I had the opportunity to tune in to the eMarketer webinar, Email Best Practices in the Age of Social and Mobile.  Once THE hot marketing vehicle with unbelieveable conversion rates, it has acquired a not-so stellar reputation, mostly due to spam and other less-than-ethical practices.  However, with the advent of social media and mobile, email has been reborn (tip: Facebook marketing now boasts some of the highest conversion rates).  Return Path Principal Analyst David Hallarman presents a webinar that covers these topics:

• About email’s integral place among digital messaging channels, such as social networks and mobile
• Why deliverability challenges increase with multichannel communications, and how to overcome them
• How to address customer preferences for communications on multiple devices
• Ways to optimize email for pass-along via email or social networks
• How the right email service provider can smooth out the process

Social and email marketing are the dynamic duo. Start using email marketing to convert social media into revenue. Some organizations are leery of controlling responses from their customers.

But those conversations, positive and negative, are happening anyway and you will not know about it if you are not involved in social media.

Inform yourself and understand how many promoter there are vs detractors. You can help shape the buzz and social media gets you into the conversation.

How to get started? Think of this as “return on engagement”. The Interactive marketer should influence social chatter, master social communication and develop social assets.

The greatest growth is in users 35+.

Social sharing allows email recipients to share email content on social networks.

Example: A wine newsletter–go to the daily facebook page. On the page, participate in groups and get the information on the site. Post the bottle notes to Facebook and reach people beyond the opt-in list. Create a discussion board on Facebook.

Here’s another one;
The AdAge newsletter drives people to the AdAge video twitter page. You click on the twitter banner on home page and that takes you to the twitter video page. Click on the video links and go to the video content on the web site. Create the hot spots.  These practices will grow your opt-in list and increase retention. A typical fall off rate is 30%.

Another example:  Mabel & Zora
An outbound email encourages people to visit their social media sites. Facebook friends go to twitter and the discussion there. There it encourages people to opt-in to regular communications via the email newsletter.

How much resources are needed to get results? Start small and in a focused manner. Get a small team of people in place to take care of the focused presence—Facebook, for ex. Name an overall leader, name modest goals, and once you have success, then carve out a person for a dedicated function and create more specific goals. This can happen over a month or so. It depends.

Keep your efforts internal (agencies can be helpful but only you can present your authentic voice to the market).

Social media metric tools are only now entering the buying space. What is out there now?

Web analytics — set up specific campaigns to track social media programs that drive to your website.

Social bookmarking — do a quick map report. How many are clicking on your social media icons?

Assets posted to your social media page can also be measured. You can track conversions at landing pages too.

Use your email marketing solution – there are tools there. Create trackable urls whenever possible and track those within the email marketing solution. Put a link on your FB page and track how that drives to your email marketing page.

So get started!
Add share buttons to your emails. Include prominent encouragement to subscribe – give them an incentive
Build your brand. Create a presence on your target market social media networks. Then create your own fan page or group on networks pages. Gently encourage them to join you. Offer advice, tips.

Drive email reps to landing pages that have social sharing buttons on them. Watch as your offer gets passed virally.

Lyris offers a guide at www.lyris.com/go/smmroi.

The beauty of this is that you can hold conversations with people who log on to your social media sites. Ask them what they are interested in (re: content). You may be only 2% of the conversation but you need to find out what will meet their needs.

View the slides and webinar.

How are you making Email work in your marketing with social media and mobile?

I recently participated in a HubSpot webinar presented by Kipp Bodnar and Jeanne Hopkins, part of HubSpot’s Marketing Team, to learn more on how to adapt and optimize my websites in order to remain competitive in the future.

Search engines can drive a lot of traffic, and SEO (search engine optimization) is important for any marketer to get at least your fair share of search engine traffic. However, there are a lot of changes in how search engines work, and more changes are coming, as search engines incorporate more data based on location, real-tim e information and social media and the social graph.

Here are some of the topics they covered:

I picked up several excellent takeaways:

Major Trends:

For all you niche marketers out there, here’s good news: long tail keywords are becoming more often used and valuable. People are getting better at searching.

I could go on, but there really is much in this SEO webinar, it’s best if you view the slides and webinar

What are you doing now to take advantage of these changes?

If you haven’t started marketing on Facebook, now is the time. Justin Kistner’s Webtrends webinar, “Facebook Marketing Secrets: Ads, Apps and Analytics”, lays out both a powerful argument for devoting resources to marketing on Facebook and reveals several secrets to help you be successful by creating awareness, getting the engagement and driving sales.

Kistner talks about how social media marketing has evolved from the classic online marketing model.

Social media marketing campaigns work differently. Facebook is a destination site. The average user spends 7 hours a month on Facebook. This presents an enormous opportunity for marketers. We need to think of social media marketing as a combination of email marketing and online marketing.

However, Kistner says that we must understand that Facebook campaigns perform better when they stay in Facebook. The is a very important distinction. Rather than using Facebook to drive traffic to other locations, Facebook marketing is effective when the campaign is centered on user activity within Facebook.

