Whether you are in the business of doing email campaigns for a client, a colleague, or a family member, or you make email management software, you’ve most likely heard a request recently to send videos as part of an email campaign.

How do you handle this?  Do you cave to the request and hope that the server holds up to the message load?

No!  You educate your constituents, gently of course, as video and email campaigns do not mix.  Here’s what to say:

• First, video files are generally too large to send via email - even if you could send the files, your recipients may not be able to receive them due to server or bandwidth size constraints;
• Second, many of use have seen the ubiquitous YouTube “embed” codes that you can copy from a YouTube page and paste into your own blog or web page to show the video of the skateboarding dogs to your immediate circle.  In an email, though, these codes are forbidden: not only may they easily flag an email as “spam”, but also email reading programs such as Outlook or Thunderbird won’t render the code into a viewable video;
• Third, it’s far better to put in a URL link to your website, which is part of the reason for the email campaign in the first place.  Your website can either house the video or separately link to the storage location.

The solution to emailing video is to place a picture from the video into the email and link this picture to the video’s URL.  Then your emails fly through servers unimpeded and its just up to the recipients to download or view the video.

1.     Social Media
Why does Forrester Research have blogs, discussion boards, a Twitter account, videos on YouTube and a Facebook page? They understand the value of starting a conversation with anyone who cares about their brand.

2.     Search Engine Marketing
Social media can help increase your search rankings, however, social media does not replace search. Search marketing is a necessary, ongoing effort to increase your rankings and help you stay there.

3.     Email Marketing
According to the Wall Street Journal, 81 percent of U.S. executives subscribe to industry e-mail newsletters for product information and business intelligence. Are these executives learning about you or your competitors?

4.     Web Sites
Your web site can no longer be a place for one-way communication. Provide a link to your blog, where they can leave comments. Invite them to subscribe to your newsletter. Provide icons for delicious.com, myweb2search.yahoo.com, reddit.com, technorati and stumbleupon. Let visitors sign up for RSS feeds.

5.     Mobile Devices
Back in 2007, Marketing Sherpa reported that 64 percent of key decision-makers view e-mails on Blackberries and other devices. Since iPhones are on the scene more and more people are using mobile devices to view web sites. How does your site look on the little screen?

Here at Ennect we’re thinking happy thoughts about the Pittsburgh Penguins meeting the Detroit Redwings on the ice tonight for game 4.

The Stanley Cup 2009!

Let’s Go Pens!

So, if email helps reinforce product and company loyalty with men and nudges them toward buying, what does the Ennect survey say about email’s influence on women?

It says, in short, seller beware!

While 53 percent of our female respondents indicated that email was a great way to hear about new products – in contrast to 27 percent of men, they clearly don’t want more email!  What they want are “smarter” emails. Forty-seven percent of our women respondents indicated they wanted to receive emails that were personalized with content based on what companies already knew about them from website visits and past purchases.

Hello.  Why is this surprising?  And what does it imply about the emails women (and men) ARE receiving from retailers?  Are retail marketers not paying attention to their readers?  Are they clueless about email?

I don’t think so.  But they may not be segmenting their lists adequately or effectively personalizing their messages by incorporating all the data they have on their customers or prospects.  Or maybe – as in many companies – the data collected from their websites is siloed and not available to email marketers.  Hey, doing email well is hard – but when different groups inside a company don’t talk to one another, well, it’s made even harder.

But, there are rewards, when you get it right:  40 percent of our female respondents and 33 percent of men said they often remembered email they received from a company while making a purchase at the company’s website. TAH DAAAH!  Ring a bell!  Brand recognition CAN be reinforced through email.

So, what’s today’s lesson?  Creating messages that stick is important.  Creating sticky messages with personalized offers that show how well you know your customer… now, THAT rings the register!

Oh, and we’re not finished.  We have a few more observations to share about our survey results.  Come back soon for our next installment…

According to our recent Email Impact survey men and women clearly have different attitudes about email and, also, use it differently. While ours was an informal survey, which used our own Ennect Survey product and which was sent to a relatively small group of people (approximately 12,250), the results provide an interesting snapshot of email usage.  Today, we’ll look at some differences the survey pointed out between the ways that men and women use email.

If you’re an offline or online retailer, these results might be interesting…

We thought it was a positive sign that both male and female respondents indicated they actually saved emails to refer to later – even if they didn’t read them right away.  Kudos to those email marketers who have established a ‘trusted’ relationship with readers, based on a track record of sending content with value enough to be saved!

