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Email Campaigns, RSS Feeds and Blogs - Page 5 of 9

Email


Email marketing helps you to stay in touch with your customers, potential customers and others interested in learning more about your area of expertise. On any given day, about 52% of American Internet users are sending and receiving email, according to the Online Activities and Pursuits Report from the Pew/Internet and American Life Project. The use of email as a communication tool still remains dominant in the marketplace for communicating directly with your audiences.

Things to think about when setting up an email campaign:
  • Does your audience prefer to get information via email?
  • Do you have a strong house list? This is usually the best source of information for sending email to your targeted audience. If not, where are you getting your list? If you don’t use a house list you will probably have more unreads/deleted emails.
  • How often are you sending the email? Really think about this one. How often will you have fresh, new content that users will be interested in reading?
  • Who is in charge of the content and making sure that it gets out on a timely basis? This is very important, especially if your users sign up for a weekly, monthly, quarterly newsletter. If the user expects it and doesn’t receive it, your brand will suffer and you may get many unhappy emails asking where the email is.
  • What content will you be sending out? Where will this information come from? Will you be sending a tips email, a case studies email, an email from the trenches? There may be one or more content variations that you send to your individual lists depending on their specific interests.
  • How many different lists are you sending to? You may be sending an email to customers or to potential customers or to media. Or your lists may all go to customers but be segmented into different areas of your business.
  • Will a user be able to choose which list to subscribe to?
  • What format do you want the email to be in? Do your users like HTML or text? What kind of information are you sending? Do you need pictures to entice the user to click for more or is your audience more analytical – “Just the facts, ma’am” kind of people?
  • How will the user opt-in/opt-out of the list? On the email certainly, but can a user sign up on your website?
  • Will you have a landing page with more information?
With increasingly tighter controls to block spammers, it has become harder and harder to reach inboxes with bulk emails. AOL recently tightened the enforcement of its 10 percent bounce rate and 0.1 percent complaint rate target thresholds. Email servers are getting bombarded with spam. In an effort to combat this, we are seeing increasing numbers of opt-in emails never getting to the in box of the subscriber. Email clients let you put on your own controls about what can come in or not come in. A marketer needs to consider all these items when putting together an email campaign.

RSS feeds


RSS feeds are rapidly becoming a popular way to reach your target audiences. About 10% of the Internet audiences are using these now as a way of receiving news and information.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – this means that you can create and publish information easily and simply to a group of subscribers. The information is timely and pertinent because RSS makes it easy to publish and send to your audience. Receivers of an RSS feed have requested this feed because they are interested in receiving your information so your message is expected and welcomed. No longer does your audience have to wait for an email newsletter (which may or may not get to them as SPAM filters become more and more stringent).

There are numerous ways you can use RSS feeds and the potential to do great things with them is definitely there. Think of RSS as the way to keep your constituents updated on what is happening on your site or in your industry. Some uses for RSS include (but are not limited to): news about your company, new products, tech specs, job openings, articles, press releases, updates on products, industry news, stock prices, and more.

Some questions to get you started on the best way to use RSS feeds are:
  • Who do you want to target with RSS feeds? RSS feeds are great for the media and those technically savvy and information-centric audiences. Use your research to determine if this is the right vehicle for you. It may or may not be at this time but keep it in mind for the future as it grows in popularity.
  • Is your content changing on a weekly or daily basis so your RSS feeds will be updated frequently.
  • What content will you publish in the feeds?
  • Who will update the feeds?


Blogs


In the first quarter of 2005, nearly 50 million Americans, or about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited Web logs (blogs,) according to an August report by comScore Networks – a 45 percent increase from first quarter 2004.

Blogs are a great way to build community among your audiences. Blogs let you talk to your audiences about things that interest them. You can center your blog around a product or service and give your company a voice. Blogs have been used to market new products (by giving them a personality, build brands, address customer concerns and give companies a voice and tone.

Blogs are also hitting the mainstream – you can find links to them in the search engines – and they are great tools for building unique content on your site.

To create an effective blog, you need to think about the following:
  • Who is the voice of the blog? What kind of voice/personality do you want your blog to have? Do you have someone suitable internally?
  • How often will you update the blog? Make sure your voice(s) have the time set aside in their work schedule to be the blog representative.
  • What are the rules for what the blogger can say in this open forum? Companies should set policies if the blog is associated with a company so that all bloggers within the company know what to say.




 

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