Now in some instances, when done properly and in the proper sequence, fans can be directed to your website’s landing page, but again, it’s not about driving people to a sales page, it’s about developing relationships with people. Once those relationships are strong and you have built trust, then conversions are possible.

Kistner lays out simple steps:

In the webinar, Kistner reveals several secrets.

Here’s a secret to Facebook advertising.

Use ads to retarget your fans with engagement campaigns.
How: use “like” targeting reach only your fans.

Targeting Likes is better than targeting Interests. People become fans of pages on a regular basis. (Interests don’t get updated). Pictures are the secret to ads. They make people pay attention to your ad. Photos are the connection rather than keywords for social media marketing. The photo you use should be targeting the interest you are targeting (ex: car on the golf course, clubs in the trunk of the car).

You can use a call to action that gives them a statement that they can like or not. Use this call to action rather than a statement: “become a fan of our page.” Remember: use like targeting to reach only your fans.

App Secret
Calls to action for engagement work better than conversion. Drive traffic inside Facebook so they can buy directly from you there or sign up for a webinar, etc.

Earned Media Secret
Users share to make statements about their identity. Use a call to action that allows them do this. Ask them for their opinion, for example. You end up using your fan base to use your wall posts to drive 1000′s more to your fan page. Earned media repeats the cycle. How? Activity is shared in the news feed. The average user has 130 friends. The goal with advertising and earned media is to drive people to your fan page

Marketing Campaign Secret
More than 3 wall posts a week is considered too much. Content ages every 10-14 days, so keep it fresh!

Kistner concludes with some great advice on social media marketing.

Get good at placing ads on Facebook. Look to targeting and optimization at scale.

If you are doing a large campiagn, optimization needs to be done automatically with rules you set up. Targeting–only send to people who are your friends and the call to action should be for engagement.

Apps
Fresh content and testing–you need to do rapid iterations and test to get the engagement, earned media and conversion rolling for you.

Earned Media
To take advantage of social media marketing, you need to take advantage of earned media. This is the best KPI for your social media marketing (KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are commonly used by an organization to evaluate its success or the success of a particular activity in which it is engaged).

Kistner ends the webinar with this advice: “Measure and improve….”

View the webinar here.

1. Did you see the last episode of LOST, the TV show? It was crammed full of commercials. You want your Facebook presence to be LOST (the show, the content, the experience) itself, not the marketing/advertising of LOST.

2. With Facebook, facilitate existing relationships. You want to be making those friendships better than they were.

3. Important! Profiles – people have profiles, brands (companies) have pages. To do marketing on Facebook, use a page, not a profile. You create pages from your profile.

4. Know your audience (do your research-what do they like, what are they doing?)

5. Avoid buzzwords (that includes SEO, optimization, marketing, advertising, integrated, leverage) You dont have a beer with a friend and talk about leveraging. We tend to talk socially about fun, positive interesting things (usually). When I talk about this blog post on my Facebook page, note that I won’t use the word “marketing”.

6. Food is awesome on Facebook! Ice cream, choc, milk, fruit, and sugar rank highly.

7. Most liked page types
movie
TV show
book
musician or band
television
athlete
actor

8. Least liked pages
religious organizations (some do really well though)
pets
bars
pharma
writer
nonprofit
retail
education
restaurants
hotels
websites

9. Is Facebook a good way to market a blog? Yes it is. The share button on your article within your blog site is becoming more used, an important channel for marketing.

10. Emphasize social proof. Make sure your like or recommendation buttons for your articles etc are in super prominent positions.

11. Video Sharing. Effect of the word video on sharing: the word video in the title is shared 30% more on FB and 30% less on Twitter. Video is more embedded on facebook than Twitter. Facebook is more video friendly, and people use Facebook more on the weekends when they are likely to watch online video. Twitter users are a more geeky and techy audience. Twitter is often used in the office, where people are less likely to watch a video that is not work related.

12. When writing for Facebook, plain and simple works best (avoid excessive use of adjectives and adverbs).

13. Most Facebook shareable words (words that encourage people to share what you wrote with others)
facebook (don’t overuse this word on Facebook — on Twitter, fine, there is lots of talk about Facebook and Twitter on Twitter).
why
most
world
how
health
bill
big
says
best
video you
apple
media
top (lists do well — note that I used the word top in my article title here)
first
obama

14. Least shareable words
vs
apps
review
down
poll
game
york
twitter
social
time
iphone

15. Think Mainstream (ask yourself–why do people like the jersey shore, for example).

Some final thoughts:

Again, don’t use your profile for marketing. Use your profile when you are connecting with people. You can friend a customer or thought leader from your personal profile. For instance, you may be interested in your customer’s favorite book or an article they shared.

Is Facebook relevant to Business to Business marketing? Yes!
We can drop the perception that people in companies are in the office all the time. They are consumers in other settings, they are people like ourselves, they like movies, have their favorite books and other interests.
Make your page something people will want to interact with on a personal level.