Digital Marketing Outlook: Separating Hype from High Impact

We can be sure that email is not going to die; it’s here to stay and even growing. Email is moving on every day from mainly commercial ‘one size fits all’ communication, which often lacks personalization and relevance (SPAM), to deep integration into the business-critical processes of organizations. The digitization of communication has only just begun, and email will play an increasingly important role in sales and marketing, as well as in service processes.

Joost Nienhuis – CEO Tripolis Solutions

I think that full video in email will take a lot longer to be fully adopted than many have first predicted. Although the majority of current video plays within client views are seen on iOS devices, I believe that more traditional desktop providers will be much slower to follow suit. I don’t foresee this change happening significantly in the near future. That’s not to say that it won’t happen at some point, however!

Lisa Coombes – Account Manager Variant4

Gmail’s inbox feature, “Tabs,” received undue digital marketing attention and spread fears that its promotion tab would be the end of email marketing. This was fueled by frantic pleas from businesses requesting Gmail users to move marketing emails from the promotions tab to the primary tab, assuming subscribers would dislike the new feature.

A more prudent course of action was to educate Gmail users about the many options they have to customize their inbox. This presented an opportunity to demonstrate a brand’s willingness to help subscribers adapt and successfully navigate new technology.

From my viewpoint, tabs were just the latest inbox innovation (and I am sure there will be more) to guide permission-based messages into the “correct” folder. For those who prefer email to other communication channels, this might be the best place for a brand’s email to reside. Here, the recipient has clear expectations for the type of messages in the folder, little distraction from personal communications, and the intention to discover sales, coupons, or deals.

W. Jeffrey Rice – Former Sr. Researcher Analyst at MarketingSherpa and Director of Marketing Strategy at Brick Street Software

The death of email is greatly exaggerated. Email remains the killer app. Even the fear that international spy agencies can snoop on your every email won’t limit its growth. It will remain the focal point for communication across the Internet.

Nickolas-Eckert – CEO Graphicmail

While mobile deserves all the hype it has been getting, I think significant investment in tying Social to the marketing mix is something that makes sense for very specific industries and companies. This is not to say that Social is not important or growing, but many companies get caught up in wanting to have a significant social presence and take their eye off optimizing the core of their campaigns as a result.

Marco Marini – CEO

Make sure to use an ESP solution that offers responsive newsletter templates and frameworks. This ensures that email newsletters look just as beautiful on a small mobile screen as on a desktop computer. Without responsiveness, especially given that more and more subscribers read their email on a mobile phone, you will see a much lower engagement rate, impacting opens, clicks, and orders.

Additionally, with the launch of Google’s tabbed Inbox, it will become more important than ever before for an email sender to instill trust with subscribers, to make that personal connection via mass communications, and to send content that is useful, exciting, and unique – in line with Google’s latest algorithm change, Hummingbird!

Barbara Ulmi – Marketing Director Graphicmail

Segmentation. Sure, it’s nothing new, but when you can break your audience down into smaller, targeted segments and offer them relevant, meaningful offers, metrics and outcomes skyrocket.

Engage someone who knows data and dive into it headfirst. Start with hunches – “I wonder if this segment has a tendency to like this offer; let’s see if it’s true.” Once the data is in hand, USE IT. The beauty of email is that it’s so easy to test. Test your hunches, test your offers. We’ve seen incredible results by segmenting our clients’ audiences at a deeper level, and the results have been outstanding. I think it’s far too often overlooked, and now is a good time to refocus on it.

TJ Rosenberg – Marketing Manager at Inbox Marketer

One of the most important things to improve ROI is segmenting marketing campaigns. If you don’t segment your marketing campaigns yet, don’t wait any longer; begin testing and implementing it tomorrow. Make a dent in the universe and improve on your marketing objectives by putting customers first: based on profile, preferences, and past behavior. If you are segmenting today, start testing and making the dialogue with your customers even more personal and relevant by making it a 1:1 hyper-targeted dialogue that engages and converts even better.

Joost Nienhuis – CEO Tripolis Solutions

Email marketing’s ability to take a reader on a journey right from the inbox to an ecommerce site powers its popularity. More importantly, the technology can measure open, click-through, and conversion rates to optimize future campaigns.

That said, I encourage marketers to remain steadfast in the pursuit of a relationship with the subscriber. The goal is to engage in a two-way conversation in which all parties attempt to resolve a specific problem. As marketers, we need to continue to be attentive to changes in customer preferences and adjust our content and its delivery channels.

The customer’s relationship is with the brand and its message, not the medium. When organizations focus on earning an individual’s trust, the customer will be willing to share contact information in return for communications that are relevant to their interests. Trust opens a dialogue, and if the conversations are personal, engaging, and helpful, it will develop into brand loyalty.

W. Jeffrey Rice – Former Sr. Researcher Analyst at MarketingSherpa and Director of Marketing Strategy at Brick Street Software

Despite all the hype, I still think that testing (or the lack thereof) is the biggest missed opportunity for the average marketer. Every email that goes out should have at least one test. If you’re not testing, you’re not learning. At the most basic level, a subject line test can help.

For those that have more sophisticated tracking in place, you can go all the way to engagement or ROI. For someone who is starting out, my recommendation is to begin with testing and optimizing the landing page. Landing pages are one of the areas where you get the biggest return on optimization.

Barbara Ulmi – Marketing Director Graphicmail

Make sure all your communications are optimized across multiple media platforms – PC, tablet, and mobile. Pay as much attention to how each client is interacting – frequency of opens and what they click on – to drive future campaigns.

Nickolas-Eckert – CEO Graphicmail

I would recommend that email marketers really focus on their engagement rates. ISPs are constantly changing their criteria for inbox placement, and at the moment, a large part of that is being affected by the engagement rates they see. We would always recommend to our clients that it’s better to send to smaller volumes of more engaged recipients rather than sending one-size-fits-all, ‘batch and blast’ campaigns.

Lisa Coombes – Account Manager Variant4