With natural sharing opportunities built into holiday emails such as Black Friday promotions and nifty gift items at unbeatable prices, are you ready to make 2011 the holiday season to share?

Unfortunately, many email marketers have put their approach to sharing emails on autopilot and have forgotten the keys to making their content both shareable and shareworthy.

Here are a few quick tips to increase the likelihood that your message will be shared—even without that piano-playing cat video—this holiday season:

1. Make your emails easy to share. It doesn’t matter how great your content is. If you don’t make it simple to share, it stands little chance of going viral. Here are a couple of tactics to make your emails more shareable:

• Limit the social networks to the one or two most popular and relevant to your subscribers.
• Ask your readers outright to share the content and tell them why/what’s in it for them.
• Be descriptive with copy on the share icons/buttons: “Share on Facebook”/”Share on Twitter/“Forward to Friends.”
• Make these buttons easy to find by placing them right in the copy block with the offer you want to promote.
• Use “bulletproof buttons“—HTML links behind the images so that a recipient can still click even when images are blocked.
• Test and analyze to learn which networks and approaches produce the most shares.
• In general, make sure your email is mobile and touch- friendly so that even “fat fingers” can click the button accurately and easily.

Last holiday season, King Arthur Flour used email to promote sharing of holiday baked items on its Facebook page.

2. Provide “shareworthy” content. People share content to help others and to be seen as a knowledgeable information source, among other reasons. The holiday season presents a number of obvious sharing themes and opportunities, including:

• Black Friday promotions: Encourage subscribers to share details of your Black Friday promotion.
• Coupons: If you want your coupons to go viral, encourage subscribers to share the savings among their friends.
• In-store events and promotions: Photos with Santa or “meet the author” with a book signing. 
• “Share with a friend” offers: Past campaigns or shopping/browse behavior on your site can tell you which offers shoppers are most likely to share. 
• Wish lists: Promote several desirable products, perhaps even using dynamic copy blocks that incorporate a customer’s past buying habits. Invite the subscriber to forward or post the email as hints for a husband/wife, parent, child, sibling or friend. 
• “Shop with me” offers: These are traffic builders for retailers with physical locations to encourage shoppers to bring friends to their local stores or to send out-of-town friends to their own nearby stores. 
• Contests, games and fun: Remember Office Max’s “Elf Yourself” campaigns? Silverpop client King Arthur Flour used email last holiday season to promote sharing of holiday baked items on its Facebook page.

3. Create stand-alone emails. Add a new email, or replace one of your regular broadcast messages with one designed specifically to be shared.

Instead of retrofitting your existing message template, create a new message design with simple navigation that focuses exclusively on a single idea and uses copy to promote sharing via email, “forward to a friend” and posting on social networks.

Have you seen or created any innovative holiday emails that were especially shareworthy? Please share below.

More Holiday Marketing Tips:
1) Blog: “Use Offline Sources to Increase Opt-ins”
2) Blog: “Leverage Facebook to Grow Your Email Database”
3) Tip Sheet: “8 New Twists on Holiday Marketing Traditions to Help Drive Revenue”

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Intrigued by the fact that more than 1 billion people have now “checked in” at a location via Foursquare? If so, you’re not alone: Businesses of all shapes and sizes are launching new programs to engage customers through check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places. Whether you’re creating a short-term campaign or long-term loyalty program, it’s critical to consider a variety of factors before launching your program. Here are five tips to help you create a successful check-in program.

1. Create a Unique Program
While check-in programs are still relatively new, you can differentiate your brand by offering more than just a “10% off” coupon for every check-in.

For instance, why not engage your customers by launching a check-in-based contest that offers a grand prize to the winner? Or perhaps you want to help your customers explore multiple locations. In that case, think about launching a check-in based scavenger hunt. Want to incorporate check-ins into your loyalty program? Why not have a special seat in your restaurant for the mayor?

Think about how you can enhance your location-based marketing campaigns by offering a unique spin on your check-in program.

