This inclusion of Social Media into companies marketing has resulted in some success stories for big name brands. A major part of a Social Media Strategy is listening to what is being said and where these conversations are taking place. In this blog we will cover two success stories where a company has listened to what the customer want and then create a strategy around them

Cadbury’s Wispa

Cadbury’s realised that there was a lot of conversations happening online, even a campaign to bring it back, about the previously discontinued chocolate bar, Wispa.

Cadbury’s decided to re-launch the chocolate bar and decided to use Social Media Monitoring to understand where these conversations were taking place and how they could use this to their advantage. By monitoring the conversation Cadbury’s was able to find out that 7,500 people were talking about Wispa on a variety of sites ranging from student websites to YouTube videos and comments.

With this knowledge they were then able to identify where the majority of conversations were starting and who the most active and influential people were.

Thanks to Social Media Monitoring Cadbury’s now knew where there was an already interested audience and key influencers, which they could then build a campaign around. Thanks to this knowledge Cadbury’s was able to re-launch the Wispa chocolate bar with great success, selling 24 million bars in the first 6 weeks and help Cadbury’s achieve an 11% rise in UK sales.

For the Love of Whispa

Following the success of the re-launch of Wispa, Cadbury’s didn’t want to just let the buzz generated die down and followed up the launch with the “For the Love Of Wispa” campaign where they once again approached the influencers of their brand they identified for the re-launch. This time they invited fans of Wispa to get involved in creating an advert by pledging anything from balloons to full rugby teams for the filming.

The result was an amazing advert full of Cheerleaders, Kazoo playing bikers and much much more all made by people who love Cadbury’s Wispa.

Here is the final video that was created by fans of Wispa

Kellogg’s

Kellogg’s was looking to understand, in detail, what was being said about their brand and four of their main products; Coco Pops, Special K, Crunchy Nut and Rice Krispies Squares. By launching a listening and monitoring program Kellogg’s was able to gain insight, which was then used as a basis for all future social media involvement.

In a 3 month period between November 2009 and January 2010 Kellogg’s were able to analyse 89,000 comments to identify influencers and detractors who were affecting the online conversation about their brand. With this new understanding about the conversation Kellogg’s was able create an effective social media engagement strategy that would subtly harness existing conversations.

By communicating with real people, in real time, Kellogg’s was able to move from reactive monitoring – only anticipating and addressing potential stories relating directly to them – to actively engaging in the wider discussion and addressing customers at their point of need. By taking on board concerns and suggestions, this extension of customer research has allowed Kellogg’s to review, adjust and launch products accordingly.

The birth of Krave

Kellogg’s decision to get involved in Social Media Monitoring didn’t just change their engagement strategy with the public but caused them to develop a brand new product from the conversations that were happening about what people wanted in a cereal and so Krave was born.

The cereal was targeted towards the youth market and it was chosen that a Facebook and Television campaign would be how they would market this new product in what was already challenging sector. The Facebook campaign consisted of users being able to bid for prizes in an auction with a new Kellogg’s Krave Currency called “Choc Chunks”. These Choc Chunks are earned by Fans of the Krave Facebook page when they complete certain task like signing up, recruiting friends, uploading photos, tagging themselves and friends in photos and mentioning Krave in their status updates.

The Krave Facebook page quickly reached over 59,000 fans who have uploaded nearly 500 of their own photos and the community they have create is starting to create their own Krave adverts. The Choc Chunk currency has been used to bid for Gig Tickets, games and gadgets.

For a new cereal the launch was a great success with Krave gaining a 0.8% market share in less than 2 months thanks to the knowledge Kellogg’s had gain about what their target audience were talking about on social media channels.

In Summary

When it comes to social media monitoring, and then engagement, no two projects are the same and proper preparation should be done before entering into social media with a corporate brand.

With the likes of Cadbury’s Whispa they were able to identify where best to target their advertising to get the best possible exposure and allow the fans that had shown interest in the product early on to get involved with launching and marketing of it.

Kellogg’s were able to identify a gap in the marketing for the cereal Krave and targeted their marketing towards where this demand was originating and build upon it.

In this blog we will cover 10 tips to help increase the effectiveness of your subject lines and your email campaigns on a whole.

1. Subject line length

People receive many emails a day and most of the time they don’t have time to read through each email and so rely in the subject line to decipher whether the email is of importance or interest to them. For this reason it is recommended to keep the subject line less the 50 characters (including spaces) so that the line doesn’t extended beyond the email client’s (Outlook, Hotmail, etc )viewing plane.

It is sometimes argued that having a long subject line reduces the number of opens but may increase the number of click through rates because the recipients know exactly what the email is about and by opening is interested rather than just curious.

2. Get the Key Information in early

As mentioned in point 1, the subject line should be kept short to help increase the chances of the recipient opening the email but also that having a long subject line is not always detrimental. Whether you chose to have a short or long subject line this rule applies to both.

With an email subject line you should always try and get the key point in early so that it attracts those recipients who skim the subject lines and email clients don’t have a set number of characters before it’s cut off. So it’s vital to main the key points at the beginning if the line before it is potentially cut off.

