Mind your mailing list: Winning the battle of the brain with your marketing message

A Hippocampus certainly has more meaning to us as a species than just being an academic institution for large, river-dwelling herbivores. Actually that last part is purely fancy. This polysyllabic whatsit is in fact a crucial component of the human brain and plays an important role in the drawing and recording of information from short term memory to long term memory. It is this small shaft of grey matter that holds the ultimate cognitive power over whether your newsletter sends are read as being relevant in the colourful chemistry of a consumer's mind.

The internet is giddy with studies and top tips about people's daily habits, spending impulses, demographics, cultural dependencies, complexes and more or less every other imaginable domestic and social element that can (in whatever way) be tied to how and why we opt for a certain brand/service/product over another. But, strangely, not much has been put into print about what our own bodies have to say about all this. So at the risk of sounding somewhat self-promoting, clearly, this is the stuff of digital pioneers.

During the last decade, bulk email communications and social networking technology has had a marked influence on the scale of which people share information, and has greatly increased our ease of connectivity. It is common for Facebook and Twitter users to have thousands of followers/fans (and to be a follower/fan of thousands). And it's just as common for mailing lists to contain hordes of contacts.

Recently, Bruno Goncalves from the University of Indiana has concluded studying the network of links created by three million Twitter users over four years. After counting tweets that are shared and regular as signifying a significant social bond, he found that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases to a saturation point until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that particular point, the conversations with less important persons start to trickle off. Then tweeters begin to concentrate solely on the people they have the most pronounced bonds with.

So how many people can tweeters maintain contact with before they get overloaded? The answer is between 100 and 200.

Though high frequency communications, such as social networks, bulk email and bulk SMS-ing allow us to massively increase the number of people we can connect with, they cannot do anything to change our physiological communication abilities. It doesn't matter what you do, we cannot maintain close links with more than about 150 people (and even that is pushing it to the boundaries) of course until somebody finds a way to increase the size of the human brain.

Having a big mailing list counts, as does the constant effort to inflate your subscriber numbers, email marketers are always looking to secure their brand a golden seat in consumer top-of-mind heaven.  But unless your brand poses some kind of real value to the individual, you will find yourself on the bottom shelf whenever they receive emails from you. It's a biological fact, as this research shows.

It is mathematically impossible to have networks that are two large, because every new contact adds a multiplier effect in terms of the number of relationships we have to know about.
If I have contact with you, I also have to bear in mind your relationship with Tom, Dick and Harry. Then I add  Sally, and now I have to apply all of her relationships to all those people in the mix. As you add more people, the combinations grow to a point were one simply can't sustain it.

Therefore, finding and nurturing quality contacts through your opt-in mailing list is  to ensuring that your communications are making a measurable impression. This means that effective list building  is evaluated by how much the people who signing up care about what you have to say, which is not something that escapes the obvious.

The key thing is to refine identifying and targeting your core market. Then build your mailing list out of this promising crop and you will already be avoiding wasting time and email or SMS send credits.

The important thing to ask yourself is: are you a part of the recipients’ inner inbox circle (or aiming to get there) or are you just another brand in the chain?

Call GraphicMail: +27 21 461 9277

Apples and Berries: GraphicMail’s bulk mobile marketing leaves no fruit unturned

Out of the vast number of up-and-coming new Android and Windows mobiles eagerly looking to take up the challenge of dethroning the ever-popular and ever-eminent iPhone, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs won’t be losing much sleep quite yet since none have managed to bite off any worrying amount of the super-gadget’s clout, as the competition stands.

But on the sidelines, and without much of the familiar pomp and circumstance drummed up whenever a new i-Thingy goes on sale, the BlackBerry has been building up a sensational brand name and presence since the turn of the millennium.

Last week Wednesday, in Kyalami Johannesburg, the BlackBerry took top honours in both the “Coolest Cellphone” and “Coolest High-Tech Gadget” categories at the seventh annual Generation Next 2011 Brand Survey awards. Further roping in such sundry prestigious accolades as “Coolest Brand Overall” and having its trademark BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) named the “Best Cellphone Application” by HDI Youth Marketers.

The choice of BlackBerry for the coolest brand overall reflects the importance the smartphone has assumed in the increasingly connected lives of a tech-savvy generation. The BlackBerry smartphone is a social tool as well as a lifestyle device that keeps youths in touch with everything and everyone that matters to them. It’s about hearts and minds and the BlackBerry has entrenched itself as a darling device in the South African youth market, unlike more beefed-up mobiles such as the iPhone.

There is a deeper issue here. Maybe we can examine the BlackBerry’s reliability or consistency as a must-have piece of hardware, or maybe the brand has simply been well placed to quietly endear itself to young users over the years. Regardless of how we speculate, it just goes to show that your mobile phone doesn’t need to be the best or sleekest to be cool. It doesn’t need to have everything but the kitchen sink loaded as standard for it to be market-share royalty. Mobile phones are an extension of ourselves and central to our lives. It’s no surprise that the youths’ vote has gone towards the BlackBerry, speaking to its image as a mobile phone of good standing.

Broadly viewed, smartphones are ruling the Generation Y roost as the most important and relevant piece of technology they own or are looking to own. The South African mobile market is growing and it is becoming increasingly feasible, and rewarding, for marketers to get on the mobile promotions band-wagon.

In this marketing era, having a mobile communications tool and mobile landing pages for your campaigns is going to be indispensable, and measurably pulling traffic to these pages begins with a simple link enriched SMS, as with GraphicMail’s mobile offering.