2. Make Sure Your Program Matches Your Goals
Is your goal to drive in-store traffic? Create buzz on social networks like Foursquare or Facebook? Attract nearby customers? Drive awareness for a specific product?

A location-based marketing program can support any of these initiatives, but it’s critical to structure your program to properly support these goals.

For instance, if you’re seeking to bump up in-store visits during the holiday season, a check-in contest may be an ideal solution for you. If your goal is to attract nearby customers, a proximity-based messaging program would be ideal. If your goal is to promote a specific product, consider how to incorporate this product into the messaging and prizes associated with your program.

3. Think Through Fulfillment
Sure, it sounds easy enough to reward guests for checking in, but how are employees in your stores going to know what a check-in is or how to fulfill a check-in reward? How do they enter a check-in reward into your point-of-sale system? How do you track rewards at the corporate level?

You should have answers for all these questions before launching a check-in program.

4. Integrate Check-ins with Your Other Marketing Systems
Check-in programs are a phenomenal way to start relationships with your customers and boost participation with your brand, but you also need to think about how to integrate check-ins into your traditional programs.

To that end, make sure you’ve eliminated data silos and integrated your location-based marketing program with your email marketing platform so that when people opt in, your other systems recognize this and can capture that behavior.

5. Measure and Optimize
As with any new marketing program, you should measure and analyze your check-in programs, tracking metrics such as total check-ins, loyalty per user, social influence (how many friends these people have), email opt-ins and participation in your other marketing programs.

Because location-based marketing is a new, transformative way to reach customers, it will take some time to optimize your programs. Don’t be afraid to seek feedback from customers and modify your location-based marketing programs to generate your desired outcome. In addition, as location-based marketing continues to evolve, it will be important to continue experimenting with the latest tools and tactics.

More Location-Based Marketing Resources:
1) Blog: “4 Ways to Work Check-ins into Your Marketing Mix”
2) PowerPoint: “Follow Them! Location-Based Marketing Tips and Techniques”

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In part one of this series, we took a look at some humorous characteristics of poor email marketing practices that can lead to nauseating experiences for recipients. Today, we’re offering a prescription for those email ills by highlighting tips on how you can use data to humanise email marketing content and improve the experiences you create.

You’ve heard it a hundred different ways: Content is king. Well, if content is king, than data is his trusted advisor. And in our world, this data comes in three forms that you must use effectively to humanise your email marketing content:

1) Inferred data — What we learn by listening
Commentary on social networks, feedback from customers and replies to your email marketing campaigns all help paint a picture of the interactions your customers are looking for. Top brands monitor these dialogues to make changes in tone of voice and email copy to create more engaging, human, real connections.

What to do to succeed:

• Monitor social networks
• Review and respond to replies on your email marketing campaigns
• Review survey data and other points of customer feedback
• Use these inputs to make adjustments to email copy, tone of voice and other elements to create deeper, more human connections to your recipients

2) Implicit data — What we learn by measuring
This is online marketing’s sweet spot. Savvy marketers use behavioural data and customer actions across email, Web, social and mobile channels to trigger email messages in real time and drive more granular segmentation in future campaigns. How a customer or prospect interacts with your email campaigns and website is the best predictor of what content, channel and timing will be most effective in your future marketing efforts to that individual.

What to do to succeed:

• Tie together your email, CRM and Web analytics technology to create a real-time, comprehensive view of customer behaviour. Then, use that behaviour to trigger email communications, mobile messages or Web content to create more relevant and timely experiences.

3) Explicit data — What we learn by asking
This is Marketing 101—asking customers what they prefer and then responding. While old school in nature, its application in today’s world is anything but. Top brands are using progressive Web forms to gain deeper customer profiles;  preference centres that offer cross-channel options as well as frequency  control options for recipients; and of course, surveys and other feedback forms that use branching and advanced logic options to help paint a picture of customer satisfaction and highlight areas of concern.

What to do to succeed:

• Give customers more control over message content, frequency and channel by refreshing your preference centre.
• Freshen up Web forms on your site to implement new progressive profiling technology that will ask new questions each time a person visits a form—adding more depth to the customer profile.
• Don’t silo customer feedback data in the services organisation. Instead, open it up and use it to drive segmentation and future campaigns to address customer feedback, fixing areas of concern and highlighting positive experiences.

