicly (this will notify the original poster of your response and thread it so other users can follow the conversation), or direct messaging to respond to something privately, for example if you receive a complaint or query about a specific order.

8. Get ready for customer service enquiries – it’s highly likely you will be contacted via Twitter with customer service questions. These shouldn’t be ignored. Be prepared for your reader to tell you how best to communicate with them.

9. Special offers work – Dell generated $6.5m of revenue on Twitter alone by using offers! We all love a discount and what better way to spread the news of your offer than on a social network.

10. Be generous – retweet or comment on tweets by other people and show them you’re not just interested in what your brand has to say.

11. Monitor – make sure you monitor what tweeters are saying about your brand or your industry so you can pick up the positives and negatives and handle them effectively. Twitter search or Tweetbeep are great applications for this.

And a word of caution…

Be aware of Twitter ‘follow bots’ – some companies use bots to automatically follow users (sometimes randomly, sometimes targeted to demographic data or use of key words) in the hope that users will follow them back.

This may have some small value in increasing your base of followers, but is seen as annoying and intrusive by most users and may earn you a poor reputation.

Click here to download your copy of the full 25 page social media in ecommerce solutions report.

Research published by Experian shows that email marketing messages shared through social networking links deliver, on average, 5 times more forwards than an email with just a single ‘forward to a friend’ link.

That’s a significant uplift, and it’s crystal clear that integrating social media into email campaigns is something we should all be doing.

But how can you make sure you’re taking advantage of that additional 24.3% reach that social media can potentially deliver?

Follow these 5 golden rules to help maximise the social network ’shareability’ of your email campaigns:

No 1 – Know the networks that your contacts and target market use

There’s no point linking your email to LinkedIn if your target market love Digg! Take some time to research the social networking habits and preferences of your target market. If in doubt, put a short online survey together, and ask them how they use social media.

No 2 – Keep your messages simple

Remember, a complicated message will not be understood, read and definitely not shared! Keep the proposition in your email campaign a single-minded and understandable one.

No 3 – Talk to your tribes

Identify the different groups within your customer base and learn what motivates them and what makes them different from each other. Again, online surveys can help to build the picture and profiles you need.

Address these motivators in your targeted email content, to create compelling and ‘group specific’ content that was just made for social media sharing. If your message isn’t relevant, it wont be shared.

No 4 – Give your recipients a reason to share

Ask yourself, why would someone want to share your email? Does your message add value to the recipient and their friends or colleagues? Will posting your email give them kudos? Or do you have a competition or promotion for people to enter? If there’s no value to share, then you’re starting out on a weak footing.

No 5 – Make it easy for recipients to post your email and for new readers to signup

Include prominent social network links in your email template. Use dotMailer’s Add to Social Networks link to quickly choose which social networks to feature. And dont forget to include a prominent link to your subscriber page so new readers can sign up to your email list and help to build your database with relevant, engaged prospects.

We recently conducted a survey of dotMailer email marketing clients to find out how their use of email marketing is changing.

Not entirely surprisingly, our research showed that companies are planning to send out more email marketing messages in 2010 than they did in 2009.

But with increased volume, how will email marketers set their campaigns apart?

Here are 6 key areas that email marketers should focus on this year, for email marketing success in 2010:

1. More focus on relevancy

In 2009, the fact that relevant emails get results really seems to have hit home with most marketers.

From speaking with email marketers at recent events, I can see many are still unsure how to best focus their emails on relevancy and take advantage of the (often very powerful) software available to help them. There’s no rocket science here, but we need a commitment from the industry to focus on best practices this year.

Our system reporting tools show us that there has been a significant increase in usage of our advanced Enterprise features (such as external dynamic content,  segmentation queries, behavioural queries and graphical queries).

Our customers are using these tools to ‘narrow cast’ and target their customer bases much more intelligently and effectively.

2. ROI not click-throughs

As the recession crashed into our working lives in 2009, the focus suddenly turned to making money and, from a marketer’s viewpoint, to ROI.

For email marketing the click-through metric may became almost obsolete with boards only wanting to hear about the outcome metrics (See Skips article in the EMC’s info box: http://2008.dma.org.uk/_attachments/resources/5776_S4.html)

It’s a wise move as we should all be more accountable for how our efforts are meeting business goals. In 2010, with budgets still under strain, proving ROI will continue to be a key focus area for marketers.

However, we must also educate those board level execs and convince them that email marketing value is not only delivered through sales figures.

We hope that more email marketers will consider conversions, data and information collected in their ROI calculations.

We’ll be working on some tools this year that will help those in marketing translate the marketing metrics into C-level figures.

