Social Email Marketing: Email for the Generations #SMMSF
This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. In this session, we learned how to use social tactics to trigger responses from the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials effectively.
I loved this presentation, not only because it was packed with useful marketing information, but also because I learned a bit about myself. I had no idea that I was Generation Y and not Generation X. I enjoyed hearing the characteristics of people in these generations and thinking about people I know who follow the characteristics to a T! The speaker was:
- Jennifer Neeley Lindsay, Host of The A-List on Blog Talk Radio (@jennifered)
Bullet Point Review!
- Characteristics of Millennials (born between 1977 and 1994):
- Real Time communication is key.
- Visually oriented.
- Need immediate gratification.
- Friends=family (they make decisions in groups).
- Share information they consider valuable easily.
- Most likely brand advocates.
- Empathetic.
- Calls to Action for Millennials:
- Prefer to share via text or Twitter.
- Impulse buyers.
- Will share deals as well as valuable content.
- Internet or mobile coupons are ideal.
- If you hit a sweet spot, they’ll create content for you.
- Characteristics of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1976):
- Time considered a precious commodity.
- Actively use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.
- Shop and price compare online.
- Use email and text interchangeably.
- Self reliant & individualistic.
- Mistrust institutions.
- Calls to Action for Gen X:
- More than 80% text or email deals.
- Reduce their pressures of everyday life.
- Communicate ways to keep kids engaged.
- Deliver quick hit info.
- Help with their work/life balance.
- Characteristics of Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964):
- They’re a squeeze generation, taking care of both their parents and their kids.
- 1/3 are actively online.
- Need to feel catered-to.
- Regular online shoppers and big spenders.
- Like spending recognition (rewards, points, etc.)
- Comfortable with email.
- Twitter is an untapped outlet.
- Calls to Action for Baby Boomers:
- Reach all of them.
- Cash back or savings programs.
- Up-sell areas of interest:
- Prescription medication
- Insurance
- Gifts for grandkids and kids
- Entertainment
- Travel
- Discount wines by the case
- Characteristics of the Greatest Generation (born before 1946):
- Value-oriented – want to discuss areas of interest.
- Spend most of their time online with email and message boards.
- Their Baby Boomer children influence their adoption of technology.
- Actually asking for more social features on their phones
- Calls to Action for the Greatest Generation:
- Emails & messages boards are good for targeted messages about senior discounts.
- Messages need to be in a large enough font size to be seen.
- Message about ways you cater to the age group.
There were some good questions after the presentation about the different email providers, such as AOL, Gmail, etc. She said that the different providers definitely cater to different generations with their levels of difficulty. Older folks tend to like the simplicity of things like AOL, wherase younger folks enjoy more optimization and personalization with Gmail. Link shorteners also matter – older generations are less likely to click a weird looking link (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc) whereas younger generations know what they are and are more likely to click.
Jennifer was kindly enough to put her awesome slideshow online, so check it out here:
Read MoreSocial Email Marketing: How to Use Rewards? #SMMSF
This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. Now that your email subject lines and user targeting have optimized your open rates, what’s next? In this session, Mani explored new ways to engage users with branded in-email polls, quizzes, social shares, and opt-ins.
I really got some good actionable tips from this session! I had never thought about some of this, though offering rewards and incentives for people to click through their emails seems like a no-brainer now. The speaker was:
Bullet Point Review!
- It’s a social world. It’s a real-time world.
- Smart email marketing engages users in their inbox.
- Remember your goals are to (1) Engage, (2) Qualify, (3) Convert.
- SMART Email Marketing
- Social
- Multi-channel
- Adaptive
- Real-time
- Template driven
- Increase user engagement with smart polls.
- Trigger social sharing with in-email smart quizzes.
- Social sharing jumped 33% when an incentive was offered.
- Keep polls and quizzes short, 3-5 questions.
Here’s Mani’s slide presentation:
Social Email Marketing: Concept of Email Social Media #SMMSF
This session was the keynote for the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact. The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. Unfortunately, I was a bit late and didn’t hear all of what Brian had to say, which is a shame. I know that he’s incredibly knowledgeable on this topic and I’ve heard him speak before and it was a treat. I did manage to take some notes for you though.
- Brian Solis, Principal, Futureworks (@BrianSolis)
Bullet Point Review!
- Content Context is King
- 1+1= Many
- Remember that ROI doesn’t mean Return on Ignorance.
- KISS = Keep it Simple Significant, Stupid & Sharable.
- You have to have a desired outcome and it has to be sharable.
