Using Interactive Media in Email Marketing

Emailmarketing Just in case you haven’t heard, there’s a lot you can do with “web 2.0” in your email marketing. It’s not just about text, photos/graphics and links.

Today you have a range of possibilities where interactive and multimedia is concerned.

Video

If you’ve got good, relevant and engaging video content (for example product demos) then you can definitely use these in your email marketing. Use YouTube or Vimeo to host your video and link to it from the newsletter. You should have a channel for your company on YouTube and you should be uploading videos there and embedding them on your website. In fact, I would suggest creating a video landing page on your website and linking to it from your newsletter.

Make sure you have descriptive text for the video in your email. Don’t count on people clicking on the video just because you put a screen capture image in there. And make sure it’s more than just a simple caption. Tell them what the video is about, who’s in it and why it’s relevant. If it’s a how-to or something along those lines, include some points about what viewers of the video can expect to learn from it. Also, tell them how long the video is.

Polls

Polls are a great way to initiate feedback with your subscribers about issues which are important to them. Heck, a poll is a great way for you to find out what issues even exist. Polls are not about you or your product. Opinion polls should be about your subscribers and be a conduit for them to share their opinions directly with you.

You can create a poll landing page on your site if you like. I personally think that any kind of interactive feature should be embedded on the corporate site and not be located off site. Why would you want to send people any where else but to your website from your newsletter? The landing page can also be an archive where people can view results from old polls.

You can share the results in real time in the newsletter or drive them back to the landing page for the results. I suggest using a combination where you drive people back to the poll landing page if they want real time results and feature the results of the previous poll along with the new poll each within the newsletter. Include an optional comment field with polls so you can share those in your newsletter too.

Your Email Service Provider may offer polls as a feature you can easily incorporate in your email marketing or you can use one of many online poll services such as Survey Monkey.

RSS

RSS is a powerful and too often overlooked information feature. If you aren’t offering a RSS feed at your website you should and you should be promoting the feed in your newsletter. RSS is especially good if you offer frequent product updates or other information which will enhance the user experience.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are critical for conversions. Don’t drive people from your newsletter to a cluttered page! Make sure the page your links go to are optimized to be relevant and engaging to the user and why they clicked. If your CTA in your newsletter was about juicers then the subscriber shouldn’t have to go hunting for that information on the landing page you linked to – the page should be just about the juicer your NL talked about. Keep landing pages clean and optimized for each conversion path.

Email Vendor Features and Functions Guide: Differences Between Email Vendors Bigger Than Expected

Email vendor guides This week the European Email Vendor Features and Functions Guide is released, the second part of the guide that offers side-by-side comparison of in total 53 ESPs worldwide.

The first worldwide edition of John Caldwell’s guide

In a collaboration between our friend John Caldwell‘s Red Pill Email and Social Email Marketing contributor Jordie van Rijn his Emailmonday, this will be the first time there will be a world edition.

Adding the European vendors the number of included ESPs is effectively doubled, thus presenting a more complete overview of the international ESP marketplace.

Jordie van Rijn: “We see a lot of ESP’s expanding their services abroad. Sometimes with very aggressive methods and competitive pricing to get a bigger piece of the email market. We are seeing that American suppliers look at Europe for innovation and clients, and vice versa. The US version has been running for two years, now the European vendors are also included.”

Differences between European Email Service Providers

While all ESPs find it important that email marketing strategy is well thought out, 20% of the email vendors don’t offer any email strategy advice. A quarter doesn’t offer creative services.

In the email tools themselves there are also large differences. If you would like to have some more control of you data than just a simple export mechanism, it is advisable to look at all the different ESP offerings. From the questions the guide asked European ESPs about data control there where suppliers that offered 89% of all functionalities, but there were also some that only offered 20%.

A new trend is offering pre-configuered campaigns, like an abandoned cart campaign, a welcome mail and automatic resends to non-openers. With this type of e-mailings, much is gained in conversion and efficiency. But only 2 out of the 28 European Email vendors offered all types of pre-configured emailings. The majority offers less than 40% and a few don’t offer any of these campaigns.  

Contents of the guide
The 2011 Email Vendor Features & Functions Guides show side-by-side comparisons of 53 email vendors ranging from small market table vendors to commercial MTAs and points in between, with over 200 essential questions asked. For the first time, a desktop application was added that helps users to identify the vendors best suited to their needs based on their own business criteria.

John Caldwell, the author of the guide has been in the email space since 1996. The Red Pill Email founder, has worked on the agency side, the client side, and as a consultant, using deployment tools that range from ESPs to in-house to home-grown email systems.

Jordie van Rijn, contributing editor of the EU Email Vendor Features and Functions guide, is an independent email marketing consultant. With his company Emailmonday he has over 8 years of hands-on experience as an e-mail marketing and loyalty marketing consultant.