Recent research from TNS revealed the number of mobile web users visiting social networking sites grew from 30% to 46% globally, highlighting that mobile phones are a crucial part of any social media activity, and will continue to do so (click here for press release). Just like Smartphone users ability to access their emails, they don’t have to rely on or be restricted to their home or work computer to access their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account and carrying a mobile in your pocket is a lot easier than carrying a laptop on your daily commute.

Mobiles are making online content even more accessible than ever before. This provides opportunities for such industries such as leisure, travel and tourism, where the target audience are frequently out and about. Hotel companies such as Hilton, Marriot, and Holiday Inn have created a large social media and mobile presence. People can use these social media sites to book rooms, read and post reviews, and interact with other hotel visitors. They can also connect to that brand at any time which fits in to their daily routine and don’t have to be strapped to a computer to do so.

Therefore, if a customer or prospective customer of your brand posts or tweets a question to your social media site it is the same principle them calling your customer service team for advice. Your social media page would be seen as a 24 hours, 7 days a week online customer service channel, even more so with mobile users logging in at different times than usual. Social media should not just be used for brands to promote new products; it is a way for your audience to communicate to your brand too, otherwise known as ‘Interactivity’.

With the amount of company information available on the internet increasing, customers are contacting brands with more complex questions and expecting a quicker response than ever before. So track of all your points of contact, including your social media page. Regularly update and monitor your pages for queries and questions, and respond to them as quickly but efficiently as possible. Interact in a personal and humanised way, so refer to them by their name when answering their questions. Encourage interaction on your profile too. I noticed an example of this on BBC Good Food’s Facebook page encourages people to ‘like’ a post if they found a blog offering seasoning tips useful. On another occasion for their page to reach 30,000 likes, they asked followers to share a post to help them reach the 30,000 mark (the post included cake recipes as a thank you!).

Finally, take advantage of mobile apps. Advertise these on your social media site and allow them to be downloadable. BBC Good Food did this on with their ‘Good Food for Friends’ application, by advertising on their Facebook page and can be downloaded straight from the page. Make use of the opportunities mobiles have to integrate online, including email and social media activity, with offline, so incorporate QR codes and SMS into your campaign to allow a multi-channel approach. This way you will have a great integrated and interactive campaign.

If you have an engaging email newsletter, it may provide a perfect platform to build a new revenue stream for your business. However, it is important to understand all the options in order to fully optimise these opportunities for your potential sponsors.

In my last post ‘Email Newsletter Sponsorship: How to do it and why’ I identified three key questions to determining whether an email newsletter could provide a sponsorship platform:
1. Does the email newsletter have a niche audience?
2. Are there analytics to measure results of sponsor campaigns?
3. Is there sufficient resource to manage?

With all criteria satisfied, we can begin to look at how to build your sponsorship assets. As emails are flexible rights, email newsletters offer a unique opportunity to highly tailor your sponsorship offering providing unlimited ways of branding and association. Two of the most common types of sponsorship inclusions within email newsletters are banner advertising and integrated placement.

Figaro Digital – the basics of banner advertising

Figaro Digital is a magazine targeting digital marketers. Their weekly email newsletter is mailed to a database of over 16,000 marketing professionals – a prime target audience for suppliers.

Their most recent email newsletter sponsor, ContentVox, was featured last week (full email here).

ContentVox’s sponsorship provided placement at a prime position (top left) as well as a banner advertisement on the bottom promoting a reader offer. By providing space both above and below the fold, Figaro Digital has ensured their sponsors will be seen regardless of click thru rates. However, the format and visual representation of the sponsorship and reader offer is not in line with Figaro Digital’s overall email newsletter branding, making it a very obvious advertisement. Furthermore, the capitalisation of FREE within the content position devalues the other messages within the rest of the communication.

On the positive side, the reader offer is in line with the context of the newsletter, providing readers free content in order to improve paid and natural search – their next event.

Internet World: Facebook enhancement

Facebook has recently sponsored marketing conference Internet World’s email newsletter (full email here) that was sent to over 85,000 registered users.

As the sponsor, Facebook took the prime location of the newsletter (top right), promotion within the main copy linking through to their speaking synopsis at the event, and are branded throughout.

This type of sponsorship illustrates a more integrated approach to email newsletter sponsorship and provides benefit to both parties. The promotion of Facebook’s involvement at the conference is a drive for new registrants, while Facebook gains further exposure, enhancing their purchased exhibitor rights.

The only downfall with this sponsorship is that it does not highlight the Facebook page that Internet World has created to promote their event, ironically promoting their Twitter account instead.

