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Spiff Up Your Cyber Communications
By: Joe Dysart
Issue: 2007sep
Given the sheer volume of spam crowding most inboxes, it’s no surprise that online marketing toolmakers are busy designing new applications that help your promotional e-mails stand out.
The emergence of e-mail titles sporting graphic “billboards,” flash e-mail campaigns that can be put together on-the-fly, video coupons that must be viewed to be redeemed—all of these innovations indicate that while legitimate e-marketers may never eradicate spam, they’ll at least be able to give it a run for its money.
Such tools are especially critical to promotional products businesses trying to reach firms with a younger employee demographic. Numerous studies indicate the internet is the preferred communications medium with younger audiences—even more so than once all-dominant television.
Seventy-seven percent of the world’s online 16- to-29-year-olds say they would rather live without television than give up the internet, according to a recent study released by Toronto-based New Paradigm. “Look at Live Earth concerts,” says Don Tapscott, New Paradigm’s CEO, who surveyed 7,600 young people in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, the U.K and the U.S. to reach Paradigm’s findings. “More than 10,000 ‘Friends of Live Earth’ events were pulled together in 130 countries. People around the world could go online for background materials, event guidelines, suggestions for running a green event, advice on how to receive a concert satellite feed and updates when additional materials such as short films became available. Television can’t do these sorts of things.”
Not surprisingly, promotional products businesses are already embracing these technologies. Payless Wedding Favors, for example, uses Flash animation to dramatically illustrate the impact of personalized pens versus plain vanilla offerings (www.paylessweddingfavors.com/wedding-favors-pens-1.html). This same programming can be dropped in an e-mail for added marketing effect as well.
Similar use of Flash can be found at The Skyline Group’s (UPIC: SKYLINE9) site (www.theskylinegroup.com); Marla’s Mania Promotional Products (www.marlasmania.ccholiday.com); CMO America (www.cmopromo.com) and Premier Promotional Products (www.premierpp.com).
You can also find industry use of video that can easily be dropped into an e-mail at sites such as Powertex Group (www.powertexgroup.com/movie.html) and PromotionCorner.com (UPIC: CORNER) (www.promotioncorner.com).
Generally, grabbing Flash, video and other marketing tools already on websites and dropping those in an e-mail only takes a matter of minutes for an experienced web designer. Here’s a representative sampling of what those designers are actually doing:
E-Mail Title Drop-Down “Billboards”
The next time you mouse over an e-mail title, don’t be surprised if a tiny graphical billboard pops up. E-mail marketing company Advenix has developed a way to program marketing e-mails so that tiny colorful company logos, product images and the like spring up when recipients mouse over the e-mail titles.
Justin Khoo, Advenix’s president, says that a recent Advenix study of VisualSubject’s pay-off found that the tool increased sales conversions (sales made to customers after they opened a marketing e-mail) by 41 percent.
Approximately 5.6 million e-mails were sent out for the study, in nine separate mailings. “Advenix VisualSubject lifts the restrictions of the 10-word subject line, enabling marketers to more efficiently and effectively communicate with their customers,” Khoo says.
E-marketers create the graphic billboard for their e-mail subject lines by uploading an image to Advenix’s web-based system. Each e-mail sent is also encoded with a “pointer,” which calls up the image from Advenix’s server when a recipient’s mouse passes over the e-mail’s title line.
Khoo says Advenix charges per impression. A company sending out 100,000 e-mails embedded with drop-down billboard images, for example, would pay a quarter of a cent for every billboard that pops up when a recipient passes his or her mouse over the e-mail title.
To see one of VisualSubject’s e-mail billboards in action, check out www.advenix.com/visualsubject.
Flash E-Mail Campaigns—In Minutes
E-marketing firm Great Big Noise (www.greatbignoise.com) offers an online tool enabling marketers to create an Adobe Flash e-mail campaign in minutes. Even better, marketers with basic PC skills should have no problem bringing the panache of Flash to their marketing mix with this product.
In practice, a marketer simply signs up online for an account and chooses an e-mail message template. Borders for the template can be color coordinated with a company’s logo or other colors. Then text, images, logos and/or other graphics are uploaded to complete the e-mail.