For example:

“Ten tips for improving your email marketing” can be re-arranged and shortened to “Email Marketing: Top 10 tips”

3. Provide an immediate benefit

If you include an immediate benefit or some sort of urgency tag in your subject line then the recipient feels the need to act quickly for the fear of miss out. This is of course dependant on the content of the email and sometimes a time scale or deadline would apply to it. Examples of this are:

• 10 best places to play golf this week
• Order now for Christmas day delivery
• 24 hours left before our sale closes

4. Be truthful

There is nothing people dislike more than someone they deam as untrustworthy. Don’t stretch the truth in the subject line or promise more than the email can deliver, or make grand claims that readers will find hard to comply with in order to get a special offer or benefit. Readers will distrust you (and reach for the report-spam button) if your subject line doesn’t reflect the email content and will most likely automatically delete future emails without a glance.

5. Think about the Spam Filters

It is a thin line between “Catchy” and “Spam” and trying to get this correct is one of the hardest parts of Email Marketing. There are certain words that trigger the Spam filters and if these are used to often in the subject and email body then the email will be automatically put in the Junk Mail. It is always best to run your emails through spam checkers before sending them out to your mailing lists.

6. Support the “From” Field

It is a common mistake to include the company name or organisation in the subject line in the belief that it will increase brand association and forget about the “From” section. If your company name appears in this field then it is unnecessary for it to also be included in the subject line.

7. Personalise

Personalise email subject lines based on users’ previous history of engagement with your emails. If you know what products or content preferences, interests, past purchases, Web visits or links they have clicked then you have an amazing insight into what works for them in email copy. Be careful when personalising on past purchases, however, because the purchase could have been a gift for someone else and might not relate to your reader’s real interests, but it can still provide a vital insight. Always make it easy for readers to find and update their data and email preferences, through an “Update my preferences” link. Avoid using the recipient’s name in the subject line unless you are sure your database is up to date. There is nothing worse then sending out emails with incorrect names in the subject lines.

8. Write the Subject Line early

It is common that the subject line is forgotten about and left till last when building an email but it should be one of the first parts of the email you should think about. As you plan a email marketing campaign, start thinking about what will go into the subject line. That will help you sharpen your campaign’s focus and may even change or tweak the offer or article focus.

9. Look back at previous Emails

The best analytics you have are from previous emails you have sent to be sure to always refer to what you have done previously when writing new subject lines. See which email subject lines delivered the action you wanted – the most conversions, the highest average sale per order, the highest click-through rate, etc.

10. Test, Test, Test.

Test continually to determine trends and styles that appear to work. Pre-test if you can. Add a day to your campaign-creation schedule to give you enough time to try out different email subject lines. Opinions and attitudes changes so don’t assume what works now will work 6 months later.
I repeat – Test, Test, Test

Writing subject lines are too important to ignore or to write at the last moment. Take your time, try out various possibilities, follow the advice of the experts, and you may see your open rates go up.

As a result of these changes please check that your social media services are still authenticated: Login into PressRoom, go to the ‘Service Accounts’ tab on the main menu and check your services are authenticated by following the ‘Authentication Success / Required’ prompts:

You’ll notice that we’ve added ‘Add This’ social bookmarking support which you read about and sign up to on their site: http://www.addthis.com/

And behind the Twitter service, we are now using the bit.ly url shortening service, so you can now create a http://bit.ly account to Manage and Analyse PressRoom links using their reporting tools.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us for any further information on using these social media services.

Two Tiered Marketing

To best describe B2B email marketing, let’s take as an example a car manufacturer with a nationwide network of dealerships:

For the brand there is a message and ethos that the central office (Parent) wants to protect and communicate through their marketing to branches (Child), but they also need to embrace local variations to messages depending on the location of each branch.

Using PromoSender, the Parent maintains brand control of main design whilst the Child adds localised messages to suit the local audience.

Eg. In the United States the messages used to sell a car in New York could be very different to the messages used in California. Ie. The Californian message maybe localised to emphasise the importance of fuel economy, whereas the NY message might focus more of driving style and comfort.

Email Marketing for Two Tiered Campaigns

A second key requirement is that “child” accounts maintain their own separate and secure opt-in / opt-out recipient databases.

A two tiered B2B email campaign is, therefore, the most cost effective method of marketing a brand that is looking to share a message with an audience that is not located in a single area: The Parent creates the main strategy and message that is then sent to its branches or resellers who then send on with localised messages to their individual mailing lists.

With B2B email marketing services such as PromoSender, the Parent creates promotions and is able to control the extent to which these promotions can be customised by the Child organisations before being sent to the customers, making it easy to centrally manage approved messages used by subsidiary users.

The diagram below shows how the PromoSender two tiered email marketing service is structured:

As with any marketing campaign, analytics is very important, and keeping informed of distributed email marketing campaigns run through Child organisations could be nigh on impossible without centralised analytics.

By having multiple branches or resellers all using a B2B email marketing service such as PromoSender, centralised reporting is a snap with each Child collecting and sharing their own analytics with their Parent organisation.