If you are looking to fully integrate sponsorship offerings within your email communications, you should include all available potential opportunities. In this case, the advocacy that Internet World could build through their own promotion of their Facebook page would build a stronger association between the two organisations, which is what they set out to do at the outset.

When I wrote about Facebook Messages back in November, I closed the piece with the thought that it was really just another form of electronic mail. Or “email”, if you will. As such, it’s bound to live or die by the same rules.

So we were a little disturbed to read this post talking about how Facebook Pages admins can load 5000 email addresses at a time to “recommend” they like the page. If Facebook finds an associated profile, it’ll do the invite internally but if not, it simply sends out a traditional email to them.

What’s more, there’s no feedback method for people who don’t want to receive such invitations. This wasn’t quite what we had in mind when they said it would revolutionise email.

Angry or disappointed?

This goes against everything responsible email marketers have fought for in the last decade and shows you can’t just saunter into the messaging businesses without a few lessons to learn. Something Google learned with Wave in its own way.

My business is currently the number one result on Google when searching for ‘email marketing’, we get all sorts of enquiries from all corners of industry. We actually end up turning many of them away based on unsuitable content, databases or other factors.

The thorough human checks we put in place mean we tend to only end up with the best most responsible clients on our books. But even as if that wasn’t enough, we also have our ultra-sophisticated last line of defence; the merciless dotMailer Watchdog.

Terms and conditions

In the case of Facebook, they seem to simply lay out the terms and conditions how they expect users to deploy the service. How carefully will they keep watch on this though? Time will tell. You can imagine the spammers’ eyes twinkling at the opportunity here.

When you consider that there actually appears to have been something of a crackdown on spammers recently, have the criminal fraternity started to look at other ways of driving traffic to their websites? ESPs with lots of data and with IPs of great reputation are also a natural target to pursue as we have seen in the recent warnings from Returnpath.

This is something that people in our business including resellers have to take really seriously- and something Facebook will have to pay real attention to.

Moving on

Facebook Messages is just in the trial phase at the moment so hopefully this is something that will be ironed out but its exemplary of the dangers it faces. If they can slip up in an area of such fundamental importance, does that bode well for the rest of this new offering?

Time will tell.

Now, not wanting to belabour the point, here are some interesting stats from Pingdom that show that not only is email is alive and kicking but is also growing – faster than social media.

So just looking at users of email and the growth of email accounts within the past year here are some figures to chew on:

Email:

1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide
480 million: New email users since the year before
2.9 billion: The number of email accounts worldwide

Social Media:

175 million: People on Twitter as of September 2010
100 million: New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
600 million: People on facebook at the end of 2010
150 million: New people on Facebook in 2010

With the new year upon us, I always find it interesting to pause and look back on what happened in 2010 – it was a big year in email marketing.

We saw major changes to the inbox with Microsoft and Yahoo changing the way people can see their inbox thanks to filters which show only emails from your friends and family. Google went further and released their Priority Inbox feature, which aimed to learn which emails are important to you and promote them to the top of your inbox accordingly. It was also a bad year for postmasters with major ISPs continuing to increase automation of spam filters and reputation and decrease staffing.

The much prophesied death of email continued to be delayed, despite continuous proclamations that social media would lead to its death. In the end, Facebook ate their words and upped their game “launching” new email features that group messages by sender rather than conversation or date (Note: it doesn’t seem to be widely available yet!). I sense integration between these two channels is set to intensify in 2011.

I am sure there is plenty more that I have forgotten – feel free to add your highlights in the comments below.

On Monday Facebook introduced new communication channels for its users – including the offering of a @facebook.com email address.

How will this affect email marketing? Here’s a round up of articles:

1. Return Path: “10 Ways for Email Marketers to Survive Facebook Messages“
2. Mark Brownlow: “Actually, Facebook changes everything (and nothing)”
3. Dave Chaffey: “5 Implications of the New Facebook email services“
4. eCircle: “Marketers should embrace Facebook’s “this is not email” announcement“
5. Dotmailer: “Introducing Facebook Messages“
6. SCMagazine: “Facebook introduces Messages to allow users to contact unsubscribed friends, but denies that it is an email service“
7. The Relevancy Group: “Why Facebook Email Adoption Will Soar Past Gmail“

Here’s a question to pose to anyone who still thinks social media will bring about the death of email. If that statement were true, then why are social media companies increasingly focused on improving their email deliverability?

The answer of course is that email is essential for the growth and profitability of social networks. In fact, social media companies are becoming some of the largest volume senders in the email universe, with hundreds of millions of messages being sent to their members each day. These emails include everything from status updates, friend/follower requests, wall postings, updates on tagged photos and invitations to join the network. It’s no wonder that ensuring those messages reach their members’ inboxes is crucial to the success of a social media company’s business.

