Much has been made of the so-called death of email marketing, and numerous articles have been written, including by myself, on how marketers are having to become more ‘savvy’ with their e-marketing strategies, but one of the main things that doesn’t seem to be being picked up on is how to make e-mail marketing more social.

We all know how important social media integration is nowadays with general marketing campaigns and at Big Dot Media we build some fantastic campaigns with social media integrated at the heart of them, but we don’t seem to see a lot of social media integration when it comes to e-mail marketing.

In reality, the same social media integration that is used on websites and other online and offline assets can quite easily be transferred to emails.

Lets take a really simple example; I receive an email from a well-known fashion brand that does social media really well. They have great Facebook and Twitter engagement, and a really active fan base, but social media integration in their e-mails is resigned to two small links to their relevant social media pages at the bottom of their emails. I know this brand has dedicated social media resource, and they obviously spend a lot of time, effort and money on their social media presence in general, but it seems an afterthought on their emails.

What could they do? Well, their email contains numerous images and links to products on their website so why not put a ‘like’ or ‘share’ links on the products themselves. To show proof of social media engagement why not put the last 5 noteworthy tweets or status updates in the email and finally why not cross sell the benefits of joining their online communities with some nice info messages about what benefits they get by being a Twitter Follower or a Facebook fan.

Particularly in this B2C market, social proof is a major factor in consumer behaviour and this needs to shine through in all forms of communications not just directly in the social media channels.

I will admit that integrating social media into emails, heck just doing social media in general, is a lot harder of B2B brands, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try! Why not try experimenting with individual sharing links in your news items, or just adding some tweets and Facebook status updates in your email, just to give your emails a more personal touch. Customers love getting close to their brands and feeling like the brand is letting them in ‘backstage’ in the life of the brand, so even if you are the most conservative and traditional brand, it will pay to let your customers see a little bit of your personality.

When you think about it, social and email are very similar, both are relatively inexpensive, easy to set up and maintain, provide rapid feedback and response and can produce a very engaged audience, so it makes sense to use them in combination to increase both email marketing effectiveness and social engagement.

There are two very important by-products of combining social with email; Firstly, with the introduction of content mail filters such as Google Priority Inbox, it is more important than ever that your email audience engages with your email in some way, otherwise you may find that your next e-mail may not even be delivered to their inbox. The other advantage is that increase social media engagement is now an attributable factor in search engine rankings. The more engaged your brand is in the social media channels, the better your search engine results will be, so give your customers and potential customers every possible opportunity to engage with your brand.

I wont go into the technical and coding details about how to integrate social into your emails in this article, as there are so many articles on the web on how to do that, all I will say is that technically its so easy to do that there really is no excuse on why you cannot start integrating social into your email marketing campaigns tomorrow.

I have to go now and sift through the 35 marketing emails I have received while I have been writing this article!

If you see any great examples of social media in email marketing, feel free to send them to me, and if I get enough, I may even start a gallery of best practice. If you need any advice or support in getting social with your email marketing, please call me on 01270 613310 or contact us.

Searching for innovative ways to market products and services, and just when we think we are on the ball, we are really just playing catch up to the next big thing.

Mobile marketing has several layers that work both individually and collectively to promote a brand’s awareness and drive positive consumer actions.

Engage your audience and you WILL reach them!

Engaging your audience is critical if you want to be successful. Your relationship with them ideally needs to be more of an emotional one rather than transactional in order for it to be long term. locally engaging them can provide you with the fastest route to gaining their loyalty. Amongst the layers of mobile marketing is NFC(near field communications) and LBS(location based services) services which have an instant impact on the customer.

It’s a given success used by some of the big brands around today such as Starbucks who offer discounts to O2 customers as they pass their local stores or Odeon cinemas who using Facebook places to offer a box of free popcorn. As far as marketing goes it drives foot traffic to the stores to enable the retailers etc to maximise all opportunities.

Brands need to put customer engagement at the same level of importance and weight as creating great products and services. Using mobile marketing to its full capabilities gives a more complete and valuable experience with brands, and allows for far more responsive services.

