What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.

That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.

About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services

MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!

We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.

By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers.

Must-Have Information

MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at the APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, at Rosen Shingle Creek resort, Orlando, Fla.

Meet us at booth #708.

Contact Kristen Pulver for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

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By Daryl Colwell | VP, Business Development

Every good marketer knows that to generate leads, they need a robust database. And a good call-to-action. And a means of reaching the potential customers in their database in a timely and efficient manner.

While those ingredients alone won’t necessarily improve your lead-generation campaigns, they will set the stage for the one tool that is a must in any online marketer’s arsenal: email.

But how do you ensure your emails stand out from the crowd? In an age when consumers and business prospects receive hundreds of emails — some great, some OK and many just plain awful — the standard prospecting email won’t cut it anymore.

What you need is great email creative. It’s what helps turn an immediate delete into a potential prospect.

When developing your email creative, keep in mind that not all lists are the same.

Say, for example, you were a credit card issuer that wanted to acquire new customers. You would want to make sure you reach out to different audiences with different messages and cards. If you were mailing out to a group on a fantasy football list, you would want to message that user an opportunity to get a card with his or her favorite team’s logo on it. You could also message a sweepstakes to win a trip to the Super Bowl or detail how they can earn enough miles to fly to one of their team’s pivotal road games.

If you were reaching out to a list of future brides, you want to focus on cash back on housewares, earning miles or points to redeem for that crown honeymoon destination, etc.

These lists are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they prove a point. You don’t turn on ESPN and see ads for diapers and perfume. You see relevant ads that the audience is interested in viewing. Email marketing is no different.

The key to effective email marketing creative is determining the anatomy of the list and sending consumers the appropriate and most relevant message/offer.

Email inboxes are highly cluttered these days. It’s important to make sure your email message/offer stands out with a great From and Subject line. If you’re a big brand, or a highly relevant offer/product, make sure that’s illustrated in the From line. Make your Subject line splashy by promoting a savings or unique proposition to the consumer. And always personalize the message where you can in order to capture the consumer’s attention.

Once the consumer opens the email, make sure the creative follows what the From/Subject line promised. Consumers will be quick to delete your message or unsubscribe to your offer/list if you’ve falsely advertised in the subject line.

To stand out from the crowd and ensure your prospecting email actually performs its intended function — prospecting for new clients, not annoying them — start with great creative. It is the key ingredient to lead-gen success from email in the digital age.

What are some of your ideas for ensuring high-quality email creative? 

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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications

The 2013 Online Marketing Summit is next week, and MediaWhiz, along with our SEO team, TLA, will be right in the thick of the show. If you’re in San Diego for the show (Feb. 11-13 at the San Diego Convention Center), be sure to visit booth #305 to chat with us about performance and search marketing, as well as SEO and content marketing. Several of our SEO and search marketing experts will be on site to discuss best practices for improving your SEO and search marketing campaigns.

MediaWhiz Vice President Daryl Colwell will take that discussion a step further during his Feb. 12 presentation, “Content Marketing Like a Pro: Tactics and Techniques to Increase Search Engine Visibility.” Here is a brief overview of Daryl’s presentation:

Time/Date: 3-3:45 p.m. PST, Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Location: Room 29D, San Diego Convention Center

Session Description
It’s no longer enough to have great SEO for your website. In today’s Google-controlled era of search engine marketing, brands need great content that is engaging, informative and shareable to rank well and

generate leads. Join Daryl Colwell to learn about his best practices and techniques to increase your brand’s search engine visibility through content marketing. Session attendees will be given several examples and case studies of brands that have gone from ranking on page three to page one purely from professional-quality content marketing that they produce. You’ll come away from this session with a top-10 list of content marketing best practices that the pros use.

Must-Have Information
MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at OMS San Diego, Feb. 11-13.

Meet us at booth #305.

Contact Keith Trivitt for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

What to Do in San Diego
San Diego is one of America’s most beautiful cities. It’s perfect mix of Pacific Ocean breezes, sunny days and laid-back atmosphere make it a perennial contender as one of America’s top tourist destinations. And there is plenty to do for free. Here are some resources for great activities you can take part in while you’re visiting San Diego during OMS:

• Visit San Diego
• 25 Fun and Free Things to Do in San Diego
• Best Things to Do in San Diego

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Over the holiday season I signed up to receive email newsletters and offers from several retail websites. Interestingly, when I received some of these emails for discounts, coupons or alerts for new items I was most likely to click on a link in the email and browse the retailer’s site. When comparing email to social media, TV or other forms of online media, the channel that most frequently grabbed my attention was email.