What PressRoom is designed to do is optimise the same news and press releases but for distribution to the social web: There’s no reason why you shouldn’t run both services side by side.

In designing PressRoom, we’ve paid particular attention to ensuring that news is optimised for the social web:

• News releases are optimised for Google News & Yahoo News and distributed to a host of blogging and news aggregation services.
• News is distributed through Twitter by automatically generating tweets which include the title of each press release with shortened url to the full article.
• Embedding YouTube videos and Flickr images brings in rich media content.
• Press releases are automatically added to Delicious social media bookmarking account.
• Google Analytics reporting compliments the comprehensive dashboard tracking from Technorati Cosmos, Yahoo Site Explorer & Delicious.

Which is great news for those who are looking to effectively integrate social media marketing into their online press & news service and engage a wider audience.

What do they do if they have the potential to reap the benefit of some good publicity such as being involved in a high profile event or the emergence of a new trend?

In either of these cases a contant managed website would allow them to update the online face of the company in minutes, rather than requiring the help of another person, company or department.

Ackura SiteManager aims to take the technical requirements out of content management, allowing designated people to be able to control what is written on their website. There is no special software to install, simply login to the site administration panel in a normal web-browser and then add or edit whatever you need to.

• Page templates allow advanced formatting to be applied to pages without the need for special training.
• Automatic menus and navigation means that visitors to the site will be able to find your content the moment that it is published.
• Built in facilities for adding web analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of your content and learn about your site visitors.
• Built-in search engine optimisation features help you to make sure that your content can be found through all of the major web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live Search.

Put simply, Ackura SiteManager is a content management system which allows you to manage your content.

Creating, editing and sending your emails is a breeze. MessageSender also has all the reporting tools you need to be able to monitor the success of your campaigns.

It's easy to edit the content of your email

One of the things that makes MessageSender special is the ease at which you can manage your recipient list based on response and use this information to tailor your future activity. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content to your audience based on their previous behaviour.

Now in its third incarnation, Ackura MessageSender is the result of 6 years of development. We are continually developing the tool and hope to bring you new modules allowing you increased functionality. The aim of this blog is two-fold: to inform MessageSender users of new and upcoming features as well as providing tips and helpful resources on how to ge the best possible results from your email marketing campaigns.

After all – having the right tool is only the first step to a successful email campaign. The rest is down to you and your strategy.

Creating, editing and sending your emails will become a breeze. MessageSender also has all the reporting tools you need to be able to monitor the success of your campaigns.

One of the things that make MessageSender special is the ease at which you can manage your recipient list based on response and use this information to tailor your future activity. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content to your audience based on their previous behavior.

Now in its third incarnation, Ackura MessageSender is the result of 6 years of development. We are continually developing the tool and hope to bring you new modules allowing you increased functionality.

Create your own branded email campaigns

MessageSender allows you to create attractive branded emails through an easy to use HTML email builder.

However, should you require help with this, we have a number of ‘off the shelf’ examples or we can design and build email templates to your specifications.

MessageSender allows you to customise your content for Newsletters, e-promotions or whatever message content you wish to forward, ensuring that the email always looks professional and will generate the greatest response rate.

Easy to use formatting tools that will be familiar to anyone who has used Word

MessageSender will allow for the powerful personalisation of your emails, giving them the personal touch that increased click through rates and sales.

Emails can be sent in HTML and Text ensuring that you give yourself the greatest chance that the message will be delivered.

Multiple language character sets are supported through UTF 8

Schedule email campaigns to be delivered as and when you want to.

Manage your mailing list

MessageSender allows you to add unlimited subscribers and upload your own mailing list from CSV files.

Auto-scrubber will help clean up your list by turning invalid addresses into valid ones and removing any duplicates

Easily search and manage your recipients based on their behaviour allowing you to target specific messages to different needs.

MessageSender can add a form to your website to enable your recipients to manage their subscriptions

Track your email responses

Manage bounced emails and unsubcribes from your mailing

Track who has opened and who has clicked through and on which links

Track ‘send to a friend’ links as well as who is forwarding your email and to whom

Extensive Reporting and Analytics

MessageSender provides all the statistics you would expect from a great email marketing system, presented in an easy to analyse summary report.

From tracking the basic criteria such as open and click rates which indicate the initial successes of any campaign, to advanced search functions that allow you to pull up recipients on a wide range of criteria, including behavioural history on previous emails they have opened or links they have clicked on.

MessageSender can easily also be easily integrated within Google Analytics or other leading website tracking and analytics systems to allow you to track all website activity resulting from the email campaign.

All reports can be downloaded into Excel making the information you gather easy to share with all of those who matter.

Custom Features

Create Multiple Logins for a single account

Create client sub-accounts underneath a master umbrella with PromoSender (insert PS link)

New features request can be implemented and pushed to production

MessageSender API and web service available

The Tracking page for each release now contains a tabbed area allowing you to view two charts; one which shows the cumulative engagement level for the release over the past 30 days and one which displays the daily activity for that release over 30 days.

Engagement Level

Engagement Activity

This is only a small step in our efforts to provide tools that help you to monitor the effectiveness of your social media news releases. There is plenty more to come.