In fact, 40 percent of women responded that they’ve gone back to review an email days or weeks after receiving it, but only 13 percent of men did. Perhaps that has something to do with ‘retail therapy,’ because 33 percent of women said they saved email from companies to refer to when making a later purchase.  Only 27 percent of male respondents said they were likely to do the same.  (We think men shop less, but have no stats to confirm that.  Do any of our readers know?)

But in an interesting contrast, men appear to be more positively influenced by email from a retailer than women.  Thirty-three percent of men said email made them feel more loyal to companies and their products.  Women took an opposite stance:  more than half disagreed.  Our male respondents were also more likely than women to purchase products as a result of an email and to research retail locations that carry products described in emails they’ve received.  So, even if men do shop less, email may be an effective way for retailers to reach them.

But where does that leave retailers with regards to women buyers?  Come back for our next post and we’ll let you know…

Thanks to those of you who took part in the Ennect-sponsored Email Impact survey last month.  We’ve been reviewing the returns and will be sharing results with you in coming posts here. While it was an informal survey sent out to a relatively small group of people, the results were interesting.  But before we start sharing the survey responses with you, let’s first congratulate the winners from the drawing we held in conjunction with the survey.
Congratulations to

•    Matthew Spohn, a product engineer at Dynaflo in Reading, Pennsylvania,

•    Megan Goggin, manager of communications and marketing at Lexington College in Chicago,  Illinois, and

•    Misti McKeehen, president of Pittsburgh Young Professionals and director of recruitment & outreach at Coro Center for Civic Leadership in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Each one will be receiving a $25 American Express® gift card in the mail shortly.

Yesterday we blogged about the various reasons why non-profits love our Ennect emarketing tools.  Today I want to segway on over to one of Elliance’s other site’s, Pittsburgh.net.  Betcha didn’t know that Ennect and Pittsburgh.net are thoroughbreds from the same stable, didja?

On a daily basis we accept both calendar and company listings on Pittsburgh.net, ensuring a smoother ride for those searching for something to do and someplace to go in this fair city of ours.  One of the coolest 21st Century businesses in Pittsburgh has got to be Segway in Paradise, a local tour operator conveying paying guests around the ‘burgh on none other than those cute little two-wheeled, dynamically stabilized Segway Personal Transporter.  Check out the video Segway in Paradise gave us to post on their Pittsburgh.net company listing.

1) We offer a 20% discount on all products to all non-profits.  This 20% discount can even be applied on top of any bulk discounting pricing.

2) We pride ourselves on customer service! This is one area where any one using Ennect will agree - we offer outstanding customer service.

3) There are no long term contracts to be signed when using Ennect.  We offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so there is no long term commitment.

4) There is a minimal learning curve when using Ennect and once you understand one tool, our three other tools are even easier to use and execute.

5) We care!  We always try to make sure everyone who uses Ennect has a very positive experience - that is what makes people continue to use Ennect time and time again.

“Congrats, you are the first “live-chat” support person I’ve ever worked with who was actually helpful (I don’t mean at Ennect, I mean with other online vendors!)”

Ennect’s LiveChat feature has proven quite popular with both pre- and post-sales customers: current users can post questions from within our four products without waiting for the longer turnaround of email or needlessly wasting minutes on the telephone and potential customers can pose questions about our products without the need to commit to signing up.  Now we’re getting daily chat requests on help with:

• uploading mailing lists,
• how to set up different types of payment methods in Event,
• setup questions on PayPal Payflow Pro payment portals,
• how to format simple HTML in windows,
• how to use Survey as a replacement for PDF or Word-based questionnaires, and
• help with aligning elements in complex HTML email templates.

What do you want to chat about today?  Link to us at LiveChat.

We are often  asked to describe the difference between a ‘hard bounce” email and a ’soft bounce’ email.  Ennect mail gives a separate report on both the hard bounces and the soft bounces.

A hard bounce is when an email address is simply invalid.  This may be because either the name of the recipient does not exist or the name is not recognized by the email server,  the domain name itself does not exist, or there may be some sort of technical problem on the receiving end of the email.

A soft bounce is an email that actually reached the email server destination, but never reached the recipient.  This may be because the recipient has a full email box, or they are on vacation and have their ‘out of office reply’ set.  In the case of a soft bounce the email address does exist. The server has allowed the email to accepted, but it is not received by the recipient.

Knowing these definitions should help with the task of ongoing list management:  meaning, a hard bounce is an email address that does not exist, so it is always a good idea to remove any emails from your list have been defined as a ‘hard bounce’.   A best-practice tip would be to review your list of hard bounces, just to insure that there are no misspellings that could have caused the email to never be delivered.  Once you have insured that there are no obvious human errors, you should remove all of those hard bounces from your list.  This is actually a practice that should happen after each email blast sent, for every list!