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"Email is a Cool Vampire"

With all the Twilight/In True Blood craze it was an appropriate and quirky way to make you rethink something that has somewhat been forgotten.

E-mail isn’t sexy, but it can be effective and lets face it – e-mails are an integral part of your consumer’s life, so it is time to understand how to use it properly. So I thought I would interpret this for you into local relevance.

Their 3 key reasons for this were:

“1.You must invite them in – Though few would knowingly opt-in for a couple of fangs in the neck, email opt-ins provide a responsive audience for your message.”

Ok so what is a good example of this? I chatted to the experts from Digital Fire who are email marketing specialists. The first thing is of course to ensure that your database has opted in! They then recommend that the best approach is to be very clear about how you manage consumers’ expectations about the communication that you will be sending to them. Indicate how often you will be emailing them and exactly what. “An inbox is a personal space, so use wording that will create a sense of trust and a feeling of inclusion in an insiders club” (Digital Fire)

2. They are profitable – Let’s face it, Love Story + Vampires = $$$. For email the equation is Opt-in + Smart Messaging = $$$. Translation: Digital Fire successfully assisted a large E-commerce platform in South Africa to profile their database, and not only did sales increase, the client now experiences an average ROI of five times the invested amount each time they broadcast an E-mail.

3. Email will not die – Numbers of experts have predicted the death of email but nobody is holding a funeral yet. When used properly, email is a simple and consistent communication device that is almost unanimously used.”

Again, the key lies in using E-mail to build a clean, profiled database.

An example of an expertly managed and executed email campaign is one in which Digital Fire took a database of roughly 900 and, through effective viral E-mail campaigns, they grew the databse to over 17000 individuals.

To summarise, the key to a successful E-mail marketing campaign is to transparently manage consumer expectations and use E-mail in a non-invasive, trustworthy way. Create something viral that is relevant to your market. You won’t fail.

You can read the full article on http://www.convinceandconvert.com/email-marketing-advice/3-reasons-email-is-the-coolest-vampire-today/

“Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.”

Facebook hired Nielsen Co. to conduct a study. They found out the following; sales boost by 68% when a “pop-up” ad is “liked” by one of their friends on their facebook page. It enhances the recall of the ad by 68% and doubles awareness of a brand’s message.

Currently Facebook sits at 500 million users and is generating more than $1 billion this year in revenues and has opened five international sales offices.

Brands are now starting to pay more attention to how to maximize Facebook and are slowly moving away from the free advertising tools to using what they call ‘social content\ adverts.” Which in simple terms is full on advertising, combined with the free tools.

For example Ford used the site’s free options, such as creating fan pages, to build up groups of fans who would share pictures and stories about their cars over the site.

Now Ford is in talks to buy social ads to promote the launch of the new 2011 Ford Explorer, which will be unveiled on Facebook later this month – they are willing to spend up to $100,000 on such homepage ads!

Most of our SA brands see FB as an effective SM platform to generate some buzz and build some communities, but now we need start viewing it as an alternative to traditional media – even TV/ Print.

I asked the Commercial Channel Manager at Habari Media, if this was activated in South Africa and this is his response:

“Yes the engagement ads featuring social context is available in South Africa and we have been offering this for a few months now.

According to Nielsen’s new product called Brandlift™ a user has a massive increase in purchase intent, ad recall and brand awareness based on seeing ads with social content and organic feeds. It is a fascinating study and proves that recommendations plays a massive role in purchases.”

Take a look at this article to gain a better understanding:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsenfacebook-ad-report/

Use Google Blog search alerts to watch blog-related mentions for your company, its competitors, and the marketplace you are in.  Simply do a search, click on Everything (on the left), choose Blog, and then at the bottom of the results page you will see a link that says “Create an email alert for…”.  Set this up and you begin to shift into a listening mode.

Use Google’s Update search to get social media updates, in real-time.  Again, do a google search, click on Everything (on the left), and choose Updates.  You will get real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and countless other social networks.

RSS Feeds still rule, in my opinion. Use Google Reader to track updates from various sites.  Yes, your CIO might be blocking this if you are in that 38% group.  However, give it a try, you may be surprised.

The top line findings of the research shows in the last 12 months:
• 81% of consumers have searched for or read a user review for a product or service they were interested in buying
• 29% have written a user review and 23% have discussed a product or service in an online forum/blog
• 37% say they are most likely to write a review when the product or service didn’t meet their expectations, with less – 28% – prompted by a great experience
• 48% of respondents who would write an online review say their motivation for writing a review is to try and change how the company services/deals with its customers with 56% saying it’s to ensure other people don’t make the same mistake
• 62% say they have come close to buying something and then changed their mind because of a bad review or warning
• Consumers are most likely to look for recommendations for electrical products (61%); hotels (55%) and gadgets such as MP3 players (38%)
• In terms of sectors, consumers who would write reviews online are more motivated to make an online recommendation or criticism on hotels (45% would write to recommend, 43% to criticise) and restaurants/bars/clubs (36% recommend, 36% to criticise). Broadband, telephony providers (9% recommend, 16% criticise) and cable/satellite TV (15% recommend, 26% criticise)are much more likely to attract negative reviews.

1. Rate & review your products
2. Create testimonials
3. Share content with their social networks like videos, white papers, how-to guides
4. Share promotional offers with their social networks, driving qualified leads and sales
5. Get friends to join loyalty clubs
6. Recommend your brand, products, or services by clicking on “I Recommend This” badges
7. Answer prospects’ questions, reducing shopping cart abandonment and increasing conversions
8. Respond to blog postings about your brand, product, or service
9. Provide feedback about why they recommend your brands, products, or services
10. Give you valuable ideas on how to improve your products and services

(This is an exert from an article published by Tremor, written by Steve Knox)

The brain is designed not to think. Did that line disrupt your thought process? It happens to be true. Our brains are designed to try to remain in a static state, to reserve their processing power for true emergencies or survival. A mechanism the brain uses to remain in this static state is the use of schemas, mental models that we use to make the world work. They enable us to assume things and use the model to fill in the missing details.

Disrupting a schema turns out to be at the core of all word-of-mouth. The brain cannot live in a state of disequilibrium. One way it gets back to its static state is by talking about the disruption. Significant disruption causes sustained talk. Word-of-mouth on brands uses these same cognitive principles. Consumers talk about brands when we disrupt a schema. They talk when we give them a piece of surprise that does not fit inside their mental model.

Effective word-of-mouth disrupts schemas that are tied to the core of your category and brand. We call this the foundational truth. Disruption can never stray too far from the foundational truth or the consumer rejects it. Effective word-of-mouth that drives consumer advocacy disrupts mildly, not wildly, from the consumers’ foundational truth.

Bringing the world of cognitive science into your marketing can pay huge dividends. Before you become enamored with the latest technology, stop and ask yourself, “What are the core schemas at play and how are we disrupting them?” Understanding why a consumer wants to talk about your brand is one of the breakthrough areas of marketing.

“People talk about your brand when brands can’t scale to listen – the playground, the water cooler, the supermarket, the coffee shop. Using the Internet as a real-time focus group, we can see deeper understanding of how our brands are talked about online – who is talking, what they’re saying, where they’re saying it, and what motivates them to say it. This allows us as brand marketers to then figure out “What do I want people to say about me” and then work from there to develop compelling product and associated marketing that will elicit that response.

But we dont only need the internet. If consumers know you are truly interested, they will tell you exactly what they tell their friends. As a brand manager you just need to be able to take it – because most of the time it isn’t what you want to hear!