Unlike the era of television, where aggravating the audience with repeated one-way messaging has few consequences, in the new era of the social web, this is one of the worst things you can do. Contrary to many reports, email marketing still has the best ROI of any online advertising and will be an incredibly valuable tool for a long time to come. So here are ten simple tips to help avoid offending your audience and boosting those ever-important click-through rates:

1. Sanity-check the recipient list.

In addition to handling bounce-backs and incorrect data, check that the list of recipients is appropriate for your message. While it’s common practice to load every business card into an email database, it’s a good idea to tag each entry with the person’s area of expertise. This helps avoid sending industrial HVAC proposals to a potential client’s office manager, but making sure the office manager gets the holiday party email. Apart from instantly improving the CTR, the recipients will come to learn that your emails are relevant and worth opening.

Put another way – and this ranks as my number one tip: you can send a simple email to a well-chosen list and get a great response, or a beautifully crafted work of art to a random audience and get nothing back.

2. Ensure the sender is a real person.

Here’s a sticky one: people used to open emails from ABC Bank or Mastercard – now they tend to look at emails from their Branch Manager or Account Representative. In the email whiteout and growth of the social side of the web, we starting to listen to people rather than organizations. In your “Sent from” field:

• Don’t use names such as donotreply, info or noreply. (And if you do, make sure you’re monitoring the mailbox.)
• Avoid the generic such as marketing@mycompany.com.
• Use a person the recipient will be familiar with (from: Steve Jobs at Apple).

When filtering mail, we scan the sender first and then we move onto point number three.

3. Work on the subject line.

Marketing departments often spend 95% of their time on building the email and about 5% on the subject title, which is a shame since 95% of their audience will use the subject line to decide to open the email – or not.

Almost every email client presents messages as a pile of subject lines – especially on mobile devices – and because we’re accustomed to getting deluged with email, with time to scan maybe one or two words per line, make sure those few words really matter.

4. Work even harder on the subject line.

There are several schools of thought on whether the subject line should be direct (“One Uproar: April Newsletter”), verbose (“Newsletter”) or “salesy” (“Are clients ignoring your email?”). This depends on your product, business and audience and you should test different approaches to get the best CTR.

Whichever method you choose,  avoid spam words that will send your email careening into the blackhole of the spam filter. These are words such as Free, Debt, $, Cash, Stop, etc. – there’s a long list of these. “Free Cash $ to Stop Debt” would clearly be a bad choice. For more creative subject lines, one of the best books on this subject is “Web Copy That Sells“.

5. Don’t rely exclusively on images.

By default, you should assume that your recipients cannot see the images in your email, either because:

• Their IT policy disables images from third party senders.
• Their email client defaults to disabling images.
• They use a mobile device that conserves bandwidth by disabling images.

Marketers love graphics but text is still king in email, so make sure both will work.

6. Use a dedicated email service.

Services such as Constant Constant can do much of the laborious legwork for you. Apart from the template libraries and email database management tools, they protect your web-server IP address from being blacklisted for spam. Most importantly, you’ll never accidentally CC instead of BCC, which is worth the subscription fee by itself.

7. Be CAN-SPAM compliant.

Apart from the legal requirement, users want to know the physical location of the sender, and they want an easy way to get off  your email list. Additionally, “unsubscribe” should be a one-click removal process rather than an excuse for an additional survey.

8. Test your email in every major mail client.

There are many more email clients that Microsoft Outlook – actually, there are 15 major ones, all of which render email slightly differently. There’s no guarantee that a perfectly-rendered email in Gmail will look the same in Hotmail, yet you have no knowledge or control over which clients your audience is using. The simple solution is to use a testing service such as Email on Acid, which will simulate your email on all 15 clients at once.

9. Use links rather than attachments.

You may be proud of your 20Mb free e-book but your audience won’t thank you for filling their inbox. If you have any type of media to send with your email, always ensure it’s linked rather than attached. The secondary benefit is that you can track how many readers click on the links.

10. Use A/B testing.

Mentioning A/B or multivariate testing often scares people, but it’s one of the best tools a marketer has. Given a list of 10,000 email subscribers, it’s easy to try 10 different subject lines on 10% of the list and see which has the best open and click-through rates. Over time, this provides an enormous amount of information about what style your audience prefers. Experimentation is at the heart of online marketing since rule books are hard to find, so try everything and see what works.

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Reel Social Media gave an excellent presentation called 5 Videos You Can Shoot in an Hour as part of the RISE Austin event yesterday. Weston Norton and Talmadge Boyd both had some great points that I’ve summarized here. The SEO world has been alive with chatter about video for a while now, so this is an ideal time to start experimenting.

Why does your site need video?

YouTube search now represents 28% of all Google searches – visitors are actively seeking out videos as well as text. For “how to”-style articles, video is often more understandable than text, faster to create, and provide a higher rate of conversions.

Putting your face – or your CEO’s and co-workers’ faces – on a site also creates a rapport than helps differentiate your organization from competitors. In the social web, your visitors will be more involved if they can see who you are.

What are the best practices for shooting video?

• Transcribe the content: search engines cannot index video content (yet) – providing a text transcript helps SEO and also allows viewers to skim for interesting sections of text to jump around the clip. One service that can do this for you is SpeakerText.
• Keep it short: the optimal length for video is around 90 seconds, in terms of maximizing the number of viewers who will stay until the end. Clearly the length will depend on the subject matter, but the video should be no longer than it needs to be.
• Invest in the audio: audiences will watch sub-standard video with good audio, but not the other way around. Make sure the audio track is as clean as possible by using a lapel microphone (see equipment below).
• Create a useful title: just as the title Titanic communicates the topic to the audience better than the name Ishtar, your title will determine whether visitors view your video or not. And also whether it gets found by Google, so flex those keywords.