However, social networks often have a higher mountain to climb when it comes to improving their inbox placement rates. Why? Because some of their practices—especially involving growing their member bases—drive a higher than average number of complaints when compared to other email marketers. Complaints negatively impact on sending reputation (the primary metric used by ISPs when determining how to route commercial email), and as a result, deliverability suffers.

What practices am I referring to? One in particular: allowing users/members to import their entire address books and then sending email invitations to those addresses to join the social network. These invitation emails often result in high volumes of complaints and can also increase the number of unknown users and spam trap addresses the social networking company is mailing to. This in turn damages their sending reputation, which lowers their chances of reaching the inbox.  Complaints and list quality in particular have a huge impact on whether a sender’s email gets routed to the junk/bulk/spam folder or goes missing all together.

So what’s a social networker to do? First, it’s important to regularly monitor inbox placement across the various ISPs and track complaints using feedback loops. Second, social networkers need to stop the risky practice of allowing users to import their address books. Finally, they need to undertake a renewed focus on the subscriber/member experience. How? Here are few ideas:

1. Create a user-friendly preference centre. Allow members to easily access it. Let them choose the types of email communications they want to receive, such as only friend updates, notifications, or wall postings. Promote the preference centre everywhere, including in the footer of every email, the welcome message, the website, the unsubscribe landing page and the member’s profile/account page. Encourage members to use it to customise the types of messages they are receiving and the frequency they are being sent.
2. Clearly communicate the privacy policy. Rather than using a lot of legal terminology, explain in simple and easy to understand terms how the member’s personal information will and won’t be used. Explain how this information can be made public or kept private and how it will be shared with other members. Learn a lesson from Facebook’s recent privacy issues, now being aggressively addressed in Germany.
3. Set the proper expectations. During the account creation/joining stage, explain what members can expect from the email program. Outline its benefits and clearly describe the program’s content and frequency. Provide links to examples of the emails being sent. The more information that is provided at this early stage, the better informed and prepared members will be for the emails to come.

Want more information? Learn how Return Path helped Friends Reunited improve their inbox delivery by over 25%. Read the case study here.

I recently saw the chart below from Morgan Stanley showing that social networks have now overtaken email in terms of usage and total users.

Now whilst the global number of users does not look very accurate (See Return Path’s post here for a good look at why); I think a useful takeaway is the upwards trend of both social networks and email. This is very much because there is a place for both. Or to be more clear; the future of email is inside the social networking environment.

What do I mean by this?

Well social networks provides a better visualisation of a user’s network of contacts and the content it generates. It does this by separating different use cases into different areas within the interface. Be it the news feed; the messages box (read email) or the photo area. Here are some of the use cases for social networks today:

1. Sharing content (photos; videos; links)
2. Updating people on your status/short messages notifying your network
3. Managing your network of contacts
4. Managing events
5. Social Gaming

In the past email took over all of these albeit for a smaller network of friends. Yes even Social Gaming – you used to be able to play chess, monopoly and even Civilization over email!

Just imagine receiving everyday in your inbox links to all your friends latest photo albums – whether you were there or not – links to whatever Youtube video they just liked – and dozens of one liner emails (and their friends’ responses) about what they had for breakfast that morning. You know what? Email would be dead under that scenario. It would be unusable.

Social networks allow you to keep track of and interact with a much larger network of people. In theory, though it doesn’t work well today, it should place the content you care about the most in front of you; pushing the rest of the content into a separate view which you can dip into as needed. Messages shift off the screen and disappear unless you actively go looking.

Email’s purpose is therefore changing. A Microsoftie at the Media Post Email Insider Summit recently mentioned that consumers are using Hotmail primarily for business purposes today. That is because the C2C (consumer to consumer) communications have shifted inside the social network already. Over time I see these coming together again or possibly delivering into separate views inside a social network. “New Email” now has a smaller number of reasons to use it but this is a positive. Email was struggling to cope with all the use cases it had before and has now limited to:

1. Private longer form or “letter” type messaging
2. Private attachments (confidential presentations; documents etc)
3. Messages that need to be retained in the future (receipts; vouchers etc)
4. Other business and marketing communications
5. Notifications.

Good marketers understand where their audience is and so ignoring social media opportunities within social networks is a dangerous game; but then so is ignoring email. People still want to receive valuable information from companies they are interested in; they will happily join fan pages on Facebook and still sign up for emails as long as there is value to them in doing so.