The rise…

Mobile marketing will continue to grow as we add more and more functions to handsets but we shouldn’t dismiss the SMS message when new features come on board.  A total of 78.9bn texts were sent in the UK last year (compared with 56.9bn in 2007), an average of 1,213 per mobile phone owner.

Shortcodes are a great way of effective marketing giving the consumer the simplicity to act upon them as they are easy to remember.

The importance…

We are definitely moving into the future whereby purchasing on your mobile device is becoming easier and a convenience.

According to a press release from Gartner, who are the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, companies Will Generate 50 Percent of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications by 2015

Overall, mobile commerce is expected to enjoy an increase of 55 per cent over the next five years, as it is made easier to purchase goods using Smartphone’s and tablets and according to research from Barclays Corporate the amount of money spent on mobile and tablet devices is expected to reach nearly £20 billion over the next ten years. Forecast for m-commerce shows it will reach £19.3 billion by 2021, which is an increase from £1.3 billion this year.

Microsoft’s Ashley Highfield at IAB Mobile Engage says mobile purchases are more immediate sales opportunities. One of his key points was a startling statistic. On the web, he explained, the time gap between search and purchase is one month. However, on mobile the gap is one hour.

So really as we are continually improving the user experience on mobile devices we move into exciting times for consumers and the way we market to them. Mobile marketing maximises every opportunity you have and is a powerful tool to use if you want to be a successful brand.

Now is the time to go mobile!

For more information about advertising on mobiles: http://www.iabuk.net/media/images/Howtogetadvertisingontomobile_8492.pdf

Written by Victoria Savage, Big Dot Media

The role of the DMA is to ensure best practice throughout the industry and ensure standards are maintained.  They also provide us with the very latest information relating to direct marketing, research and white papers, and legal advice.

We are thoroughly delighted to be a member of the DMA, and it proves to our agency partners our dedication to working to the highest of standards and professionalism at all times.  As a direct result of our membership, our agency partners will benefit from our knowledge of the latest standards in direct marketing.

http://www.dma.org.uk

Press Release – Zeus PR

Big Dot Media Opens London Office

Cheshire-based digital agency, Big Dot Media expands its operation this week with the opening of a London office.

Big Dot Media with a head office in Nantwich, will now have a second location on Grays Inn Road in London’s Bloomsbury district, within the prestigious WC1 postcode – right in the heart of London.

This move follows hot on the heels of a 100% sales increase from January-May 2011 against last years’ figures.

Moreover, their expansion follows numerous staff appointments, which has seen Big Dot Media double staff numbers since this time last year, and they are continuing to recruit to support their increasing work portfolio.

Steve McGrath, MD at Big Dot Media said: “The opening of a London office reflects the increasing level of business we are doing in London, and the general demand for our services in the South East.

“We are thrilled by the agency growth this year, and is testament to our company ethos and the effort of our great team.”

Big Dot Media offers silent and confidential digital media services exclusively to the creative agency market. The firm specialises in web development, e-mail marketing and social media integration.

That’s understandable, but at a time when social media is having such a huge impact on brand perception, it’s worryingly short-sighted.  When we think about ROI, what comes to mind is a simple calculation of the financial investment we’ve put in and we measure that against how much the bottom line has grown.  Social media doesn’t work like that.  The time, effort and financial outlay in either hiring a dedicated social media employee, using your advertising agency, or hiring a specialised social media company, throws all logical thoughts and beliefs about ROI to the wind, because social media is such a complex subject and very few paths lead directly to the bottom line.

Social media has turned the world on its head in many ways, and forced us to look at things differently.  It is deeply embedded in our everyday lives in a way none of us ever expected, and we are still learning how best to use its tremendous potential and the wealth of opportunities it holds.  But to think you can bypass social media and carry on regardless is to misunderstand the fundamental power of social media, and also that of the consumer.  These days the consumer is taking charge of your brand perception.  There is more consumer power now than ever before, and people are embracing the ability to talk freely about their most loved or most loathed brands in front of a vast global audience.

Brands need to loosen up, adjust their mindset, and realise that social media has the potential to turn their whole business around with the wealth of insights their consumers can offer them, and not concern themselves with how many sales social media immediately brings.  It is so much more than that.