At both the Mobile Congress in Barcelona and the recent Internet World London, GraphicMail found great resonance for its integrated bulk mobile marketing product, which enables users to very simply create any number of mobile campaigns without requiring any serious technical skills. GraphicMail gives you the tools to send a text message with a link to a mobile page or entire mobile site containing graphic-rich messaging, enabling you to develop a true one-on-one engagement experience. Over 5.3 billion people have mobile subscriptions as of 2011, approximately 77% of the world population. Mobile devices are spreading faster than any other kind of technology, leaving one a bit dumbfounded when you think of the sales potential, how much tapping of the market is yet to be done, and the role of South Africa – which is becoming an ever-increasing mobile presence.

Friday Corner: Natural Selection 2.0

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Friday Corner: Facebook enounters of the third kind

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A Brief History of SPAM

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Best practices for Gmail’s new and improved email filters

Having had a rude awakening during the past three weeks, email newsletter marketers have seen the effects of Gmail implementing its new, stricter rules for spam identification.

Their latest effort in the battle against bad-mail has already caused much frustration amongst users and may show greater challenges ahead in the effort to ensure reliable email deliverability. With significantly more severe screening measures, suddenly you are going to see a larger percentage of sends canned as spam than ever before.

In an attempt to appease users and lower complaint levels; Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo have all been amping-up their algorithms recently. Unless you are spam-agnostic and couldn't care less, it's probable that their overbearing approach is having an undesired effect on your email newsletter marketing campaign.

Life would be much easier if the Gmail techs were to change their algorithm to tip the balance in a more email friendly direction, since it would be considerably less effort to flag the occasional spam emails dropping into our inbox rather than needing to sift through lists of questionable messages to find the important ones. Anyone who has ever used  bulk email marketing will know that spam filtering is not simple and the same is true for being filter-conscious while creating a campaign.

Mainly taking into account areas relating to ISP reputation, the new security protocols place an extreme amount of focus on email content. Thereby seeking to stop senders from recycling the precise same copy to large volumes of recipients. But that's what we've always been saying; it’s a good habit to customise your content and provide several versions of the same text to begin with, and now things are changing so that your deliverability could be riding on this.

As for those on the receiving end, there's no escaping that you will now need to more routinely run through their spam folder to find the info that they care about seeing, but that may have overshot their inbox. The extra email house-keeping might become a big point of contention for users, the advantage for direct email marketers is that those who publish, quality email content, uniquely written, will make it to the trusted sender zone. Having tighter filters means that fewer potential email marketing competitors will be sharing the same attention-space and that customers can afford to take that little extra time in examining your emails, giving you better influence.

“All big ESPs are now including reputation filters. This is not limited to sending IP and sending domain reputation. From address (friendly from) and from domain reputation is also becoming a very important factor in getting your mail out to your recipients.” - Shaun Swanepoel, GraphicMail Network Administrator

Making use of a reputable ESP and simply not spamming is, as always, the best advice for working around filters.

SPAM ahoy!: Is your message just floating around with the rest

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New email marketing editor with over 300 free templates coming soon to GraphicMail

GraphicMail is entering the last stage of completing the integration of a new email newsletter editor that will let you create studio-quality email campaigns more efficiently and easier than what has been possible in the past. You can simply breeze through those newsletter-making hassles with the powerful new editing package, all of this without any HTML or design skills.

Marketers and email resellers know that building stylish, branded emails can be a lengthy task, even when using a smart email software suite. Because something is online, that doesn’t necessarily always mean that everything will get done faster. Getting your email newsletter from concept to send-ready is a case-by-case undertaking, that is delayed by some online email packages are painfully slow, even when using pre-set templates.

First impressions count. Before anyone will delve into the details supplied in your email newsletter, they will discriminate, strictly based on appearances - whether it would be worth their while to do so.

Furthermore, consumers expect professionalism and quality in the marketing communications that they receive. It’s common-sense that the majority of readers will ditch your email newsletter, unless you are instantly able to project the magnetism of real value - and that’s regardless of whether you have written the most beguiling sales copy.

With this editor; images, structure and coloring all work in visually irresistible ensemble to help you win readers over during those crucial first-look moments. We give you over 300 email marketing templates to create customised campaigns that reflect your business or brand profile – just pick yours from a list of industry categories. Some templates are drag-and-drop enabled, making it even easier for those of you who aren’t quite tench-smart  to design newsletters easily. 

The-board photo editor lets you edit images simply and ensures that these are perfectly placed in each template. It also gives you the ability to work in layers; which allows you to change the text within images -  especially useful when working to produce email newsletters for multiple languages. The color picker tool, which plucks precise colors from your logo or website and records them to the theme manager, where you can blend your own color-scheme or select from pre-existing sets - a true gem in its array of features..

Together with our core system, this new editor will become GraphicMail’s premium editor and we project that in the long term our client-base will progressively be migrating to the new system as they become more familiar with its virtues. Social integration features and users’ campaign management will be enhanced with tried & trusted publishing tools as well as feedback monitoring via tracking and analytics.

"The new Editor will enable our users to seamlessly create, edit and manage their newsletters and email correspondences. We have focussed on user experience and deliver this through simplicity and flexibility. From simple, yet striking emails to more complex socially integrated newsletters, users can be sure that their email newsletters will hit the spot with their target audience." - Paul Hobden, GraphicMail Product Manager