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Fresh off its effort to drive spam below 3 percent in the inbox, Microsoft’s Hotmail team has turned its attention to a newly minted villain: “graymail.” It defines this new class of email content as “legitimate newsletters, offers or notifications that you just don’t want anymore” and pegs it as 75 percent of what users were previously reporting as spam.

If you’re a serious emailer, that last sentence probably quantifies what we all know intuitively: Despite working hard to make opt-outs clear and simple, some users still find it easier to report email as spam. Keeping our lists fresh and the content relevant are still the top two strategies for successful mailers.

While new improvements in the ongoing fight against spam are always needed, you may be wondering what these changes mean to your deliverability strategy.

Three Key Areas
I won’t reiterate every detail from the Windows Team blog post on graymail, but its solutions break down into three macro categories: user tools, categorization and cleanup. From a sender’s perspective, the user tools are primarily centered on filing and flagging which are solid UI additions to the product.

Anything that allows recipients to more intelligently organize and manage messages is a good thing. The categorization effort is where things start to get interesting. First, Microsoft has (presumably) used existing data to determine that 50 percent of the non-spam content of any given inbox is “Newsletters & Deals.” The next tier by message volume is “Social Updates,” which it pegs at 17 percent. So, in essence, it’s now targeting this combined 67 percent of a user’s inbox with the new Sweep functionality. Microsoft claims it’s 95 percent accurate on its first-pass classification and should theoretically get better as the algorithm is enhanced by crowd-sourced data.

As a user, you may have a philosophical objection to an ISP treating content you’ve requested as a second-class category, but we’ll save that user-centered debate for another post. In fact, I’d contend the classification is great—it’s the cleanup features downstream that start to complicate life for legitimate marketers.

The issue is that new sender-specific rules are coming to town—rules like “delete everything but the most recent message” or “delete after 10 days if unread.” New filters like these should remind us of the importance of timely content sent to an audience that clearly understands its importance. This calls for an even deeper consideration of behavior-triggered messaging (which always feels timely versus blast communications) and renews the importance of A/B testing to optimize content. At the end of the day, these new rules make the first hour of inbox time more critical than ever.

Just the Beginning?
It’s easy to see how this type of content-level segmentation helps pull users out of an all-too-common email behavior: hoarding. While some users prefer to manage their email this way, my guess is the majority simply find it easier to chew up disk space than deleting a message. By accurately categorizing the messages, it opens the possibility for more user- and system-specific controls in the future—which likely reduces the cost-to-serve equation in Microsoft’s favor.

Solution: Less Blasting, Deeper Relationships
As an email marketer, one solution is to be actively moving toward longer-term relationships with your subscribers and thinking deeply about how that changes your tactics for the channel. And don’t limit your thinking to just message content—how you use Web analytics data and where your form data lives are critical issues to cover. The bottom line is that not every message requires a “Buy Now” link by which it’s judged—every so often, people simply like to be thanked or asked a question. Be human!

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We’ve all experienced it. Sadly, we’ve all probably contributed to it at some point in our careers. I’m talking about email content that, while maybe not nausea-inducing, does nothing to promote any positive feelings or connection with the customers we’re communicating with.

As they say, step one to solving a problem is recognising it.

Here’s a quick test to help determine whether you’ve generated potentially nauseating email content:

• You created a single static email message, paired it with a list of 10,000-plus recipients and hit “Send.”
• You have numerous data fields for each recipient in your list, and you didn’t use a single one of them to segment or dynamically generate content unique to each recipient.
• After artfully crafting your email, properly segmenting your list and testing it relentlessly, you directed the call to action to your website’s home page so recipients could wander around aimlessly until they lost consciousness or closed the browser.
• Following a fantastic website experience and a transaction that generated revenue for your brand, you sent a beautiful [sic] text-only confirmation message that looks like it was written by a robot.