Whilst there is no easy way to measure ROI in social media, it’s not impossible.  All it takes is some creative thinking and clear goal-defining, and understanding that social media ROI is not just about the financial bottom line.

Think carefully about what it is that you want to achieve from social media.  Do you want to change brand perception?  Do you want to get your marketing messages to the masses?  Do you want to improve customer loyalty?  Establish your baseline, and monitor how your social media engagement, be it Facebook, Twitter or another channel, is having an impact on these particular areas.  For example:

• If for some reason you had a particularly poor brand perception, and you were suddenly giving great customer service over social media channels that people started engaging with you in a positive way and sharing your page with their friends and contacts, that’s a great return on investment right there.  It won’t necessarily have an immediate impact on the bottom line, but you are strengthening foundations and improving relations which stand a good chance of leading to increased sales in the medium to long term.  If you clearly define your goals, and measure the impact in these areas worked on, it is possible to accurately measure your return on investment.
• Announcing a discount voucher code through social media is one way to gain a good understanding of how social media is working for you, and can easily be tracked to the bottom line too, as you’ll be able to see how many times that code is used.  More detailed reporting and analysis may involve studying what time of day brings the best results, or which day of the week.
• Track how much engagement your tweets or wall posts receive, and analyse which type of post is the most popular and at what time of day/day of the week.  This not only shows how well your brand is fairing socially, but also allows you to perfect your engagement by studying what works and when.

Brands need to understand that there is so much they can learn from social media.  You can’t get better than a direct line to your customers.  Is a particular product not selling?  Then use social media to ask customers why they don’t buy it!  You might find it’s something so simple, that when changed, sends sales through the roof.

This is such an exciting opportunity to change your brand for the better.  Listen carefully to what people are telling you, and believe me, they are ready to tell you.  If people are saying your customer service department is a waste of time, then take that information and go and do something about it!  Address their issues and chances are your customers will jump for joy and start singing your praises to their friends.  This is the return on investment that is hard to measure in traditional terms but is absolutely priceless in terms of value to your business – your consumers are to be ignored at your peril.

There is so much to learn about your brand from social media.  Take this opportunity now to build on the positives, and work on the negatives, before it’s too late.

Written by Louise McGrath, Director, Big Dot Media Limited
Published article can be found here

IE 6-8 makes up for 20% of the most popular browsers used.  Therefore by deciding to integrate CSS3 into your website, you are stopping up to 20% of potential viewers experiencing its full capabilities.  However some web developers argue that CSS3 should be used despite this and those using incapable browsers are at their own loss as upgrades of the browsers are available.

So what’s the solution?

The obvious solution that springs to mind is quite simply; not to use CSS3 if cross browser compatibility viewing is a requirement.  This means to achieve effects such as rounded corners, gradients and border images; we must stick to using images to guarantee the same result on every browser.  This in itself can be very time consuming and adds to your pages loading time.

However…

There is another solution: PIE.

PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer and it claims to be able to make Internet Explorer 6-8 render several of the most useful CSS3 decorative features:

• border-radius
• box-shadow
• border-image
• multiple background images
• linear-gradient as background image

PIE is implemented as an attached behavior in your CSS.  Once the 30k .htc file has been uploaded, you can specify “behavior: url(PIE.htc);” to any target element where CSS3 is already in use and the same effects are rendered in IE 6-8.

Example of tabs with rounded corners rendered in IE6 with PIE

PIE only allows just a few of the features CSS3 provides and contains a few issues such as browser zooming, short-hand CSS only and some more

The overall solution between CSS3, PIE and older browsers its mainly based around the requirements of your project.  A website that needs to work and look in all browsers will mean images are the safe fall back as PIE only has a few features and known issues.  However, if cross browser compatibility isn’t your main concern, using CSS3 and PIE may be the solution for you.  It will save you time, make your website more dynamic and generate some nice effects.

Their expansion follows numerous staff appointments, which has seen Big Dot Media double staff numbers since this time last year, and they are continuing to recruit to support their increasing work portfolio.

Steve McGrath, MD at Big Dot Media said: “The office expansion reflects our strong growth and development over the last year, and our commitment to both the growth of our business and our customer offering.

“We are delighted at the extent to which the company is growing and we are really looking forward to the year ahead.”