Not surprisingly, retailers agree that email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools that they have. Wait! Isn’t social media supposed to be the new medium that kills email while simultaneously generating sales? Not so, according to recent industry reports. Forrester tracked 77,000 sales during the recent holiday season and found out that only 1% of online sales came from social media sites like Facebook.

So please forgive me if I am not one who buys into the fact that in in the next two years 50% of retail sales will come from social media sites.

That doesn’t mean social media juggernauts like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn aren’t prime for retail sales and marketing opportunities. With a combined user base of more than 2.5 billion, there is potential for social media to play a huge role in sales.

The question for marketers is whether the social media market has become so saturated that it’s effectively become easier to grab consumers’ attention via email than from a tweet. A recent study found that in 2012 consumers took longer to respond to emails when compared to 2012. Yet email marketing still remains a powerful marketing tool for businesses.

Triggering the Online Shopper’s Itch
Going back to my personal example, whenever I am alerted by email to an appealing sale from one of my favorite retailers, I often end up browsing that company’s website. When it comes to social media, however, the odds of me clicking on promotional tweet are very low. My inbox is a place where I know that retail messages are specifically sent for me. So when I see “Sultan: You have a special offer from company A,” it grabs — and holds — my attention much more than a generic brand tweet along the lines of: “Follow us for a special discount offer!”

A holiday email I recently received from Express earned high marks for its ability to capture my attention. As the screenshot on the left shows, the email featured professional-quality photos and imagery.

Holiday retail promotions on Twitter weren’t so enticing. A tweet of a sale from a popular home retail outlet failed to grab my attention, even though it offered a 75% savings. There was nothing visually appealing about the tweet. In a Twitter feed that is literally updating every second with breaking news, sports information, random trends, etc., the promotion failed to trigger my shopping itch.

Will social media eventually become a significant factor in online sales? Possibly; but for now, email remains on top.

What form of online marketing gets your attention? Does social media play a significant role in influencing you when it comes to purchasing a product online? Disagree with what I discussed? Tweet me @Riaz_MediaWhiz and let’s discuss.

Image source: SmartInsights.com 

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The post Email vs. Social Media: Which Is Best for Shopper Marketing? appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

What’s Premium in the Post Homepage Era? | Digiday
Search was first to put a serious dent in the primacy of the homepage. Now, with social and mobile gaining steam, publishers are left without the big, splashy homepage premium ad placements.

The fact is, most publishers see half or more of their traffic come in through the side door, whether through search, social or other means. That means publishers need to create new premium placements in a world where “every page is a home page.”

Coupon Sites Prove Attractive for Retailers Doing Affiliate Marketing | Internet Retailer
When it comes to affiliate marketing, coupon sites have proven far more valuable than content and comparison shopping sites for Bake Me a Wish, an online retailer of cookies, cakes and brownies, says says Joseph Dornoff, the merchant’s vice president of marketing and operations.

Why Big Bird Remains Powerfully — and Globally — Significant | Harvard Business Review
Big Bird has had a big presence in the collective conversation lately, thanks to mentions in the first two presidential debates. The outpouring of support for the giant yellow puppet that followed the first debate is a testament to his and Sesame Street’s continued relevance in people’s lives. Sesame Street, in fact, is a great case study of a brand that has managed to remain powerful over decades and across cultures.

Tweets Spawn Ad Campaigns | The Wall Street Journal
Consumers’ tweets are starting to influence and find their way into brands’ traditional, online and TV ad campaigns. What impact will that have on how brands engage with consumers online and the efforts they take to develop digital consumer advocates via social media?

What Red Bull Can Teach Content Marketing | Digiday
The marketing world woke up recently with Red Bull envy. At a time when brands talk of being publishers, Red Bull showed how this can be done on a grand scale: enabling Felix Baumgartner to complete a historic (and awfully cool) skydive from “the edge of space.” Red Bull’s bold sponsorship of Baumgartner’s historic jump shows a glimmer of the future of brand content marketing.

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The post The Friday Five: Premium Display Advertising Under Threat appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

Pinterest Fosters Unique Shopping Behaviors | eMarketer
A new eMarketer report delves into the retail activity spurred by the latest social network to make headlines — Pinterest. The visually focused, aspirational site has grown tremendously, and it offers a lot of promise for retailers, assuming they can get users to link images with product offerings and purchases.

