The From Line

59% of consumers feel very strongly or strongly that they give their permission before they can be marketed to on their mobile device. 18% said no permission is needed.  

Recently Gold Lasso rolled out a social media feature for eLoop clients. A powerful tool, social media is a popular topic in interactive marketing. It offers unique opportunities for increasing the reach of an ordinary email campaign, exposing it to a much larger scale than other marketing methods. The potential for social media's impact on campaigns is exponential.

In order to ensure social media exposure from your email campaigns, it is important to incentivize the reader.  Create a compelling promotion; two for one, half price, new products or any other incentives that will influence online word of mouth via social media sharing. This will increase your exposure to new customers and reinforce messages with existing clients.

By integrating social media with messages in eLoop, you can measure the number of reposts, who shared information with their networks and how many times the information was shared.

One feel-good approach is to use cause marketing to encourage posting to social media. Being associated with a cause and supporting one such as cancer research fundraising, holiday food drive or simply tweeting about social issues can be the differentiator for getting additional exposure. Using the cause marketing approach is not only rewarding but could potentially keep your messages alive on the web even longer.

To share more ideas on leveraging the social media tools that we offer, contact Gold Lasso on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. And remember to stay tuned for GL Jive, our online client community - perfect for information exchange and brainstorming!

The technology to deliver e-mail marketing campaigns is better than ever. The success of the campaign, though, is still only as good as the content that the message includes. Follow these tips for improving your copy.

1. Know your audience – good marketing is all about knowing what the audience you’re trying to reach will react to. The goal of the message, and the text within the message, is to achieve a reaction from the reader. To achieve that reaction, you need to know what the reader’s wants and needs are. In most cases, the marketer can make some assumptions about the reader by looking at demographic information. Find out what the audience’s likes and dislikes are and tailor your message accordingly.

2. Include a call to action – messages should include an action step for the audience to complete. It might be to make a purchase or complete a survey or simply to visit a particular Web site. Whatever the action is, it should be clear and easy for the reader to complete.

3. Keep it short and sweet – don’t ask that your readers go through mountains of text to reach the information they want or need. Anticipate what it is that they want or need and give it to them. No one has time to read through long messages, nor do they want to.

4. Write, review and revise – a common mistake for marketers is that they write the message and send it out, ignoring the two last (and arguably the most important) steps of the process. Write your copy and take a step back from it before you review it with a fresh eye and make the necessary revisions.

5. Consistency in marketing is essential – if you don’t have a set of key messages that you draw from, create one today. Key messages are short statements that convey the most important elements of your company/organization or campaign. All marketing copy should include the key messages. The goal is for the reader to see the messages so they reinforce what it is you want them to do.

Writing e-mail copy that conveys a consistent message and encourages the reader to act is an art. With these easy-to-implement tips, you can take your message text to the next level.

For all the marketing rules you follow, breaking a few can wreak havoc on the results of your campaign. Review these pitfalls you can't afford to make (or repeat).

1. Ignoring the “reply-to” address -- Most ESPs offer a Web mail program and email address to collect responses to a message. The goal is to keep your inbox clean (and not inundated with out of the office replies) after sending a message. It also serves as another layer of protection against spammers. The problem is that most people forget the “reply to” address isn’t coming to their inbox and don’t check the Web mail account.  While you instruct your recipients to contact you at a specific address, it doesn’t mean they won’t just hit the “reply” button.

2. Don’t slack on testing – We can’t say it enough. Always, always, always test the message.  Even if you tested last week or last month, test it again.

3. The trap of complacency – Whether you use the same old HTML template or ignore updating your list, complacency can leave you behind the curve with stale campaigns.   

Do you have a mistake that you want to share? Send your worst email marketing mistakes to Gold Lasso or share them on our Dot Email forum.