You Need to Segment Your Email List

Sam Harrelson on July 3, 2014

Building an email newsletter is a fantastic thing for your business. In fact, it’s a must. Email is still a very active and viable channel for marketing and with free/cheap tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or Awebber, it’s easier than ever to organize and send email newsletters.

Whether your list size is 50 or 5,000, you need to be segmenting your list. That means splitting it up into various sub-lists based on relevance and groupings.

Even with small business lists of only 50 addresses, we commonly segment those into “leads,” “potential leads,” and “previous customers” with each segment receiving their own variation of the newsletter.

It works.

And here’s some data to back me up…

When I conducted a survey about email marketing, I asked respondents to tell me, in a free-form text field, why they chose to subscribe to emails from some companies. One of the most common responses I received was that they expected the emails were going to be relevant to their interests. 38% of respondents specifically referenced the word “relevance,” and one especially well-worded response indicated that content should be “particularly and specifically” relevant to them.

via New Data Proves Why You Need to Segment Your Email Marketing.

Vine’s Loops and Impact on Social Media Marketing

Sam Harrelson on July 1, 2014

https://vine.co/v/MFTr7DiMjaQ/embed/postcard//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js

Vine is Twitter’s 6 second short video sharing social network that allows users to capture short videos that loop when viewed. Like Instagram, Vine is an app and the main experience is via mobile rather than the traditional desktop web. Accordingly, Vine is insanely popular with certain demographics (predominately teens – 24 year olds). It’s rather addicting and companies have caught on. Agencies have even been set up around the idea of “microcontent” marketing.

However, one of the stumbling blocks we’ve hit with client work has been the lack of sharing the number of views (or “loops”) that a particular Vine accumulates. One of the reasons Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc all share the number of views and shares particular content has over time is because it adds to the social “virality” of that content. These companies have done a great deal of research on how viewing numbers help to increase additional and long term viewing.

Looks like Vine is finally adding this feature too:

With this update, there’s now a new way for you to quickly get a sense of how popular and interesting a Vine may be –– based on how many times people watch a Vine loop. The number, which you can see in our mobile apps and on vine.co, updates in real time, so as you watch a video, you’ll know you’re watching with others at the same time.

via Vine blog – Introducing Loop Counts.

Vine isn’t right for every company, small business, or community group out there. However, if you can find your niche and aren’t afraid to “try new things,” then definitely give Vine a shot in your marketing plan.

Twitter Adding “Buy Now” Buttons to Tweets?

Sam Harrelson on July 1, 2014

There’s no formal announcement of “Twitter Shopping” yet, but Twitter has been making some strategic moves that would allow users to purchase items directly from tweets (such as a partnership with Amazon).

If so, this could be an interesting play for small businesses that sell niche products. Twitter is a level playing field (well, relatively) compared to other social networks in that most everything is public. This could be very interesting for both Twitter and e-commerce…

So did Fancy accidentally make public another Twitter Commerce experiment? Is Twitter starting to facilitate in-tweet purchases?

The companies aren’t saying. Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser declined to comment, and Fancy execs didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

via “Buy Now” Buttons Start Appearing in Tweets. Is Twitter Shopping Here? | Re/code.