- The new messaging value system:
- Connection
- Empathy
- Conversation
- Engagement
- Listening
- Adaptation
Overall, I wish I had more! But I have much more from the other speakers of that day. Stay tuned! Here’s Brian’s slide presentation:
Faces & Voices behind the Affiliate Nexus Tax Mistake
Recently I was asked to come to San Francisco and participate in shooting a video to help convince legislators here in California that passing a nexus tax law similar to those passed in New York, Rhode Island, and North Carolina would be detrimental to the state economy, rather than positive. Unfortunately I fell ill at the last minute and was unable to participate, but I recently see that the video the Performance Marketing Association put together is available online and really puts some faces to the issue.
I hope this will help legislators reconsider their views on the advertising tax and consider it’s impact on 25,000 small businesses here in California. Please take a look at the video and do what you can to share it. If you’re sharing on Twitter, please use the hashtag #noadtax.
They’ve already been thanked once, but I’ll send out another big thanks to those that spared their time and opened their offices to the shooting of this short video:
- Rebecca Madigan, Performance Marketing Association
- Loren Bendele, Savings.com
- Alan Gray, Newsblaze.com
- Kevin Johnson, Ebates.com
- David Lewis, Cashbaq.com
- Lisa Picarille, LisaPicarille.com
- Eva Rosenberg, TaxMama.com
- Brook Schaaf, Schaaf-Partnercentric
Performance Marketing Leadership Summit
On April 19th, the day before ad:tech SF 2010, OfferVault presented their Performance Marketing Leadership Summit, a half-day event featuring discussions on compliance, fraud, and transparency. This was one in a series of events presented by OfferVault focusing on improving the performance marketing industry. Big thanks to Jim Lilig and the folks at OfferValut for putting this event on for free, allowing anyone interested in joining the discussion to attend. This event was also co-sponsored by AffCon, OfferMobi, and DirectTrack.
I headed over to the city to go, and I’m glad I did. The afternoon was divided between two singular speakers and two panel discussions, end capped by lunch to start, drinks to end, and a break in the middle. Here are some highlights of information I took from the day’s thought leaders:
E.J Hilbert
President of Online Intelligence, Epic Advertising
- Compliance is a dirty word, some people think it always equals loss. Truth is, there is no true definition.
- Compliant traffic is actually a 15% increase in profit in the long run.
- Margins decrease initially because of the bad traffic.
- Whether or not we see what we do as spam, the rest of the world does – it’s due to a lack of understanding.
- Remember, to the general public, we’re guilty by association.
- Compliance seems to be a catch-all, referring to legal, network, advertiser, corporate, affiliates, etc. Perhaps it should just be legal and corporate and we can call everything else fraud.
- More traffic = more money.
- The most profitable cybercrime is spam.
- We can’t because they don’t – there’s not enough enforcement in the industry. We need to crack down.
- Many top media outlets are developing their own advertising platforms they can trust instead of utilizing the existing platforms we use.
- Partner with the advertisers, that’s where the money is, not with super affiliate A or B.
- There are 4 ways to deal with fraud: accept it, insure against it, mitigate against it, not accept it at all. We should not accept it at all.
- Top advertisers are the ones calling the shots, because they have the money.
- Watchdog groups are paying attention. If we don’t do something soon, others will. We don’t want that.
- Online advertising is mainstream.
- Sometimes the way we have to go isn’t the popular way, but it’s the right way.
Panel 1: What We Need To Do to Combat Fraud
Jason Spievak (RingRevenue), Brandon McDonald (Product2Web), Chris Graham (Atrinsic), Tom Cohn (Venable), & Carrie Birkner (Lashback)
- How often does a company do something when one of these outside agencies tells them about a problem? Fairly often, actually. They gets lots of flack from publishers if they don’t take action.
- A lot of the responsibility in combating fraud comes from the technologies, the networks.
- Many networks and managers are now taking the stance that if an affiliate isn’t going to be forthright about their methods, they’re out.
- In the industry, we don’t trust each other.
- Product2Web stops fraud at the cart level. Networks should force their advertisers to utilize this kind of tool.
- Longevity planning should be the new term for compliance.
- Most affiliates live in this world of cloak & dagger, so where’s the incentive to be transparent? They incentive should be in taking the high road.
- Part of a network or merchants positioning & branding should be that they watch things & enforce their guidelines.
- Affiliates are black hat or gray hat because it works. They’re looking at the short term money makers, not long term business planning.
Peter Borders
Founder & CEO, MediaTrust
- We have the chance to seize a tremendous long-term opportunity.
- Affiliate marketing harnesses the best of the best, and we continue to harness new channels.
