Melon Corporate Blog
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Interview With Tamerlaine Beasley
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 20, 2008
Interview with Tamerlaine Beasley from Beasley Intercultural.
What rhymes wih Rex - powerful subject lines
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 20, 2008
What rhymes with REX...
This was the subject line in a newsletter that I received from Tricom Equities Stockbroking about a year ago.
The email contained research regarding the Regional Express Airlines that is listed on the ASX with code REX.
The subject line was so good that I haven’t forgotten about the email over a year later!
Such can be the power of an effective subject line...
In a recent survey (same as previous link) 59% of recipients said that they determine the value of each email by the subject line.
So what makes a good subject line?
Powerful subject lines should generally be short and tap into peoples’ curious nature - they should generate a thought in the recipient along the lines of "I wonder what that is all about, tell me more".
Subject lines need to pack a proverbial punch as well as generate intrigue or have a “twist”.
With a little intent the most ordinary of subject lines can be repackaged into a powerful subject line.
Interview with Mark Zuckerberg - founder of Facebook
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 13, 2008
Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed at the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
The interviewer is annoying in her flirtatious style but it is an interesting insight into Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was recently named the youngest self made billionaire ever by Forbes magazine - a very impressive financial achievement.
What struck me during the interview was how Facebook are still not quite sure how they are going to generate income. He tries to put a new spin on the advertising angle but it doesn’t sound all that different from keywords (contextual ads).
Excellent Alternative to YouTube
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 12, 2008
We have discovered a great 2 year old streaming video site called Viddler.
It is very similar to YouTube with one difference - people can comment on the video as the video plays.
See an example here where people have made comments on the progress bar. The feature makes a lot of sense and it would be interesting to see take up of this feature in corporate and marketing videos. I think it is one of those features that seems so obvious once you have seen it in action you wonder why it wasn’t thought of before.
Email Marketing Resources
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 06, 2008
I review a lot of magazines, blogs, websites and newsletters - relating to online marketing and business in general.
I thought instead of providing an exhaustive list I will review a few of my favourites every so often.
3 online resources relating to email marketing that I regularly make use of include:
- MarketingSherpa : a great source of research material, trend analysis, case studies and industry updates
- Email Marketing Reports: a collection of well researched rigorous articles on email marketing - it is a breathe of fresh air to read solid articles about email marketing as opposed to the self interested "fluff" that is so common on blogs
- Clickz Email Marketing Newsletters: a choice of many focussed industry newsletters written by experts in each field
Please feel free to leave comments with some of your favourite email marketing resources.
Next week I will discuss some of my favourite magazines.
BRW Digital Survey 2008
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 05, 2008
BRW Magazine has published results of their Digital Survey on page 37 of the latest edition. It is available online if you are a paid subscriber.
I have scanned in a version from the print version - you can see it here.
There is also an audio discussion of the results here.
The survey presents some interesting results including:
- 17% of companies have their own blog.
- 54% of companies currently use email marketing and 67% of these increased their spend in 2007 and 65% will lift spendng in 2008.
- 43% of companies made use of search engine optimisation services (SEO) and 40% of these increased spending in 2007 and 44% will lift spending in 2008.
Web guru coming to Australia
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Mar 04, 2008
Jakob Nielsen is considered by many to be the father of usability and has been around for a long time in the web world. He has been called “The guru of web page usability,” by The New York Times.
His organisation is presenting some workshops in Melbourne later this year. They will be very worthwhile for the online marketing/web professional.
More info can be found at http://www.nngroup.com/events/melbourne/agenda.html
They will be having sessions on a wide variety of web usability issues including “Email Newsletter Usability”.
I will probably be heading to one of the sessions myself so drop me a line if any of you are going and we can make contact.
Do you love your lawyer?
Kevin Garber (General Manager) - Feb 29, 2008
by Kevin Garber, General Manager
In her article ”Subscribers Speak: Email Connections are Still Welcome, but Increasingly Fragile“
Stephanie Miller from Return Path makes a good point about lawyers: that we all tend to love our own lawyer, but don’t think much of lawyers in general.
She goes on to state that recent research indicates that email marketing is evolving into a similar “love hate” scenario -
“When email connects, it really connects. Yet, still so much email marketing is tired, old batch-and-blast.”
Beautiful on the Inside - HTML code and your emails
Dain Saxon (Digital Producer) - Feb 08, 2008
It’s not difficult to create great looking emails <start shamless plug> especially if you choose Melon Media to create them for you </end shamless plug> but how do your emails look ‘on the inside’?
The code that makes up your HTML email is an important, yet often neglected, aspect of email creation. It dictates to the Outlooks, Hotmails, Gmails and MacMails of this world how the email should be displayed, and though the concept may be difficult to appreciate, these browsers ‘see’ the code and then render it as it sees fit. So where you see the colour red, the browser sees #FF0000.
Therefore if your code is not clean, or has parts missing, or is extraneous, or uses deprecated tags - then there is every likliehood that this messy code will translate into a messy email.
If you want your clients to see a clean, well designed email when they receive it - read on.
The perils of using BCC for email broadcasts
James Peter (Chief Web Systems Architect) - Jan 25, 2008
A question we hear frequently is: “Why should I use an email marketing tool such as melonMail when I can just copy and paste the addresses into my email programs BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field or just use Mail Merge?”
One of the easiest mistakes many marketing staff make is misunderstanding how broadcast emails are in fact very different to the normal emails you send around the office.
There is unfortunately a misperception frequently from managers that email marketing is an amazing breakthrough not because of its convenience and effectiveness compared to other mediums - but because its FREE compared to traditional “snail-mail” campaigns.
It is true that the overall cost of an email campaign can be significantly lower than a paper campaign however, if you want any level of success from your broadcast its important to understand that its not as easy as copying and pasting then clicking send.
The very existence of the multitudes of specialist email broadcasting providers speaks testament to this - how could they stay in business if it were that simple?
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