We have recently gone through and analysed information and statistics regarding e-marketing and seen some interesting trends. USA is somewhat ahead of us in e-marketing and strategy development which makes trends and statistics from the USA interesting to us. Below is some facts and reflections regarding this information and examples of what doesn’t work.

According to emarketer.com the opening frequency for a newsletter will increase if you add an offer or a voucher. E-marketer show an increase of 10% for newsletter with an offer, which is quite good. We believe that it’s not the offer itself that will lead to an increase in sales but the feeling of getting something relevant, some value in the newsletter. But sending through endless amount of vouchers and expect an increase in sales wont work, the content of the newsletter have to relevant to the voucher which have to based on previous purchases and history of the customer. Relevancy is the key to target your marketing group.

35% of people in marketing believe e-marketing send through at the right time with content based on customers previous behaviour will increase sales. 57% believe is valuable. 70% of the marketing people mean that sales conversion on the web have increase the last 12 months, even though the market is slow. They also believe newsletters sent through as emails covert more sales compared to A/B tests of the website and usability tests.

Four important parts of e-marketing:
1. Your content should be relevant and clear
2. Add some value to your newsletter and customers; offer, voucher, knowledge etc.
3. Be clear and personal as sender
4. Let subscribers choose if they still want the newsletter, have an unsubscribe button.

Once again we found a great article on how to optimise your e-marketing strategy with the purpose to keep in touch with and engage customers as well as direct traffic to your website. The keywords are relevance, frequency and analytics.

Behind this article is the american business Market Experiments who’s got a strong focus on e-marketing and online marketing. Read more on how to optimise your marketing here.

Practical customer case on how to increase profit through writing newsletter along the guidlines above, you will also find some interesting statistics.

Todays young people send less email than the older generation, this behaviour is likely to follow them in future employment. Social media will play a central part for young peoples communication, however email will still remain a important form of communication, more clear and personal.

Even if as many as 26% of young people prefer social media over email as a way of communication, email is still an important infomation channel. The content may be published on a webpage or a forum, but reaches it’s target as an email or a email notifcation.

In the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” it’s shown that email along with social media is still in top over marketing strategy and will only increase over the next decade as shown in the following study.

So use your webiste, webshop or Facebook page as a communication platform, encourage your users and customers to use your forum. Send out vital information via email, this becomes a key priority if you work with ebusiness, recriutment and ‘know-how’ products.

We are happy to introduce YouTube films in Connective, we have tried it over a period of time now and it works like a charm. So how do you go about adding a YouTube clip in your newsletter? Here is a guide for you who already have Connetive or is considering getting Connective!

Sadly, not many newsletter providers allows YouTube films in their newsletters, we believe it’s due to the lack of standards for newsletter clients to show videos and the fear of spam.

For you who already have Connective or have tried it, you know there is a number of functions which makes the newsletter easy to read as well as provide detailed statistics, especially the page links. The page links in the articles lets the reader stay in the newsletter even when they clicked the “Read more” button, so page links solves streaming of the YouTube clip in newsletter in a nice way. It’s very easy to add a video to the newsletter as well, you just add it the same way as you would to your website.

This is how you add a YouTube clip in Connective:
1. Write an article as usual with ingress, content text and a picture. Choose to add the article as “New Article”.
2. If you like your YouTube clip in any other position than in the middle, add a table and then add your link, as the link will automatically be centered.
3. Go to YouTube and the video you want to add.
4. Copy the embeded link underneath the video and choose the smaller size.
5. Open the article in which you want to place the video. Choose the HTML mode in the text editor (the button with <>) and paste the link, then choose the design mode again and preview the result.
6. Remember to paste the link in article and not the ingress, otherwise the video will end up in the ingress and not be shown in the article (see explaination below).
7. Send a test of the newsletter to yourself, read the ingress and click on “Read more” to see the video.

Connective allows to add YouTube videos in the email, this look nice in the email, however most of the big email providers like Outlook and Live(new hotmail) do not allow streaming of the video inside the email. If you still want to add the video in the email you will have to request that your readers open the mail as a web page, that allows them to see the video as you created it inside Connective.

If you want to know more about YouTube and page links, just contact us.