Recently I attended the EIS or Email Insider Summit in Park City, UT. The EIS is a convergence of thought leadership among branded senders and industry experts, which lends itself to fantastic sessions and great conversions around the future of email. Given the tremendous value of information shared I am a regular attendee. I came away with over fourteen pages of notes, but wanted to share the two biggest takeaways from the summit here on the Bronto Blog, the intersection of:
- Email and Social
- Email and Mobile
Email and Social
More and more we’re hearing about the intersection of email and social. So the panel “Email-Social Integration 3.0” addressed it means for email marketers. The marriage of email and social will soon be much more than just SWYN (Share with your network). According to Chad White, this year 26% of top online retailers used SWYN links, and it’s estimated that in 2011 50% of retailers will be utilizing this feature. SWYN is being viewed as a basic email/social tactic. In 2011, there will be many more, complex applications bringing these two channels together.
In 2011 you will see more email marketers pulling tweets and wall posts into their email campaigns. I’d recommend only pulling selected, relevant tweets vs. a live feed. The value of this tactic is to bring user driven content in your campaigns. This helps feature key clients or supporters but also promotes email subscribers to really dig into their emails to see if they were featured. Yelp does a great job of this by selecting reviews to feature in their campaigns, subscribers get value from the shortened reviews but are also on the look out to see if their reviews were selected.
Another way email and social can meet is through Location-Based Marketing (LBM). In 2011, we’re anticipating that more and more email campaigns will spur a subscriber to check-in when visiting a physical location . Giving subscribers an incentive to check-in and then using their check-in data to further market to them (What did they buy? Did you receive any other demographic data?) really brings the social/email channels together closer than they’ve ever been before.
Then there’s Facebook. Dingo was mentioned on this panel as having a great email campaign that was used to incite their fans to attract new fans. If they met the challenge by bringing on a new fan, they were rewarded with a coupon. This example exemplifies the power of the email channel and how you can grow your social network through existing email subscribers. But don’t put too much weight on the benefits of social over email. Email is a critical component to keeping your communities in touch with your brand. Social is also important but bonds formed on social networks can disintegrate quickly if they lack strong brand affinity. If fans know, like, and trust your brand, they’ll be an advocate. Therefore you need to keep reinforcing the importance of following your brand on Facebook or Twitter by providing valuable content/deals. Just like email marketing, if you don’t have a compelling message, a killer deal, or value in what you’re saying, open/clicks will drop. The same with social networks like Facebook and Twitter – you have to continue funneling great information to keep fans coming back for more. Just take for example the success of Bronto’s clients promoting their Facebook page to email subscribers.
Email and Mobile
It’s no surprise that mobile is a hot topic in the industry and was heavily discussed at EIS. A great quote from Justine Jordan of Litmus App on the panel “Why You Need to Be Concerned About Mobile – And What You Can Do,” is that last year more people had cell phones than tooth brushes. New phones/devices are coming out at a very rapid pace, so with this changing environment how to marketers keep up? The opportunity for mobile presents itself as a junction point for other channels. In the panel there was an example of a Facebook page advertisement projected on a movie theater screen before the movie began, the page boasted additional content on the movie. This provides a great opportunity to get people connected to Facebook with mobile as the junction point while they’re hot, when they’re waiting and excited to see the movie. So what’s really “powering” mobile is the context, relevant experiences, and the end user experience, sound familiar?
For email marketers the discussion around optimization for mobile is that if you are able to segment out mobile users and design specifically for mobile, you are definitely ahead of the curve. Overall however, there is a movement to slim down content to help optimize for mobile, but is also a great practice for email marketing – think about some emails that go on long before the fold, are you scrolling the whole way down?
Keep in mind the “less is more” principle which is definitely seeing a resurgence in both email and mobile. Keep in mind for 2011 that every marketer should know their audience breakdown and develop a marketing plan that integrates all channels into a cohesive marketing strategy. This would be a great New Year’s Resolution/Goal – start planning.
I hope this has given you some insight into the Summit, but I’m just skimming the surface. Please comment below if you would like further explanation on any of the points from this post.
Carolyn Sparano
VP, Client Services
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