You get the point. And if you’re like me, at some point you’ve created this sort of email experience for your recipients.

In today’s world there’s no excuse for sickening your recipients. And we all know the results of doing so: decreased engagement, lowered conversion, increased opt-outs or complaints.

So, take a moment to think critically about the last email you sent to your database. In part two of this post, we’ll take a look at some top brands that are creating engaging, personalised, humanised email experiences for their customers.

Before we end this post, what are some nausea-inducing emails you’ve seen recently? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

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In today’s mobile, multichannel world, it’s more important than ever to be where your customers are. And increasingly, that means on smartphones and tablets, where more and more people are checking in at retail locations or business events. Foursquare, for example, is adding a million customers a month, and a recent Digital Omnivores report indicated that in the last month nearly half of tablet users shared their location using a location-sharing site.

For marketers, location-based check-ins offer an opportunity to deliver astonishingly relevant messages that engage customers and prospects based on where they are, build loyalty and drive revenue. And they also present exciting opportunities to integrate with other channels such as email and Twitter.

What Are Check-ins?
Check-ins are location-based sharing via mobile device, performed most frequently via Foursquare and Facebook Places. Once users “check in,” their location is broadcast to friends in their network (if they so choose), and the user can view tips, offers and other information about nearby places.

For users, check-ins provide a new social outlet as well as a chance to gather valuable information about the location and, in some cases, special offers. For marketers, they offer a valuable opportunity to reach customers in the real world, gather data and increase brand awareness.

For example, let’s say there’s one user that checks in to a downtown fast-food restaurant for lunch four times a week, and another that checks in to an upscale bistro on the weekend. These check-ins tell you volumes about their lifestyle and what services or goods they might want, helping you to tailor your marketing.

There’s also a distinct social aspect to check-ins, with people sharing tips and leaving reviews for their friends to read. For businesses, that means that adopting location-based marketing has the added benefit of having customers do some of the marketing on behalf of the location, adding a human voice that even your best promotional copy will have trouble matching.

For digital marketers, there are many different ways to work check-ins into your messaging mix, but here are four that clients have found particularly effective:

1) SWEEPSTAKES
What They Are: Prizes based on when or how often someone checks in to a location with Foursquare or Facebook.

How They Work: Participants opt in to the sweepstakes using their Foursquare or Facebook accounts, and then your marketing platform confirms their sign-up with an automated email confirmation. Participants then check in via Foursquare and/or Facebook, and you monitor the results and select a winner based on the check-in criteria you’ve established.

Benefits: Creates excitement around your brand, increases store and venue/event traffic, provides new opportunities to grow your email list.

Real-life Success Story: A retail client used a sweepstakes to drive 11,000 check-ins over a four-week period. And here at Silverpop, we offered a $100 American Express gift card for Agent ROI attendees who checked-in–and notched a 40 percent participation rate.

2) LOYALTY PROGRAM
What It Is: Campaign that rewards customers for signing up and checking in to your locations using Foursquare or Facebook.

How It Works: Generally, participants will receive a reward at sign-up (e.g. “10% off next purchase” or “Free latte”) and then will receive rewards at various intervals. For example, a free drink for the third check-in, a free sandwich for the fifth check-in and a free meal for check-in No. 10.

Benefits: Boosts store traffic, increases engagement and loyalty, provides valuable data on your most frequent customers that you can use to more strongly engage them.

Real-life Success Story: A retail brand utilized a loyalty program to successfully drive more than 10,000 check-ins in its first month.

3) LOCAL OFFERS
What They Are: Special offers delivered to people when they check in nearby your locations.

How It Works: You set up a radius around a location and the offer you want delivered, and when someone checks in within that radius, they automatically receive the offer via email.

Benefits: Drives store traffic, builds brand awareness, keeps your brand top-of-mind

Real-life Success: Several restaurants have seen redemption rates between 5 percent and 15 percent.

4) TWITTER MESSAGING
What It Is: An automated or manual reply to guests via Twitter.

