Eggblogg

Why email must get more relevant and targeted

As I read this white paper from Responsys on the new rules of engagement for email, I couldn't help but agree with the basic idea that email needs to get more relevant if it's to cut through the clutter. Not just the spam clutter, but the clutter of untargeted email.

For example, I regularly receive updates from a networking group, telling me about their meetings taking place each month and encouraging me to attend. Trouble is, they're quite long, and half a dozen towns are featured as well as my own, meetings I'm unlikely to travel to.

I used to open these emails in order to see what was happening in my town, who would be at the meeting, guest speakers coming up, etc. This kind of information might persuade me to go along. Instead, I got a bit fed up with reading about what all the other groups were doing, and not a lot about Lewes.

If this list were segmented geographically, it wouldn't be hard to send out emails which just focused on each recipient's local group. Over time, members and prospects would become more engaged, as they found out more about the people involved, the venue, what happened at the last meeting.

In the Responsys report, the authors note that 'untargeted, irrelevant messaging will result in a faster decline in engagement.'

As email marketers, it's something we and our clients must take on board.

Its and it's

As reported by The Guardian, England is now 19th in the world literacy league ('England plunges in rankings for reading')

Good news for those of us who make a living from writing!

Keep recruiting teachers who can't spell, keep up the errors and typos in the newspapers, encourage kids 2 txt and read nothing but Harry Potter until they're 53! Keep kids on the computer and tell them that reading is boring! Yay! More work for us!

But that report's probably rubbish anyway, because, as everyone knows, students are passing more and more and more exams with more and more A, A* and A*&%£!?* grades, so today's kids must be WAY cleverer than those grumpy old men & women who know the difference between its and it's!

Mapping the media landscape

Still on the subject of tools, here's Deborah Schultz's map of the tools available in the social media landscape...  itself a useful tool.

I find conceptual maps interesting in that they say as much about the author's viewpoint as about the landscape itself. I look at this and picture one or two 'here be dragons' labels.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it's Social Media

I have a confession to make: ten years ago my introduction to the internet was in the form of an online community for history lovers. We each created our own avatars, took on Roman, Greek or Egyptian family names, and cavorted around the various special interest message boards and chatrooms all day and all night. I made pretend friends and real friends; some I even met IRL (as they say). I learned fluent emoticon-ese, took part in online arguments, role-played, formed some groups, joined others, attended virtual weddings and parties, created banners and avatars for fellow citizens and learnt basic HTML.

It wasn't called social networking back then, but it certainly wasn't Dungeons and Dragons.

Things have come full circle for me now, as this kind of online connection-building (funny how it's not called 'virtual' any more) has been re-invented as the Phenomenon That Is Social Media. This time around it has real commercial possibilities, which is why marketers are so excited about it.

At Eggbox, we don't claim to be at the cutting edge of social media marketing, but we learn new things every day. It's knowledge we're accruing on behalf of our small business clients who want to know about it and be a part of. Not only that, but given my own 'history' in the area of online community (I even used to write academic papers on the subject) it seems like a natural fit. So here we are, getting our feet wet but hopefully our noses not too dirty.

On the face of it there's a lot to learn (not least of all the language of tagging, pinging, digging and pimping...) but I agree with Geoff Livingston when he talks about a social media strategy requiring a blend of PR, traditional marketing and old-fashioned relationship-building networking skills ... in particular, word-of-mouth. Bring it on!

Fighting the (word) flab

This week I've been scrambling to get our new website up, and although the redirects aren't yet in place and the changeover from the old sites isn't complete, it's a relief to be more or less there. And tweaking and refining never ends anyway.

I think I've ditched about 90% of the content on the old sites. The new site is lean and mean. I suspect that no-one was reading the other stuff anyway. So from now on I'm going to try to keep it short. Which is actually harder than being verbose. As Mark Twain said (more or less), 'if I'd have had more time I'd have written a shorter website'.