Dec. 5 – Email is the frosting to your gingerbread house

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Gingerbread house
Photo Credit: Wendy Copley

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Email Marketing is still so important

2009 has been the year Social Media just seemed to take over. We all love new toys and seeing how they work. Please don’t think that makes your old favorite toys any less useful (Velveteen Rabbit anyone?).

Every social networking site is tied to an email address. For many of those sites, a new update or subscriber on a site generates an email alert reminding you to go back and see the most recent activity. Our businesses are run with emails. Sales leads are usually forms filled out on your site, which generate an email. Everything we do online is held together with email.

Our friend Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory calls email the “Digital Glue.” Email is the driver of all things we tend to do in business. It is the staple of all online marketing. When you are building a gingerbread house you essentially have some cookie planks and cool colored candy. The frosting is what holds the whole thing together! Don’t overlook how important email is because it is the one piece that hold all of your online marketing together.

Want some more from Greg?
Check out this video too on merging your email marketing with social media:

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

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Why Campaign Tagging is Important for Email Marketing

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Campaign Tagging is a great way to track results of your your Email Marketing efforts within Google Analytics. By tagging your links, you gain a broader, more full picture of what people do on your site after they “clickthrough” a link in an email.

What are tagged links?

Tagged links are the links within your newsletter that have been assigned a unique “tag” that will register within your Google Analytics account. There are three required (*) unique parameters that you modify for each link within the email campaign, and two optional parameters that you can use to further filter the reports.

They are:

  1. Campaign Name*
  2. Campaign Source*
  3. Campaign Medium*
  4. Campaign Term
  5. Campaign Content

* Required

The Campaign Name is the name of the email marketing campaign. This should be unique for every email that you deliver so that you can later review and compare the analytics data.

The Campaign Source identifies who distributed your email newsletter. You can use the name of your email newsletter or the name of the provider, depending on how complex your email marketing efforts are.

The Campaign Medium is simply ‘email.’

The Campaign Term can be used if you are targeting certain terms – if your Campaign Medium is PPC, for example.

The Campaign Content can be used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.

So now that you have the basic understanding of what Campaign Tags are, here’s how to use them. Google has a URL Builder that generates the Campaign Tags for you. You then use these tags in place of the original URL’s within your email.

Example:

Say I wanted to link back to our home page from within a newsletter.  I would use the URL http://www.hallme.com/. In order to integrate this URL within analytics, we would use the URL Builder to generate the new link.

We’ll use “Campaign Tagging” as the Campaign Name, “Hall” as the Campaign Source and “Email” as the Campaign Medium.

Google URL Builder

This is how the new link appears:
http://www.hallme.com/?utm_source=HALL&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Campaign%2BTagging

Once this link has been added to the newsletter and delivered to an inbox, if it is clicked, it triggers a page view in Google Analytics and shows the referring source as HALL (the name of the campaign we selected).

This is important for a number of reasons. Without tagging your links, you may see a spike in visitors coming to your site after delivering a newsletter. But how do you distinguish which of those visitors are a result of your newsletter? You don’t.

Also, analytics treats links from within a newsletter as Direct Traffic. Direct Traffic is the number of times visitors came to your site using a link they have either saved in their favorites, bookmarks or from within a newsletter. Campaign Tagging is essentially segmenting this data so that you can better understand the performance of your newsletters.

In order to access this data from with Google Analytics, log into your account.

View Reports
View Reports
View Traffic Sources
View Reports
View Campaigns
View Reports
View Dimensions
View Reports

So now that you have the basics for integrating your email marketing campaigns with your analytics accounts, you’ll better understand the behaviors of your target audience and see actual data generated from your newsletters reflected within your website analytics.

Why Image Only Newsletters Are Bad: 3 Steps For Success

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Why Image Only Newsletters Are Bad: 3 Steps For SuccessI’ve seen it so many times, (well technically I didn’t “see” anything at all): a newsletter arrives in my inbox, and, since I don’t load HTML images automatically, all I is see is blank space or maybe a couple big red “X’s”… I know who the newsletter is from but without loading any of the images I have no idea what their offer is.

