Posts Tagged 'Digital Trends'

What are the plans for your office over the Xmas period? Closed for well-earned break? Nothing to worry about until the New Year? Great, time to sit back relax and slip on some classic Nat King Cole.

Whilst you’re drowning in mulled wine and Quality Street this Xmas, Google, Social Media and essentially your social and search strategy continues to work away, because Google’s not having a break for Xmas, neither is Facebook or Twitter. So what plans have you got in place for the Xmas Period to ensure your digital channels are looked after?

For those lucky enough, the business you work in will be closed between the 24^th December and the 3rd January 2012. Nearly 2 whole weeks. So in that time, have you got plans in place to keep an eye on your Facebook page? Is Twitter taken care of? If the Social Media Platform manager is off, who will be responding and posting to your loyal army of Fans? Who will be keeping them entertained, informed and up to date with Boxing day deals?

Similarly, who’s managing the search activity? Will content still be produced and published; will you be keeping an eye on PPC bid values and keyword opportunities?

If you’re reading this and mild panic is setting in, fear not, it’s not too late to act. Just remember the 6 P’s (Proper Planning Prevents Pi… you know the rest). It’s time to sit down and map the next few weeks of activity.

Like the perfect Xmas dinner. Planning is essential.

Tweetdeck, HootSuite whatever your platform of choice, the best place to start is with your content plan. What are you saying, who are you saying it too and how frequently? Once you’ve decided this, get your updates written, scheduled and ready to go.

Blog posts. Get them written in advance and schedule their release for a number of days over the two week festive period. Ensure you’ve setup up your blog posts to be automatically tweeted and added to your Facebook page too.

Crisis management. Have a plan for the worst, have a key person monitor the social platforms over the Xmas period, setup keyword alerts and ensure you have an elevation plan in case there is something urgent to respond to. Leaving a customer complaint or query unanswered is not an option.

PPC. Ensure you’ve set your maximum bids, is someone monitoring the impact that a boxing day push from a competitor might have on your performance? Just like crisis management have someone monitor performance intermittently over the festive period.

If you plan your festive support right, then roasting your chestnuts on an open fire are the only thing you’ll have to worry about over the next couple of weeks.

With the New Year slightly closer than it was when we brought you part 1 of our email marketing trends for 2012, now seems the perfect time to hit you with part 2.

The demand for relevance in messaging, the prominence of social platforms and their messaging capability and inbox competition increases will all have bearing on email performance in 2012. Read on for our final 4 thoughts on email trends for 2012.

Engagement based deliverability

Inboxes are beginning to serve emails to the inbox owner based on their behaviour, which has potentially very damaging affects for regular broadcasters with poor open rates. In 2012 we expect to see ESP’s provide an inbox that archives emails based on whether the user opens and click from a sender on a regular basis.

The Facebook messaging centre

Borrowing from the principles behind Google+ Facebook is providing users with a new way to communicate through its message centre allowing people to stay abreast of conversations between groups of people via email, text message or instant message all within Facebook’s walls. So what’s the impact for businesses broadcasting emails to consumers? It’s likely that less time will be dedicated to the traditional inbox, meaning messages will be read less frequently and open rate tails will get longer.

Email will become more valuable

Despite threats to email’s online communication dominance, an opted in email list is now more valuable than ever. With recent studies showing that an opted in email list is 23% more likely to convert to sale than other online communication channels the importance of keeping that list up to date, keeping communications relevant and timely and not losing the interest of the recipient are as important as they’ve ever been.

Open rates are set to fall. CTR’s are set to rise.

More email senders, more sophisticated inboxes, more options for online communication means less emails will be opened by recipients, whilst the volume of emails sent by brands will just keep going up. In 2012 we expect to see the open rate decline continue. On the flip side click thru rates are on the increase. With better targeting & timing, stronger calls to action and better content consumers are taking action on more emails than ever before. We’re predicting continued increases in CTR’s throughout 2012.

So the New Year is still more than 70 odd days away, but that’s no reason for us not to share with you our thoughts on the top trends that will affect your email marketing performance in 2012.

With the explosion of smartphones, social media and inbox competition over the last few years, we’ve looked at how these channels will continue to impact performance into next year. Below is Part 1 of our 2 Part series.

Inbox Overload
Email addresses have become a standard information requirement for pretty much every business when capturing a customer or prospects details. This has led to an enormous increase in inbox competition. As businesses knowledge of email marketing practices increase, so does their appetite to communicate. Making inbox standout, timeliness and targeting more important than ever.

Communication Complications
Social media has begun to threaten the effectiveness of the inbox. Faster, more up to date, easier to interact with and share, this up to the minute communication poses a series threat to email’s relevance. Compare social to email and unless you’re sitting in front of your computer with your inbox open or surgically connected to your blackberry, email reaches you when you get round to  accessing your inbox.  Being aware of the roles of both channels and their relative merits for your communication goals is essential for continued inbox success.

Portable Inboxes
Smartphone handsets now represent 30% of the entire UK mobile market and this figure is expected to grow rapidly in 2012. Optimising emails for mobile handsets, indeed creating dedicated templates for mobile handsets is becoming increasingly important. Ensuring there is a mobile optimised site at the end of a click thru is key to success with email marketing in 2012.

Smarter Inboxes
Email inboxes are smarter than ever. Providing users with automated filing, and ‘sweep’ options for mass inbox clean up. Making sure you are listed as a preferred sender or ‘starred’ as a sender they want to hear from is essential for consistently high open rates and preventing your message being deleted en mass with every other sender.

Part 2 of our ‘Email Marketing Trends for 2012′ coming soon.