Email will move into the social network itself; in fact the seeds have already been planted with Facebook Messages or Twitter Direct Messages. What is next is also clear. Facebook have already announced they are rolling out an email platform; whilst Myspace webmail has already launched.

From a marketer’s perspective; does it matter that the inbox sits within a Facebook account or within a Google account? I think not.

In December we conducted our Annual E-Mail Attitudes Research to establish how general consumer attitudes to email have changed in the last year. We expected to see change in email perception, especially given the growing feeling that control of content is the entitlement of the masses, however, what we received back from the research was a resounding confirmation that consumers expect a lot more from e-mail as a marketing channel.

The research made it apparent that the momentum which had been building for several years with the advent of sites like Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, finally reached a critical mass of enthusiasm for the power of the individual over content.

At e-Dialog we have been consistently advocating the importance of preference when it comes to sharing relevant content with your customer base, and engaging with them on as many touch points on the customer life cycle as possible. To the extent we’ve begun to feel like a broken record.

As one of my colleagues, Luke Griffiths, discussed in an article on the results, our E-Mail Attitudes Survey confirmed that those brands that continue to send generic communications risk alienating consumers. 53 per cent of consumers would opt-in to a service which allows them to select the type of e-mail messages received from their preferred brands. This reveals that brands could be limiting the marketing potential of tactics such as “share-with-a-friend” (SWAF), by not giving them a choice over content.

This research also showed that not only has perceived relevance of marketing e-mails decreased over the past year, but consumers are actively removing themselves from mailing lists.
With a prediction of further sizeable increases in the volume of e-mails consumers receive, brands are going to have to work harder not just to gain the attention of the consumer, but even simply to ensure their marketing messages do not end up being discarded in the inbox.

17 per cent of those who feel that e-mail has become more relevant in the past year claim this is as a result of opting out of e-mails which are not of interest or that they no longer wish to receive. The implication of this is that where consumers have control over the frequency and type of e-mail they receive, engagement and interest increases. Clearly more research is needed to verify these results, but all indications are that the trend we are seeing in other channels applies to e-mail. Give consumers power over the content they receive and engagement will increase.

However, this in itself poses a challenge, as consumers are much less likely to give brands a chance to get it right if they are able to unsubscribe or alter their preferences after one or two inappropriate messages.

Something which all of us have really taken away from the results of this research has been that overlooking your customer’s right to chose will have a detrimental effect on the email marketing campaign. However, it needn’t be a time-consuming process to establish this. Customer preference can be easily collected through an online preference centre or customer outreach. If registration is required to access a service, then it is a simple process to collect a little more data at this stage. Giving the consumer control of e-mail frequency and content guarantees that they are receiving something they genuinely need and want.

This year’s research has clearly demonstrated that managing consumer preferences will provide the greatest challenges for marketers over the next year. However marketers have a huge opportunity to engage with consumers through an increased desire and propensity to share content and use different channels to interact with a brand.

Facebook has recently announced that businesses with applications on the social network will soon be able to ask users for their email address and permission to contact them directly:

“We’re excited to announce that you will soon have the ability to ask users for their primary Facebook email addresses, providing you with a direct channel to communicate with your users”

Currently, applications can communicate with users through internal Facebook notifications, but this doesn’t really provide much opportunity to build a more personalised and direct relationship with users of the social network.

With the new changes to Facebook, application owners will be able to specify optional or mandatory email permissions when users install or use an application. But let’s be clear.  The emphasis here should be firmly on social media and any marketer thinking this is a quick win to getting a new database to blast is mistaken.  Facebook itself has given some advice to marketers on how to most effectively use this new functionality:

“We recommend you use email to send them interesting and relevant information, like receipts for purchases they make, messages to help reactivate them if they haven’t visited your application or integration in a while, or newsletters promoting new features or contests.”

Integration is key

We’ve covered the links between social media and email a number of times on the blog and I wrote earlier this month about a great campaign from Fat Face that utilised the power of email and social media in combination to great effect.

This move by Facebook allows email even greater levels of integration and throws water on the fire that social will be the death of email. The use of social media and email working together (as with other channels) rather than in spite of is just as much a central part of any marketing campaign. This is backed up by Facebook’s announcement that they intend to provide a functional email client.

Of course it goes without saying that the way in which businesses use this valuable data will ultimately dictate how valuable it becomes. Facebook itself has put together a list of fairly stringent rules and regulations that can be found on the developer wiki.

Companies that use this data correctly will be able to elevate the relationship they have with these users. But companies that use this as a way to further bombard contacts with marketing messages, with no targeting or segmentation, will very quickly find the data become useless and, even worse, that users end their relationship with the brand on Facebook and email.