3. Relevant, personalised content

Just as our sending habits have changed in the last year, so have the expectations of our recipients. Personalised emails with dynamic content are now commonplace and will be increasingly expected by recipients.

The challenge in 2010 for many marketers will be justifying the time and money spent on personalising emails or segmenting campaigns. We hope that a reworked definition and better understanding of ROI (see above) can help justify these highly effective campaigns.

4. Social, social, social

Social media was the phrase on everyone’s lips in 2009 and expect 2010 to feature more of the same!

More email marketers will be linking and including social media elements in their campaigns. Hopefully 2010 will finally prove that social media is not the death of email, but that is in another complimentary and integratable channel.

5. Rich data collection

Whilst buying quality lists can be a useful way to build a distribution list, response rates have consistently shown that data collected directly is more responsive.

Because of that, data collection should also be seen as another ROI consideration.

In 2010, our clients have said they’ll be looking at ways to collect data themselves through viral campaigns and buying traffic via search – both natural and PPC.

6. Delivery depends on the data

ESPs always brag about their deliverability records and experience. What we must also remember is that deliverability is hugely dependant on the quality of the data you’re sending to.

In 2010 the focus will be on quality not quantity. We’ll see email marketers looking again at their data sources and ensuring data is up-to-date and all recipients have opted-in.

In doing so, they will maximise open rates and in turn maximise the likelihood of a recipient following a call to action.

We are all spending an increasing amount of time reading blogs and participating on social networks. Research from Nielsen shows that globally, we spent 82% more time on social networks like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook in December 2009 than we did at the same time a year before.

This increased interest offers great potential for marketers; by tapping into social communities you are geared up to reach a wide new audience through one of the most effective marketing tools – peer recommendations.

Email marketing provides you with a fantastic way to tap into your recipients social networks, but it won’t happen on its own. We’ve picked out four top tips on how to use your email marketing to encourage social sharing:

• Add sharing links – ‘Share this’ buttons have become common on most web content, so make sure you add them to your emails too! They allow readers to quickly and easily share material they find interesting with their social circle. Indeed, a recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that including sharing buttons on an email marketing message produced a 25% boost in reader interaction and a surge in inbound traffic from social networks
• Publicise your newsletter to social communities – When you send out your email newsletter, why not post the link to the web version on your Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook account. This will encourage your followers to read the message and, if you have a prominent ‘subscribe’ link in the email itself, they might even sign up
• Add a ‘follow us on Twitter’ link – As well as giving recipients the option to share newsletter content, make sure you publicise your social network accounts so that recipients that aren’t following you on Twitter for example can have the option to add you. This will help you deepen the relationship and will make it more likely that they will share future content with their network
• Encourage social media interactions – Where possible, try and encourage recipients to take actions on social networks. For example, could you use your email message to invite feedback on your latest product via Twitter or on Facebook. Or why not encourage your customers to submit pictures of them using your products on Flickr?

By creating a link between your social media marketing and your outreach via email, you can begin to join the dots between your separate strategies and use both forms of communication to support and increase customer retention and acquisition.

picture credit

Google Wave launched earlier this month and the surge of anticipation that followed the initial unveiling of the new product in May (see above), only seems to be growing.

Google Wave is a new platform, which the media are calling ‘email 2.0’. Some are even going as far to say this could be the ‘end of email’.

Of course, we’ve heard this all before. Last time it was social media that was going to end email, now its Google Wave, tomorrow it’ll be something else…

But social media didn’t kill email – it’s just another channel and, if anything, smart marketers have developed ways to integrate social media and email to great effect.

Google Wave will be the same. The platform integrates a number of commonly used applications – word processing, spreadsheets, slide presentations, email, real-time live chat and broadcast web conferencing, with a very slick user interface. It’s a great collaboration of collaboration tools and marks a major turning point in the development of communication technologies.

For the many brands beginning to experiment with networks like Twitter, this will be a natural development to their existing marketing strategies, and help them justify why Twitter is important!

But email will not disappear, even if Google Wave gains major traction (and it is way too early to tell whether it will). For marketers, email will continue to be key to their strategies, the same rules will still apply, and the same techniques will still work.

In fact, the good news is that – if Google Wave does take off – email as a technology could experience something of a rebirth, making it more popular than ever and used more frequently.

Brands should also be able to increase real-time interactions with recipients, bringing more social media and 2.0 elements to traditional email marketing.

Whatever happens with Google Wave, you can be sure that we will be on top of developments and the first to communicate best practice techniques to our customers. So, stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you get a beta account do please let us know what you think.

by Tink Taylor