econsultancy's mobile email best practices

Practical mobile email tips from econsultancy [Erik Boman]
Particularly useful:
1) Don't crowd links because fingers have trouble tapping in small surface area of mobile screens
2) Use one-column layouts
3) Don't waste space with banners & mastheads
4) Prioritize images for critical links & content

key performance indicators on your dashboard?

Be sure to track these KPI's:
1)Referral traffic sources and YOY growth, from keywords, email campaigns, social media marketing & the like.
2)Conversion rates, including sales, but also other goals: email list growth, webinar attendance, downloads, or social media participation.
~What else do you monitor?
Also see INC mag's list of marketing KPIs.

nice email stats

1. approx 2.5 Billion individual email accounts exist, enabling organizations to talk to actual humans ...talk about direct marketing
2. Google search now includes Gmail; so, an old promotional message can turn up in search results because it's suddenly relevant ...bang!
3. 77% of people prefer promotional messages via email v. 5% via text & 4% via FB ...ka-pow!

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Useful facts & tidbits from Chris Crum here.
ReadWriteWeb interview here ["email will never die"]
Experian benchmarking study here.

mobile ads' impact to date

WSJ article aggregates mobile ad data.
Summary:

• $2 of every $10 spent on mobile ads is banners ("spray and pay")
• Google earns 95% of all mobile search ad revenue
• 18% of users clicking on graphics/imagery (for now)
• Smartphones & tablets account for 10% of internet traffic but only 2% of ad spending

Thoughts:

• Clicks will drop with time
• Ad spending will equalize to represent traffic contribution
• Ignoring email here - drives online traffic & sales; direct response

See the full article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444083304578016373342878556.html?google_editors_picks=true

alternative to facebook?

Neat article by Rusty Speidel of Jaggers Communications re: MySpace challenging Facebook, specifically in the music space.

Love his comment about the new MySpace, "This demo looks like my daughter acts."

This ties in well with our social media course because it seems to encourage links, connections and sharing.  It will be interesting to see when and how it enables push marketing (email?) beyond SEM.

Also...

"First thing you notice is the prominent role music plays in the site. The musician in me loves this. It’s like you can create a soundtrack of events that can be tied to the images and posts you create. Very cool. The timeline is horizontal and everything in is a visual mash that ties posts, video, audio, connections and photos together around those events. It’s loose, slick, and sexy, and seems to borrow a lot from Path and Pinterest. "....

Original piece linked here.

unsophisticated email performance dashboards the norm

New Report: Email Testing & Deliverability

Highlights:

• 16% of email marketers don't measure inbox deliverability 
• just 5% of companies currently use multivariate testing, compared to 66% that test subject lines and 44% who test the best time of day or week to send emails
• only 41% of respondents said they had the email deliverability information readily available in a dashboard
• however, large proportion of respondents are already carrying out competitor analysis by signing up for other brands’ newsletters (37%)

View original details by David Moth (posted 9.18.12)

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/10723-16-of-email-marketers-don-t-measure-inbox-deliverability

Running Commentary: Pinterest

One more outlet for sharing; great spot to post the imagery of digital messages.
http://pinterest.com/murraymr/email-marketing/