The success and reputation of Big Dot Media has been noticed nationwide, reaching as far as the House of Commons, from which they received a congratulatory letter from Edward Timpson, Crewe MP.

Edward Timpson, Crewe MP said: “Having a market leading business of the innovative and performance calibre of Big Dot Media located at the heart of Nantwich, is recognised by staff and the wider community alike as a treasured local asset.

“I wish you and all your staff every success in your future endeavours.”

A digital persona is a an online virtual user that can have a name, location and set of user attributes that can be used as base on which to test their potential user journey through your website. Essentially a personal is a ‘thumbnail’ view of a potential visitor and can be made a complex as giving names, locations, user types etc or as simple as ‘new user’ or ‘existing user’.

Digital personas fall under the general guise of Usability (UX) and because of this many people think it is only relevant at the completion of a sites development when most of the UX testing takes place. In actual fact UX testing should occur at every stage of your site development from initial planning through to final testing and continuing to be a part of the on-going development of a website.

For a larger site it is important to create a number of digital personas when planning and testing your site, personas of various ages, technical skill levels, and abilities that will ensure that you are able to cater for the whole gamut of users that may access your site.

It is especially important for e-commerce sites, sites with large amounts of content and ones that expect a high level of users with disabilities, however the principles can be applies to any website in any sector.

The first thing to do is to create a number of personas. The amount of personas that you need will vary depending on the size of your site and the expected attributes of your visitors. When I talk about users with different attributes, I am not only talking about users with disabilities, but also different levels of technical competency different ways of interacting with your web content.

For example, lets create a digital personal called Janet. Janet is 63 years old, lives in Leicester, and has never bought something online before. If Janet was to visit your website, is there enough information and advice to enable her to get to purchase online from your website?

It is important to give weight to the thoughts of your digital personas at every stage of development, so that even if you make small user path changes, stop for a minute and say to yourself, “How would this change affect Janet?”. It can be handy at this stage to have pocket cards with your persona bio’s on them so that they can be bought out and add some physicality to them.

Lets create another persona. John from Kent is 26 yrs old, works in advertising and is browsing your site using his new iPad2. You don’t have a mobile optimised website, so can John easily get to the content he wants using ‘taps’ rather than ‘clicks’. Remember iPads2 can’t see Flash movies, so have any flash elements got image backups?

Susan, from Milton Keynes, is registered disabled, she finds it very hard to use a mouse and consequently uses keyboard shortcuts to navigate through most websites. Do you have accessible keyboard shortcuts for your main content? If you don’t, what kind of experience do you think Susan has?

I could go on all day creating different personas with different attributes and it’s important not to get too bogged down with trying to think of every scenario that may crop up. Essentially you need to remember your prime audience, the audience that will buy your product, request a brochure or give you a call. Remember the users that are your customers and create their personas, because at the end of the day, they are the people that you need to have a good experience on your site.

Personas work best when they based on facts about existing users, so don’t just make them up, base them on information that you already have to had about your customers.

You will know when your digital personas are working, when someone asks in a meeting, “What would Susan think about that change?” – and no one asks who Susan is!

Digital personas should have a place during the planning and wire-framing of your site, but it also sits within usability testing, although this is generally done by real people. However if your budget doesn’t stretch to live usability testing, then you can employ digital personas instead. You can either create your own personas, ask your web agency to come up with some personas, or hire a specialist agency for this.

A new and increasingly popular trend are digital personals being used to develop and refine social media strategies as well. Many brands are realising the true potential of ‘social proof’ and the benefits of positive user feedback in a social media environment.

Digital personas can be an effective method in determining where and when your customers will engage with your brand. Once these brand ‘touch-points’ have been indentified, only then can you decide on the best way to communicate and engage with your customers in the method that they prefer.

As with many forms of advertising now, the ideal way to communicate with your customers is to engage them in their life stream rather than sell to them in the traditional ‘stop-and-look-at-this’ environment.

The use of digital personas give stake holders and unique insight into the needs and motivations of your consumers and ultimately provides and positive user experience for your customers.

If you look around on the train to work or walking down the street, you will notice that nearly everyone has a mobile phone and smart phones in particular are experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity. 85% of new mobile handsets that will be sold in 2011 will be able to access the Internet and recent research from HFI found that 43% of people access the Internet from their mobile device.