There are a lot of savvy people out there who like to take the wheel and direct their own Email Marketing initiatives. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t take the necessary steps you’re probably just wasting your time.

Here are three important steps one should consider when drafting up a newsletter:

  1. Never use an image to deliver all your content: if your whole offer is drafted as an image and your recipient does not allow HTML emails, well you’re out of luck. The best advise is to “recreate” your image using an HTML editor so that any and all text elements render as text. (see fig. 1)
  2. If images are necessary use ALT Tags: make sure you utilize ALT tags and don’t describe the image, describe the content you are promoting. If your images don’t display in your recipient’s inbox, they still see or “read” the content that was intended for them. (see fig. 2)
  3. Test your newsletters in different email accounts: If you’re not testing your newsletters in different email accounts, i.e. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, then as stated above, you’re out of luck. There are so many elements within a newsletter that look perfect when you’re drafting it but not so perfect when viewed in different accounts. The solution? Test test test…

Fig. 1

This is an example of an image only newsletter with NO ALT Text:

An example of an image only newsletter with no ALT text

Fig. 2

Although this is an image only newsletter, the designers used ALT text in a very creative way.

Describing their offers so that you still get the details without loading any of the images:

An example of good ALT text usage in a newsletter

If you absolutely have to take the wheel and create your own newsletters, following these simple steps will definitely give you a good start in the right direction.

For more helpful hints, or to talk about how Hall can help with your Email Marketing initiatives, leave a comment or contact me directly!

Email Marketing is an Important Part of Inbound Marketing

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Email marketing as part of your Inbound MarketingAs I mentioned before, Inbound Marketing is the term for the types of marketing efforts where you are being found by consumers when they are researching information. With that said I have seen more than a few ears perk up when I mention email marketing as a part of one’s Inbound Marketing strategy. “But email is actually going OUT how is it a part of INbound marketing?”.

A few things:

  • How did you build your email list?
    If someone is searching for an answer, solution or product online and they stumble across your website (due to your website’s original content and Search Engine Optimization),  decide you are a thought leader in this field and sign up for your newsletter using the user conversion piece on said landing page – then that is Inbound Marketing.If you build your list at conferences, meetings, your show room etc. with genuine people who are interested in receiving more information about your products and value those emails from you, that is also Inbound Marketing.
  • Do you segment your lists? Are your loyal customers in one group, prospects in another, those who have previously forwarded your email to a friend in yet another? If so, you show that you care about each group and the specific things they bring to your business. For example 5-10% of Lego’s are sold to adults or AFOLs (adult fans of Legos). As a company, Lego’s has segmented information for this group and promoted brand evangelists to spread the message of this group. How would this group feel if they were lumped in with the millions of generic Legos fans? Probably not as passionate as they are now.
    By segmenting your lists you can tailor your content to reach each group accordingly promoting that conversational tone of each email piece.
  • What content do you deliver in your email marketing campaign?
    Are your newsletters strictly about your products and maybe a few sales and specials you are offering? Then maybe that isn’t Inbound Marketing. But, if you are delivering engaging content on content that your subscriber is looking for and pushing that lead back to your website, that is considered Inbound Marketing.
  • What results do you want from an email marketing campaign?
    If you are hoping your emails will start a conversation, provoke a question or a follow up email then you are participating in Inbound Marketing. If you just hope to shout out your latest and greatest product and you feel burdened by any responses to your email then perhaps this isn’t a part of an Inbound Marketing initiative.

Those are a few examples of how email marketing is a part of your overall Inbound Marketing plan. The main thing is that it isn’t about the tool (Twitter, email, Facebook, LinkedIn) as much is it is about the tone, the content, the relationship and how that information is shared with your audience. Inbound Marketing is producing good quality content that consumers will be able to find when they are looking for more information, products, services etc.