Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Email Marketing Dialogs

A rule to remember before we start this discussion is to never share or expose any of your end customer's personal information without their overt approval.  This is one rule that you can never compromise or your business will fail.

 

Email dialogs are all about effective marketing for the Awareness to Action cycle.  Starting with your promotions, your web site, and your periodic newsletter, you create opportunities for your users to express an interest in topics and offers that you make.  Engaging those events with intuitive and well prepared follow up is a requirement of competitive marketing.

 

Every new launch for your products or services will create new content for your marketing efforts. This is when you want to capture your digital assets for reuse. Your product developers will be most cooperative about providing information about their great new product when they are about to announce it and get famous.  Strike while they're hot!  Great new tools from Adobe and Hubspot make it easy to capture and reuse content.  Use one of these new tools to gather their videos, images, text, dialog, advantages, weaknesses, gadgets, software, reference designs, seminars, and reference guides for future reuse.

 

When you create promotional content, always consider 3 email marketing deliverables.  The ability for sales to push this content to their customers and contacts, a payload site that reinforces or responds to the offer, and the ability to listen to and track the user's reaction.  Eloqua, Marketo, Constant Contact, iContact, and many other vendors now offer off-the-shelf solutions to these types of email dialogs today.  Each one has their own advantages and incremental cost structures.



In the early days of the web, email marketing solutions were not readily available so we built a few from scratch.  At National, we called our patented process for engagement, ePitchPaks.  This system collected every new promotion for new content, was easy to use by sales and the channel, and did an extensive job of tracking the end user activity.

 

A relatively new technology with gaining popularity in the mobile space that any user with a cell phone camera can use is a square matrix QR code.  A simple scan by a user can launch them directly into your marketing dialog and response site.  This does not change the need for content, landing page, or response tracking but it does add a new and easy to use way to engage the process for any mobile user that sees a physical, print, or even an online promotion and get right into your sales funnel.



Try to keep the pages for your transactional or response sites as simple as possible.  The best way to increase conversions is to have a single focus for your conversion pages.  The landing page should confirm that the user is in the right place and give them a context of where they are in the transaction process, provide an answer or benefit that responds to a desire that the visitor has, dangle an image or description of the fulfillment payload that the user will get, have a large conversion button `above the fold', preferrably in an attractive contrasting color to the rest of the content, and have a clear requirement or price for the payload.

 

Good conversion page design can be hard.  I often see conversion pages where these elements are missing or they are so conflicted with additional links, images, and information, that it is nearly impossible for the visitor to find the button to complete the process!  If you keep it simple, and your product has value relative to the cost for the user, your conversions will climb. 

 

 

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

 Phil Gibson ©2016

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