- Direct response television (infomercial) industry is trying to get into affiliate marketing.
- Evolution from Mass Media to Me Media. The consumer used to be at the bottom of the funnel, and now they’re at the top.
- Consumer is king, and we need to empower them. The market should be driven by quality and lifetime value.
- Right now there is little innovation, minimal brand presence, and an “all for me, more for me” mentality. We need to evolve.
- What do we need to do? Share information and data, innovate, move up-market, and collaborate.
- We have to think holistically for the sake of the industry.
- We should help each other to set standards.
- We have to be an industry of problem solvers.
- If the whole industry goes up-market, we ALL win.
- It’s time to build collaboration and trust, and support agents of change.
Panel 2: The Road to Tier 1 Advertisers
Rebecca Madigan (Performance Marketing Association), Todd Crawford (Impact Radius), Theresa Farmer (UnsubCentral), Peter Klein (MediaWhiz), & Liz Wasserman (Mate 1)
- Big advertising agencies still don’t understand affiliate marketing.
- What do we need to do for tier 1? Educate – be transparent.
- Big brands, this should be sales. Agencies can’t guarantee the spend of budget in terms of performance marketing.
- It’s a much longer sales cycle with large agencies.
- People want stability and consistency, which is tricky with performance marketing.
- Is it possible, technologically’? There’s efficiencies when you automate that always allow you to make more money.
- Big brands don’t understand that with “performance” you’re getting branding for free.
- Brand reputation is a concern for big brands, so performance seems scary. But it goes both ways, you can also build a brand using performance marketing like Mate 1 did.
- We need to do a better job explaining the metrics to agencies. They need to understand that there’s two types of advertising – performance and branding. And often there is some overlap.
- There’s a kind of lethal nihilism. Outside impressions of the industry is that we’re “a little shady & quasi criminal” and people don’t want to get involved (great quote by Liz there!)
- This gets perpetuated by smaller, CPA type folks that are looking for short term gains and give the rest of us a bad rap.
- Self-regulating isn’t going to work because there’s always a few folks willing to break the rules for a quick buck.
- Advertisers worry about negative brand impact and are worried about consumer respect.
- We don’t bring the consumer into the equation enough.
- Merchants need to focus on moving up-stream.
- It should be a goal to really be able to understand the lifetime value of a customer.
Advertiser-Sponsored Online Game Tournaments on PCHGames.com
While this is nothing new (ad-sponsored games), this tournament is an exciting twist on the old idea.
Publishers Clearing House (PCH) today announced at Ad-Tech San Francisco the introduction of advertiser-sponsored tournaments for free online games on PCHGames.com. Sponsorship exposes a brand to more than eight million targeted loyal PCH site visitors and drives an estimated 200,000 potential customers per tournament to an advertiser’s Web site. Tournament games include Mahjongg and Solitaire, which are two of the most popular games online and on PCHGames.com. In February 2010 PCHGames.com had 16 million game plays, 1.6 million unique visitors, 5 million visits and 28.8 million page views. Tournaments are developed in conjunction with casual game developer Arkadium.
The next tournament, Mom-Jongg, a Mother’s Day inspired version of the popular Mah-Jongg classic tile game, is taking place on April 28th and includes cash prizes of $1,000, $500 and $250. In addition, the top 25 scorers will earn 1,000 tokens, which can be used to win prizes including Amazon and Walmart gift cards or entries into PCH sweepstakes.
“PCHGames.com site visitors are highly motivated and engaged, especially when they have a chance to win cash just for logging on and playing their favorite games,” said Josh Glantz, vice president and general manager of PCH Online. “During the last tournament there were more than 540,000 games played in 24 hours. As the popularity of these tournaments increases the number of free online game plays continues to rise and ultimately makes this a very successful program for sponsoring advertisers.”
The advertiser-sponsored tournaments present a number of opportunities for brand messages and offers to be communicated throughout PCH’s stable portfolio of online properties, as well as through the company’s opt-in database of email subscribers. In addition to the customized tournament landing page sponsors also receive takeover ads, featured placement on the homepage of PCHGames.com, banner ads throughout the network, pre-roll and post-roll ads before the game begins and when it ends, custom tournament and partner emails and much more.
“Our online game tournaments provide a great way for advertisers to reach a targeted audience with multiple touch points at a time when they are engaged and hoping to win big,” said Michael Zane, director of online marketing at Publishers Clearing House. “Our team at PCHGames.com works closely with participating advertisers to obtain artwork and messaging, and then manages the tournament in its entirety. It’s a simple process that results in an entertaining and rewarding experience for those who play, as well as a great marketing success story for participating brands.”
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