Mobile Payments Still Tiny, Set to Explode in Next Four Years | Advertising Age
The hype surrounding mobile payments seemingly knows no bounds. But the reality of consumer adoption of the emerging payments platform hasn’t quite caught up to the excitement, as our Daryl Colwell has noted before. Now, however, there is new research to suggest that mobile payments may finally be living up to their lofty hype as the ultimate bricks-and-mortar-meets-online-marketing platform. Research firm eMarketer estimates that the total transaction value for mobile payments in the U.S. will be $640 million this year, but that will grow to more than $62 billion in 2016 as a bigger segment of the population uses their phones to buy medium-ticket items, including fast-food restaurants.

Google Wants to Join the Party, Not Crash It | The New York Times

Have you ever hosted a party and found your guests wondering who stars in that new movie or play? Well, Google is here to help. It’s figuring out new, less intrusive ways to join the party — as varied as voice search, Internet-connected glasses and other wearable computers, or dining room tables outfitted with screens. What could these new innovations in real-time mean for the future of online advertising?

Advertising’s Bumpy Transition (And Why It Matters To You) | The Social CMO
Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, Web users are going to be stuck seeing a lot of irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.

E-mail is still going strong, studies show | Click Z
Social media and mobile may get more of marketers’ attention, but e-mail is still an important platform, studies show. More than 9 in 10 internet users have e-mail accounts, and 60% use them on a daily basis and e-mail can actually increase the effectiveness of other platforms, experts say. “For marketers trying to reach consumers, e-mail remains one of the best ways to find them,” this article notes.

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Growth in the email marketing industry shows no signs of abating. Analyst firm Forrester Research forecasts U.S. email marketing spend to reach $1.7 billion in 2012, a 12-percent increase over 2011. Fueling that growth is the increasing combination of email with social media and direct marketing that many businesses are using to deliver more targeted and relevant campaigns to consumers. 

Much of this improvement is based on data and learned information about customers.

New technology has created an evolution for direct mail marketing, allowing companies to seamlessly integrate it with email marketing. This delivers better leads for brands while ensuring their direct mail and email marketing campaigns are actually read by consumers.

Recently, MediaWhiz President Ed Kats was asked by Inc. magazine to offer his thoughts on how companies can effectively integrate direct mail marketing and email marketing. Below is a summary of his responses:

1. Know your audience and business model and then integrate direct mail marketing and email marketing to either be a 1-2 sales punch or complimentary to each other. For example: direct mail is meant to compel customers into a store through the use of coupons or advertisements. An email is generally meant as an “Act now!” retail sale for non-considered / non-essential purchases. For considered purchases (those that consumers think about purchasing before going to a store or brand website), companies should use direct mail and email marketing in tandem to drive consumers to either call or visit a website and “learn more” about the product. 
2. When used for customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns, businesses should plan their event calendar well ahead of time and make sure they have different conversations with customers across direct mail and email marketing that are complimentary to each other. It’s important, however, that those marketing pieces are segmented by tactic and channel to ensure quality and consistency with how your customers have responded to direct mail and email offers in the past.

What are your tips and best practices for integrating email marketing and direct mail marketing campaigns? Share them in the comments section. 

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The post Can Email and Direct Mail Learn to Love Each Other? appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Editor’s note: The following post was originally published in iMedia Connection. 

Web hosting company HostPapa’s new infographic comparing email marketing and social media marketing has given marketers a new lightning-rod topic to debate.

Despite no shortage of proponents in each camp, we think the conclusion is simple: it’s pointless to compare email marketing with social media marketing. Each has a unique value. More importantly, we believe that email and social media should be used in tandem, not against each other, for effective digital media and marketing campaigns.

The problem with comparing email marketing and social media marketing is apparent: one (social media marketing) is a brand strategy while the other (email) is a direct-response strategy. Each requires the other in some form to be effective, and each builds off the other for greater value and efficiency.

The infographic isn’t without merit. It offers some valuable insight marketers can use to understand how, when and where to use and integrate email marketing and social media marketing to improve their lead-gen and digital engagement efforts.

But first, it’s necessary to look at the facts.

Email Still Generates Results

Email marketing continues to produce eye-popping results. According to HostPapa, business spending on email marketing campaigns has increased 60 percent in the past year, accumulating 17.4 percent of U.S. brands’ digital marketing budgets in 2011. Email open rates continue to rise, too, improving 12.6 percent in Q1 2012, according to a report by Epsilon and the Direct Marketing Association.

Those are no small feats; especially for a form of digital communications many believe is dead/has died/will die.

