“Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you.” – Hamlet | Friday is a perfect day to start the morning with a spot of Hamlet, tea, crumpets, and a peak at the inmost part of our inner thinking and strategy of the mobile/social channels. This week I attended the Inbound Marketing Summit’s New Marketing Experience here in San Francisco. I was invited to sit on a panel tasked with answering the question “Is email dead?” I think we all had the same response to that question (recently and infamously postulated by the WSJ back in October) NAY, Email is not dead!
However not-dead email is there still seems to be some confusion about the social and mobile aspects of the channel. Let me put it another way, email is a doppelganger of its self and has several lives and incarnations.A single email crosses realities like a sub-atomic particle on a bender.
Consider this scenario for a moment—marketer X sends an email that customer Y receives at lunch on his or her mobile phone. The customer quickly scans the email but has greasy fingers and doesn’t want to pinch and drag it here and there so he or she makes a mental note to view it later. That same day, during an afternoon lull, the customer decides to log into his or her Gmail account and peruse the email while the boss is out for a 2nd wind and critical espresso. The email is a good offer and after clicking a link the customer decides, well it’s five o’clock somewhere in the world time to hit the bar. That evening after a few post-mortem cocktails the customer comes home sits down at his or her desktop fires up Thunderbird, which he or she uses to pop mail from Gmail and views the same email. This time instead of just perusing the site that the email references, the customer not only shares the email and corresponding offers with friends on Facebook, but actually converts and buys a product. Wow, that’s a hard working and patient email. So in that scenario, how many emails would you say were sent? If you said one you’re spot on.
Your single email has not only touched more than one person, but the email was viewed on three different email clients and found it’s way into the social realm. So are you considering mobile rendering when you’re crafting your email? Are you including share-links to make it easy for your customer’s friends to share the email on Facebook, Twitter, even LinkedIN if you’re a B2B marketer? No? Why not?!
Here’s a few factoids for some Friday fun…
- Americans on average have 150 Facebook friends. By NOT including a sharethis link to prime the social pump you missed an opportunity for an additional 300 eyeballs to see your offer.
- According to Tom Webster of Edison Research 1 in 3 Americans access a social network through a mobile phone. Pretty slick of you to send that gigantic 3 column piece that even an iPhone’s near bullet proof rendering has a problem digesting and processing. Rule of thumb here is be nice to your users, use a 1 column layout, try to keep it around 600pixels across and always, always include a text portion properly formatted to about 70 characters per line (that’s as much as the average eye wants to see) for older devices.
- About 1 in 10 people are currently viewing your website on a mobile device. Why aren’t you coming up with keen mobile strategies for this hand-held 1 in 10 that are really your digital vanguard and potentially most engaged users?
Where does the 1 in 10 come from? Good question, glad you asked, it comes from the web analytics we’re all hoarding but not acting on. We here at Unica use our very own Netinsight which gives us a great bird’s eye view into what kind of browsers are being used to view our site. I took a look this morning and saw Mobile Safari and Blackberry 9700 together comprise almost 10% of the pie!
However you harvest/cull your data, just do it. Get as much of it as you can and then do it again. Yeah, do it twice, measure twice and cut once was a phrase Tom Webster succinctly employed when describing his fondness for data and penchant for accuracy in measurement. The specifics of how you go about setting up your mobile/social strategy will depend on your products, your business goals, requirements etc. This is the part of exercise that Chris Brogan called “clearing the blur” or those things that distract you from making good decisions about the direction your strategy and company needs to go.
The fact that you need need a mobile and social strategy isn’t new or ground-breaking, the fact that I’ve been using mobile and social in the same breadth should give you an indication that not only are these the hot topics du jour, but its where the world is heading: faster, smaller and infinitely connected. Or as Hamlet might have put it, “To be mobile and social or not to be, that is the question.”
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Deliverability & Messaging
Unica | Pivotal Veracity