How It Works: You connect your Twitter account to your marketing platform. When someone shares his or her Foursquare check-in with friends on Twitter, your marketing platform tells your Twitter account to send a personalized response. Examples might include, “@LorenMcDonald Thanks for visiting! Let us know how your experience was” or “@LorenMcDonald Thanks for visiting! Want to receive future deals? Sign up for our emails here: ow.ly/signup.”

Benefits: Additional customer touch point, be where your customers are, expand message reach.

Real-life Success: Clients have seen a 30 percent click-through rate on Tweets sent to guests that check-in at brand-owned stores.

In addition to these examples, check-ins can also be used to drive email sign-ups, facilitate customer service, increase product awareness and much more. Regardless of how you use check-ins, knowing where your customers and prospects are at a specific time presents unique opportunities to deliver highly personalized, relevant content, so savvy marketers should make sure they’re setting time aside to strategize about how you can incorporate location-based campaigns into an integrated, multichannel marketing strategy.

Interested in learning more about check-ins? Read about Silverpop’s acquisition of location-based marketing platform PlacePunch, and download our Agent ROI presentation, “Follow Them! Location-Based Marketing Tips and Techniques.”

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Buyers today are hungry for content, and unlike in years past when they depended on salespeople and corporate materials for their information, they now have a breadth of resources to sink their teeth into—everything from search engines and blogs to social networks and online communities.

Marketers have always known that appealing content is important. But, today’s buyers want to do their own research and investigation, making relevant and engaging content more important than ever. Incorporating a process for creating and marketing content is extremely useful—content shouldn’t be a part of what your marketing department does, it should be a mindset that fuses everything together. Give your buyers content that will cleanse the palate and get them ready for sales.

Now, most of you are probably wondering where you’ll find the time or resources to produce a wealth of new content. The good news is you already have it; you just need to plan for it.

The key is to repurpose, repackage and extend the life of content. It’s easy to spend a lot of time preparing for a speaking engagement, Webinar or white paper and then quickly move on to the next big thing. All of these pieces of content can be repurposed into more content, however. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Turn that white paper into a series of blog posts and even bring in a third-party expert to weigh in on a particular point.
• Presentations from speaking engagements can be uploaded to SlideShare—tweet these from your personal and corporate handles and you can extend the reach of this content by hundreds, or even thousands, of people.
• Take the Q&A from a webinar and post it as a blog. If Webinar attendees are asking about it, others probably are as well.

When a message is broken up into many different pieces of bite-sized content, it often has a better reach, will encourage more social sharing and ultimately yield stronger search engine results. You can even find content producers within the walls of your own company; an employee passionate about a particular product feature or idea could be a great contributor to the corporate blog.

When creating content that customers and prospects want to consume, it’s important to remember a few other things:

• Remember not to talk at them—listen to what they have to say via social networks, community forums and surveys.
• Then, talk to them the way you would talk to another person, dropping robotic corporate speak.
• Include messages in your email arsenal that are designed to inform, entertain or provide value rather than sell.

This will show a more human side to your company, making buyers more willing to further engage with you.

Once you have all this great content, automation allows you to connect with people in a more personal fashion—it’s manually impossible to respond to the individual needs of hundreds or thousands or prospects in real time. By automating this, you can improve efficiency and give yourself some extra time to focus on other things.

Send emails based on your prospects’ behaviors. It doesn’t make sense to send a buyer information on things that don’t match their interests—automated messages based on Web pages an individual has visited will deliver highly relevant and personalized content that will entice your buyer to learn more. While it may seem ironic, automation makes your communications much more personalized, luring prospects in even more.

All of this content you’ve repackaged and repurposed will be available to further nurture your prospects or provide useful information to your existing customers. Think about how you can be the leading expert in your industry, providing quality content that your customers and prospects want to consume. With a wealth of content at your buyer’s fingertips, they’ll be able to learn about your company and its personality. Before long, they’ll likely be ready for the next course—sales.

More Resources:
1) Tip Sheet: “Getting Personal: 5 Tips for Humanizing Content“
2) Blog: “Marketing Automation: Crawl, Walk, Run”

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