4. Feature
Article:
'The
New Inbox': Mobile's
Impact on
Email Marketing and Social Media
Sundeep Kapur
I had an opportunity to
share the stage with Simms Jenkins
at SES New York in March, where we shared best practices on email and mobile.
Simms gave me a copy of his new book - "The New Inbox" - and I want to highlight a few things.
With more than 40 percent
of consumers checking their email messages on the mobile smartphone, Simms
offers a few tips to ensure success. He calls them new tricks, technology, and
savvy testing.
With the messaging device
being mobile and ever-present with the consumer, businesses have the
opportunity to conduct "right time messaging - right message on the right
device." And if you do this well, your opportunity to connect and engage
goes up - you can measure this by a read, a click, or a purchase.
Here are three of the
seven ideas from this section.
First, smartphone users
are more likely to read emails than to make calls.
Second, it takes the
reliance on mobile even further by highlighting that people read more email on
a mobile browser than any other browser. I know I use my mobile device to
filter out my content and then perhaps use another "laptop-based"
browser to respond to other messages.
Third, Simms shares some
statistics of consumers deleting email or unsubscribing from email based on the
mobile messaging experience - proving that how you render on mobile really
matters.
As you build your mobile
strategy, Simms offers five key considerations.
- Subject lines are really important, as they
set the tone for the rest of the message.
- Your primary call-to-action should be a button
and not a link.
- Your message should deliver value. Think about
this one; you have taken consumers' precious time to look at your message
on a mobile device - make the message worth their time.
- Talk to your audience as if you know something
about them (aka, be relevant).
- Test, learn, retest, and keep learning.
Simms highlights a
chapter in his book on ideal ways to leverage email and social media to drive
consumer engagement - he calls them the new best practices.
In another chapter, Simms
talks about "surefire ways to get your emails read" by focusing on a
few things - from field, subject lines, personalization, and length of
campaigns. I took the liberty of summarizing the entire chapter - which is full
of many practical tips and a lot more detail.
The book offers advice to
digital marketers serving both B2C and B2B industries. The ideas are pragmatic
and very relevant to enterprises of different sizes. Simms actually dedicated a
chapter to small-and-medium-sized businesses.
From my personal
experiences I would really like brands to leverage mobile to both send digital
receipts and engage via social media. This real-time interaction will add value
to your email marketing program and help build up on user-generated content.
Mobile payments, mobile
preferences, and mobile messaging will play an ever-more impactful role in
consumer communications. Get Simms' book for yourself - it offers real examples
and advice on how to grow your list, create better emails, what to test, and
how to drive more sales.
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About the Author
Sundeep Kapur - NCR, has been assisting organizations with their converged
channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to
converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple
industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, and
personalize and speak to consumers more effectively.
He is an
industry-recognized expert who has delivered keynotes, run panels, and
delivered "relevant, inspirational, and outstanding" education for
organizations around the world.
Sundeep is also an avid
user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, and video into a
conversational digital book. His daily dose of best practices can be found at www.EmailYogi.com, where he
has more than 1,200 articles on best practices.
source: www.Clickz.com
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