eNewsletter Takes Off

I've worked, over the past few months, on rebooting the company email campaign. Prior to the reboot, we were sending out too many emails and not enough meaningful content. Our members were losing faith in our product and no longer wanted to hear what we were saying. The restructure planned followed two main philosophies:

1. provide content - give readers a reason to read. while we wanted to keep pushing our products, we needed to give them a reason to interact with us as well.

2. be reliable - establish a time frame of when emails go out and plan ahead to make sure there's enough time/opportunity to publicize all events.

3. follow through - make sure that we're doing the things that we tell people we're going to do. give our audience a reason to believe in our 'product' again.

So far things have worked out great. The first email went off on time and we saw a great return: 17% open rate and 29%(!) ctr. That's a huge jump from where we'd been in the past and from what I can tell, some pretty solid number as email marketing goes.

Take two. Our second email went out as planned but hasn't had the same response. This time we only had 13% opens and 17% ctr. How to account for the big change? The email went out three hours later than the last one. There weren't as many links. The bulk of the content was different, though some was the same. Would all those factors decrease the numbers that much?

It's all trial and error with a new campaign. We'll play with the details a bit before next month's edition and see where that puts us. Hopefully after 6 or so we should have a more solid sense of what our readers want to get, when they want to get it, and what will make them read on.

The Conversation Prism

Social Media. The next frontier of public relations. Er... The current frontier of public relations. Or, perhaps, the biggest part of public relations that pr pros are still trying to tackle. Brian Solis and JESS3 came up with this diagram that maps out social media: The Conversation Prism. A great resource for anyone looking to expand their social media positioning or checking how they stand.

Just when I thought I was starting to get it, this post shows me just how much I'm missing. And the big question remains: how to put it all together? If I'm on facebook and myspace 5x/day, updateing twitter every afternoon and evening, listening to pandora at work, getting google alerts first thing every morning, and using yahoo groups to organize my outside endeavors... where (and how!?) does it come together?

It would be impossible, (and futile), to utilize all of the tools available. This 'map' is a helpful visual in dividing them all up so you can not just what tools your using, but what 'color' tools you're hitting the most. My prism has a ton of blue and a smattering of red and green, but not much orange or yellow. It would seem to me that balance is the key, rather than total domination of one area but what a task finding the right colors and making sure they're all working together...