Even for the novice e-marketer, a professional-looking Flash campaign can generally be crafted in minutes. Plus, the service will store images online for future use and perform a spam check on your e-mail, ensuring that your message does not sport any obvious “route-it-to-the-spam-bin” trigger words.
E-Mail Video-To-Go, With YouTube’s New Video Mixer
This top-10 spot for today’s youth, YouTube (www.youtube.com) has made creating video on-the-fly so easy, even kids can do it. E-marketers can use YouTube’s new—and free—video mixer to quickly create a marketing video for e-mail distribution as well as for posting on the web.
Designed for the casual user, the mixer enables you to upload one or more videos for editing and add titles and captions over your content. Borders and clip-art from your own library can also be included. Plus, you can throw in some transitions and other advanced effects if you want to get fancy. Just don’t forget your Spielberg baseball cap.
This is an ideal tool for companies looking to attract younger drivers and employees. Chances are, the demographic they’re seeking hangs out on YouTube. So it’s a great place to make and post a recruiting video—as well as to link to from within a recruitment e-mail.
A Smart Live Chat Box In Every E-Mail
For years, e-marketers have sent e-mails containing “live chat boxes,” which they use to instantly engage a customer. Companies such as Epromos (UPIC: EPROMOS), PromoCentric (UPIC: Pcentric) and 4imprint Canada, for example, offer live chat at their websites (www.epromos.com/sitemap/industry_filmtvandvideo.html, www.promocentric.net and www.4imprint.ca/infopages/contactus.aspx, respectively).
Recipients simply click on a “click-to-talk” button, generally located below the chat box, and begin text-chatting with a company representative about a product or service. Some live chat boxes even offer the option to auto-dial a customer if that customer types in a telephone number.
Last year, LivePerson, one of the pioneers in the field, upped the ante by backing its live chat boxes with behavioral analysis software. Essentially, companies using the LivePerson product can program the software’s behavioral analysis end to sense when a marketing e-mail is being viewed by a potential customer and how long it’s being viewed. Plus, it notes any other activity associated with that e-mail.
The application is ideal for companies looking to gauge how their marketing e-mails are being received—and for companies interested in inviting potential customers to chat via text or phone when a set number of preconditions have been triggered.
LivePerson’s system, known as Timpani Contact Center, also enables companies to track customers who click on their website as a result of receiving one of their live chat marketing messages. Companies can then invite customers to chat or talk by phone once the customer has triggered a number of preconditions for a potential sale.
Smaller companies are more apt to use the application in tandem with a live company representative who tracks visitor activity in a chatbox-enabled e-mail or on a company website, and who then makes an overture to chat or talk at an appropriate time, according to LivePerson. In contrast, larger firms are more likely to put the behavioral analysis technology on auto-pilot, allowing the software to look for customers who trigger a set number of preconditions and then alert a company representative when its time for a live human being to intervene and begin chatting with a potential customer.
With either approach, LivePerson must be doing something right. It continues to win numerous industry awards for its approach to live chat boxes—most recently from LiveChatDir.com, a directory and info clearinghouse of live chat technology. “LivePerson Timpani Contact Center integrates chat, e-mail, knowledgebase and voice seamlessly into one application, making it the most cost-effective and ultimate customer support tool in the market,” says Arjun Agarwal, Livechatdir.com’s editor. “The recent integration of voice as a click-to-call solution was a key differentiator for LivePerson compared to the competition for this award in 2007.”
Video E-Coupons—Not Your Typical Clip-And-Save
Coupons Inc. (www.couponsinc.com), one of a number of e-marketing firms riding the growing use of e-coupons on the web, has developed an electronic coupon powered with the promotional wallop of video. The catch: users must view the 10-60 second promotional video embedded in the coupon before the discount offer can be redeemed. Smart.
Branded Widgets For Higher Search Engine Returns
Firms hip to the growing popularity of widgets (http://desktop.google.com/plugins)—handy little tools that track temperatures, headlines, stocks and the like—have discovered that the free, downloadable programs are great website traffic builders. Paste a link to a popular widget in your marketing e-mails and your company’s rank on search engines can spike significantly.
Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, California. He can be reached at 805-426-9579, joe@joedysart.com or www.joedysart.com.
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