What sort of video should you create?

Rather than shooting commercials, which are definitely more complicated and costly, there are various types of video that are useful to visitors and easy to create:

• Interviews: with colleagues and co-workers, providing insights, expertise or breaking news around your business.
• Testimonials: get customers to say how great your product or service is – it’s more genuine in video.
• Screencasts: for demonstrating either proprietary or third-party software, screencasts are popular on the net.
• How-to videos: show your expertise by solving niche problems or providing advice in your field.

What equipment do you need?

• External microphone: Audio Technica ATR-3550
• Video camera: Kodak ZI8.
• Video editing software: Final Cut Express (for Mac) or Premiere Essentials (for PC). There are many free editing suites available too.

Given the proliferation of cameras on devices, it’s no surprise that video is becoming more important in the social context of web marketing. The direction that Google is taking with SEO also means that you ignore these trends at the risk of losing your ranking. We’re going to start experimenting with video on all our sites in the next few weeks – more to come soon.

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40 Things You Wouldn’t Have Guessed…

1. Social media can severely damage your brand: “In videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere this week, a Domino’s employee in Conover, N.C. prepared sandwiches for delivery while putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches.” New York Times, April 16 2009.

2. Brands can become the conversation: “Brands are now becoming conversation factors where academics, celebrities, experts and key opinions formers discuss functional, emotional and, more interestingly, social concerns.” Simon Clift, Unilever

3. Companies avoid social media because they want to retain control. Consumers flock to social media because they want control. For companies, “they only think they are in control.”

4. 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology and two thirds of the global Internet population uses social networks. Use of social sites increased 82% globally from 2009 to 2010.

5. There are 4 billion photos on Flickr alone.

6. There are now 50 million Tweets a day.

7. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and spends almost an hour a day on the site.

8. Three quarters of Digg users are male, in a household earning $85K on average. 99% of Digg users access the Internet every day.

9. The #1 social network in 25 countries is hi5, offered in 26 languages primarily through mobile devices.

10. Facebook has over 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs, and over 140 applications added each day.

11. Pepsi invested $20mm in a social media campaign in preference to Superbowl ads in 2010, breaking a 23-year dominance in Superbowl TV ads.

12. Best Buy has hundreds of employees interacting on Twitter to sell promotions and solve problems.

13. Over 40% of users have “friended” a brand on Facebook or Myspace.

14. Traditional success metrics don’t reveal ROI. Loyalty, trust and qualitative factors are more important than “number of followers”.

15. The “Whopper Sacrifice” application causes 233,906 friendships to be canceled before Facebook banned the application (and a wildly subsequent petition to revive the application failed).

16. The most popular viral video in 2009 was Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, with 216 million views. The Muppets’ Bohemian Rhapsody received only 15 million.

17. Twitter and LinkedIn have quickly become major  recruitment channels during the recession.

18. Conversational marketing is replacing the mass marketing which has dominated advertising since the 1950s.

19. Email marketing generated an ROI of $43 for every $1 spent in 2009, outperforming all other direct marketing channels.

20. A Forbes media survey showed email and e-newsletters to be the second-most effective tool for creating conversions, just behind SEO.

21. A MarketingSherpa report showed that pay-per-click (PPC) ads provide the best ROI of any type of marketing or advertising. Only 18% of TV ads generate positive ROI (Socialnomics).

22. Google Social Search, which started as an experiment last year, is generally believed to now have a greater weighting in SERPs ranking – and will probably be considerably more in the future.

23. Benjamin Franklin understood social media: “Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”

24. “If content is king, then conversion is queen.” – John Munsell, CEO of Bizzuka.

25. “Social media makes it impossible to hide bad customer service.” – James Beswick, Founder of One Uproar (you’re welcome).

26. To succeed in social media, you have to be a tummler (from @debs).

27. Toyota’s “Rock The Space” Myspace contest received over a 1,000 song entries in the first day.

28. From the plane in the Hudson to the death of Michael Jackson and the car crash of Tiger Woods, Twitter broke the news first to an audience larger than all traditional domestic media combined.

29. Social media provided wind in the sails for President Obama’s election: 13 million people on the email list, 3 million online donors, 2,000 YouTube videos with 80 million views, and 5 million friends on 15 social networking sites.

30. The localization revolution, seen with the success of applications like FourSquare, has started to make the Internet personal, local and relevant again – advertisers be warned.

31. More than half of the the world’s busiest 20 websites are either social networks or contain substantial elements of social networking platforms.

32. Adaptability and rapid repeat failure are key elements of the social media business model: “As you start building the product… Listen to the community and adapt… We saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn’t see anyone using our product that way” – Chad Hurley.

33. Social media can succeed for small businesses just as well – and sometimes better – than for big brands. Kogi’s BBQ taco truck in LA has 45,000 followers on Twitter waiting to see where the truck arrives next.

34. ”People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.” – Seth Godin.

35. “Stop looking at the Web as merely a display opportunity and not a way to interact. That does not create a new business model, it just shifts one that isn’t growing and is outdated.  The reason sites like Google are stealing advertisers from daily newspapers is not because Google has more eyeballs. It’s because Google used the interactivity of the Web to deliver a new, better way to advertise.” – Sarah Lacy

36. John Maeda: social media “let’s you connect with more humans. Not more computers, as was the earlier goal of computing.”

37. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama.

38. There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or Tweet daily (Socialnomics).

39. 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.

40. “Social media is like any good social interaction, it starts with listening, followed by observing and connecting and finally making a contribution when you have something to say that others are interested in hearing.” – Elizabeth Ferris.

Do you need a social media strategy for your business? Contact One Uproar at social@oneuproar.com.

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