In addition to this 3 out of every 10 people now read their emails from a mobile device, so if you send our regular email communication, on average, 30% of people will be clicking links through to you website from a mobile device.

This means that it’s not really a question of ‘Do you need a mobile optimised website?’ but ‘How quickly can you get mobile optimised site up?’

Now at this point, many companies start thinking they need a mobile app for their mobile users, but in reality a mobile app is the icing on the cake for mobile users. The actual ‘cake’ is a well optimised mobile website.

According to recent Taptu research the browser-based mobile web market will grow much faster than the app market, so a mobile site should be your first port of call over mobile apps.

Once you have decided to optimise your site for mobiles, the first thing you need to look at is how the needs of your mobile users differ from the needs of your desktop users.

Odeon Cinemas recently reported that traffic to their mobile website was more focussed on searches for cinema times and tickets in the short term , i.e. what was on that night, whereas traffic from desktops was more long term bases such as what was on in the next couple of weeks. So they optimised their mobile specific site for cinema locations and imminent times and dates.

This is where good web analytics comes in to play. You can filter your top viewed content by device and see if you mobile users are going to different areas of your site than desktop users. You may find that mobile users are mostly interested in your store or office locations, or just your contact details, so make sure these are easy to find from your mobile optimised website.

You may also want to consider that it is harder to read long paragraphs of text on a mobile device, so why don’t you take the opportunity to cull some of that text and make it more ‘punchy’ to aid your mobile users.

Be sparing with images, it’s even more important that a site loads quickly on a mobile device, so make sure its optimised for speed and try to avoid using Flash for anything because it won’t appear on any Apple mobile device (iPhones, iPads and iPods).

Interaction with mobile websites is different as well, more and more smart phones are touch based now, but using finger gestures is a lot less accurate than clicking with a mouse (especially if you have fingers the size of mine!), so you need to allow more room for navigating and make you main buttons slightly bigger. Give your mobile optimised site more whitespace and make it easy for users to get from one page to another.

Using media queries and device and viewport specific style sheets, you can serve up entirely different content to mobile users based upon their device and screen size, so use this information to serve content that is relevant to the device that it is being viewed on.

Finally, keep analysing your stats, mobile usage can change considerably in as short as 3 months, so keep analysing what your mobile users need and react to that.

Adobe have released the latest Creative suite CS5.5 Web Premium.

Is it big news?

It claims to have everything you need to design, develop, and integrate websites and immersive digital experiences for desktops, smartphones, and tablets in one place.

Included in the suite:

Dreamweaver® CS5.5 Flash® Catalyst® CS5.5
Flash Professional CS5.5 Flash Builder™ 4.5 Premium Edition
Photoshop® CS5 Extended Illustrator® CS5
Acrobat® X Pro Fireworks® CS5
Contribute® CS5 Bridge CS5
Device Central CS5.5
Media Encoder CS5.5

The buzz from the bees is the real excitement comes from Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4.5 software. It’s an Eclipse™ based development tool used for building mobile (BlackBerry, Android, iOS), web, and desktop apps using ActionScript® and the open source Flex framework.

It allows you to develop more intuitive applications and uses common codebase to build the apps whilst sharing code from web applications. There is also new PHP tooling support using the integrated copy of Zend studio 8

There are updated versions of Flash Professional and in Dreamweaver advancements in HTML5 includes advanced jQuery integration.  Dreamweaver also integrates with Adobe BrowserLab, an Adobe CS Live online service^1,2 that accurately tests web content across browsers and operating systems.

So what do our developers think?

“They’re all, as we call them ‘nice to haves’. They might make our lives a little easier integration-wise but not really revolutionise the way we work as of yet.”

“ Basically, nice, but a bit pricey for what it is and an update for the sake of squeezing more money out of consumers,  even though they paid out a fair amount for CS5.0.”

Here’s what has changed since CS5 http://adobe.ly/eAAr0E

So does the new Adobe Suite wow you or is it just more of the same?  Is it worth the money or will you be saving your pennies until the next major release?

Written by Victoria Savage, Project Manager for Big Dot Media