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3 New Year’s resolutions you should make for your email campaigns

New Year’s resolutions are always easy to make, but notoriously hard to keep.

2011 is firmly in our rearview mirrors. It’s more than two weeks into 2012, and all those well-intended resolutions which seemed so reasonable at the end of last year may have already fallen by the wayside.

While some of your master plans  may have encountered some delays, you can still score points on your self-assessment by deciding to adopt some healthy email marketing habits to improve your campaign performance for the year to come:

1) I resolve to begin my 2012 communications with an email marketing plan

Don’t dawdle for months before you figure out what you want to communicate and promote this year. Do yourself a favor and start setting specific goals. Now.

Why not set one big email marketing objective for the year? Or at least one for each quarter or month? You could, for example, consider goals for the amount of subscribers you want to add to your list in 2012 or get brainstorming in advance for specific commercial dates such as Valentine’s Day; which is just around the corner.

• Keep your plans simple and make sure they’re realistic and reachable. Don’t waste time in 2012 on things that won’t help you. After all, it’s a lot more rewarding when you know your goals are within your grasp.

2) I resolve to make it a year of measurement

With the statistical tracking features provided by most email service providers (ESPs) there’s no reason to practice guess-marketing. But if that’s what you’ve been doing, then there’s no better time than the present to become a monster of metrics.

Record all your benchmarks and measure your successes this year. If you're not sure about what kind of stats you should be looking at, download our 2011 Industry metrics white paper to learn about all the key figures and what they mean.

• Before you can set real goals you need an accurate baseline of figures and trends to project your annual performance from. Focus on what’s important to your business as you gather stats and set your goals accordingly. Whether that’s new sign-ups, higher open or click-through rates, more fans or followers, better campaign ROI or any other key metric improvement.
• Comparing your current figures against last year’s numbers, if you have them, will give you a better idea of how you are growing, what to expect, and let you anticipate high and low business periods before they happen; which also makes it easier to budget.

3) I resolve to become mobile friendly

Mobile marketing will go from buzz to biz in 2012. With the growing popularity of smartphones and the increasing dependence on mobile devices, marketers will have to consider adding mobile to their communications mix and take their marketing strategies to the next level. This will be the year to catch consumers where they are, wherever they are; on mobile.

An increasing amount of people started reading their emails on a mobile device in 2011. As we move closer to the time when mobile web access eclipses PC web access, brands will realise they need a web offering optimised for the mobile environment. This has not yet happened within all businesses, but soon the time will come when consumers will be demanding it.

In 2012, give serious consideration to making your digital communications mobile friendly. Ensuring that you have mobile sign up forms and that both your emails and website landing pages render properly on popular mobile devices are top priorities.


For more email marketing New Year's resolutions, read our original article published on Memeburn.

Google Search Plus Your Word: What it means for Emailing

You’ve probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search last week, sleekly dubbed ‘Search Plus Your Word’.

In case you are unsure about what it does in practice and wondering if it has anything to do with email marketing; here we’ll brush over the basic concept behind the feature and what to expect from it.

While 'Search Plus Your Word' will mainly be impacting SEO, it’s important to understand what it is and how it should be affecting the emailing business.

First of all, 'Search Plus Your Word' is (at least at this point) an optional feature. Every user has a choice to switch between global search as it is now and the new Google + search.

If they do opt for Google+ search, the short version is that Google search results are going to be personalised for each user. Signals will be drawn from your Google+ Circles, highlighting things your friends, followers, or you have shared.

Google will also be feeding your brand’s Google+ social content directly into personalised results, for consumers who’ve added you to their circles. These search results may also include content that a consumer’s friends posted about you.

So Google’s approach of delivering relevant results based on unbiased data will now be coloured by your social sharing activities. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results, meaning that whatever the people connected to you online are saying or sharing will be counted as more relevant than before.

What it means for Email Marketing:

One interesting byproduct from Search Plus Your World is that email marketing programs will become more important, because of its power to encourage actions such as social shares.

Google+ content will be dominant on Google searches, and so, some sites will receive extra prominence because they have an audience containing a mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content; be it newsletters, blogs or other communications.

The sites that don’t have an active social media audience or community will be losing some limelight, so now is the time to integrate social media with your email marketing and actively work do build your social fan base, if you have not already done so.

Integrating Email and Social

The real benefit of social media has always been its ability to leverage your message and amplify your content as people take your content and spread it on their networks.

With 'Search Plus Your Word', if you integrate your social media marketing with your email campaigns, you will not only increase your marketing effectiveness, but you will also be boosting your Google search rank.

You can do this by:

1. Placing a link to your email newsletters on your G+ pages every time you perform a send
2. Including social media share options for G+ in your email newsletters
3. Adding social media channel subscribe buttons on your email newsletter such as “Join our Circle” on Google Plus
4. Promoting your content by broadcasting your blog entries via your Circles on G+
5. Sending out email newsletters that have excerpts from your blog with links to each post

Social share has been a groundbreaking feature of GraphicMail’s 2011 developments, making us the first email marketing service to incorporate the ability to easily share email marketing messages on social networking sites and report on the results.

Our clients benefit from being able to see how many times an email newsletter has been shared on social networks, viewed and clicked.

The mashing up of email and social strategies is something that GraphicMail is committed to continue with in 2012 by further integrating social media and our product features.

We will discuss this further at a later stage, so keep reading our blogs to stay up to date with the latest news on social-email integration.