Last week, email marketing service provider (ESP) Silverpop sent out a press release, focusing on some conclusions the company made, based upon its conversations with customers and email marketers.
Some of these conversations occurred via webinar. Silverpop has a popular monthly webinar series and, according to the press release, last year thousands of marketers logged in to Silverpop webinars.
Now, let’s look together at some lessons Silverpop learned about the priorities, challenges and issues email marketers have.
Silverpop found that in 2009 “webinar topics that particularly resonated with marketers focused on strategies to maximize engagement”.
Engagement and social email marketing hottest topics
Let me spell that word: e-n-g-a-g-e-m-e-n-t. As in engagement marketing, as in relationships, in dialogue and yes, in social email marketing.
What were the two webinars that generated the highest registrations (and thus appealed most to email marketers)?
The first one was called “Email Marketing Goes Social: What It Takes to Make Email Sharing Work”. Sharing. Social. Social email marketing, people!
What did the webinar wanted to show marketers? Silverpop: “how to choose the right networks, create ‘share-worthy’ content, promote links to social networks correctly and more. Attendees learned what types of offers are most shared, what creative layouts work best, and what words incent recipients to post messages on social sites”. Again, sharing, social media and the combination of social media and email marketing.
However, of course email marketing is not the only area where social networking evolutions have important consequences. I maybe should rename this blog. Call it “the blog where the social revolution meets marketing” or is that too much hype?
Anyway, back to Silverpop. As I already told you a while ago, the email marketing service provider found that overall, more than eight out of 10 (84 percent) marketers plan to include social media into their email programs in 2010.
In the press release Silverpop’s Loren McDonald says this about the increasing attention of marketers for social email marketing: “It’s easy to see why email marketers are excited about social media. One message to a single recipient has the potential to reach hundreds, or more. Magnify that by every brand ambassador and influencer on your list and the viral potential is truly staggering.”
The never ending quest for the best time to send your emails
The second most popular webinar the ESP presented last year was called “In Search of the Ideal Email Send Time”.
Personally, I find it a bit strange email marketers still have so much trouble finding the ideal time to send their emails. I always thought the answer was testing and asking your subscribers.
But then of course email marketers should start to talk to their subscribers and see them, as I recently wrote, as real people.
The timing issue is also very relative. When you see email marketing as a pure mass push medium (as it is more often the case in B2C) timing matters.
But when you see email marketing as a way to guide your prospects and customers through their buying journey and customer life cycle and when you integrate email marketing with all other possibilities you have to track their digital footprints, the timing of your emails is no longer a general issue that should be answered by benchmarks and all kinds of metrics.
The timing then entirely depends from the individual signals you get from all the people behind the email addresses in your list.
Are you ready to read those signals?
Some related posts:
– Listen to the people behind your social media connections
– Looking back: (social) email marketing 2004 – 2010; are we there yet?
– Do you use social email marketing?
– Social email marketing and sharing
– The best day to send B2B emails
– Should B2C email marketers reconsider the timing of their emails?
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