Social Media is Garnering Big Money

Those numbers pale in comparison, however, to the growth of social media. The figures are widely known but worth repeating for full effect. Facebook has 900-plus million users worldwide. LinkedIn has 161 million active members. Twitter has more than 100 million active users. That doesn’t take into account the $4.7 billion businesses are projected to spend on social media marketing in 2012. Or data indicating that small to medium-sized businesses are projected to increase their social media budgets by 100 percent this year.

HostPapa concluded in its infographic that email “wins” because of its allegedly superior reach, features and usage. But that misses the larger point addressed above: social media isn’t about generating a direct response or a purchase. It’s about connections, relationships and engagement between brands and their customers. Of course it is different than email; comparisons between the two are futile.

What does this mean for brands still confused about how, when and where to integrate social media into their digital marketing campaigns?

1. The natural synergy of email and social media. Direct marketing (email) is more effective when there is branding (social media) behind it, and branding is improved when there is direct marketing behind it. Look for ways to integrate best practices from each into your next email or social media marketing campaign.
2. Social goes beyond engagement. The common perception of social media is that it doesn’t offer a direct sales component. It’s great for engagement but bad for lead generation. That’s true … to a point. Brands can turn social media marketing into leads if they include a way for consumers to opt-in to their email marketing campaigns within specific social media messages. From a tactical perspective, the digital age demands that email marketing and social media marketing are interconnected and integrated.
3. Let social do the soft sell and email go direct. Know where you are placing the appropriate function, how it will be consumed and how audiences will react to the message. Include social components in every email marketing campaign to ensure that first-, second- and third-tier readers can share your content and advocate for your brand.

Keith Trivitt is director of marketing and communications at MediaWhiz, a performance marketing and integrated digital media agency. Steve Goldner, senior director of social marketing at the Ryan Partnership, a MediaWhiz sister agency, also contributed to this post.

Brought to you by HostPapa Web Hosting

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We’re big fans of the semi-annual industry confab known as LeadsCon. For this summer’s event, LeadsCon East, we’re hosting a special workshop aimed at helping marketers garner better value and more leads from their digital marketing campaigns.

On Wednesday, July 25, our workshop, titled, “Guaranteeing ROI and Accountability: The Benefits of Online Channel Integration,” will help marketers understand how they can effectively utilize online channel integration to generate results in an accountable and measurable fashion. It’s about more than just placing an ad across various online channels. Our panel of experts will discuss how they utilize multichannel integration to keep the leads coming in while ensuring real ROI for their brands.

We’re excited to host this workshop and invite all who will be attending LeadsCon East to attend. Session details are below.

For more information or to schedule a private meeting with our sales team while at LeadsCon East, please contact Keith Trivitt at ktrivitt@mediawhiz.com or 646.264.0144

Be sure to check out the MediaWhiz booth at LeadsCon. Visit booth #111 for cool giveaways and to chat with our friendly sales team.

MediaWhiz LeadsCon Session Details

Session:              Guaranteeing ROI and Accountability: The Benefits of Online Channel Integration

Date:                     Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Time:                    9–9:45 a.m.                   

Room:                   Rendezvous Trianon, Hilton New York

Session Description

The holy grail of digital marketing is a guarantee of results for brands. In this informative session, MediaWhiz and its clients discuss how marketers can utilize performance marketing to deliver actionable and quantifiable results while maintaining brand integrity and ensuring compliance in an increasingly litigious online environment.

Speakers

• Moderator: Jeremy Leonard, Senior Vice President, Strategy & Operations, Mediawhiz
• Mike Venables, Group Planning Director, Neo@Ogilvy
• Scott Kaufman, Vice President, Marketing, The Lasik Vision Institute
• Sung Kim, Chief Technology Officer, TriAd Media Solutions

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In order to increase conversions, improve sales and drive results for clients, email marketing and creative teams should work together to produce highly-targeted, high-performing messaging. To maximize collaborative effectiveness, these departments should keep the following email subject line best practices top of mind:

• Avoid obvious SPAM words like Free, Coupon and Cash
• Keep it Short – Subject length should be up to 50 characters or less
• Refer to best performing competitive offers
• Include company name for credibility and better branding
• Create a recognizable, relevant benefit for the reader
• Continually test and compare open rates

Obviously, the subject heading alone will not convert to sale. Email marketers must ensure that the body messaging offers strong selling points. But if the subject line doesn’t grab the reader, the body of the email might as well be lost in online space.

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