With Click 3G, ClickSquared has attempted to assist both the self-service and full service marketer. Here’s a list of features found in their new platform:

- Consolidation of client data into a single marketing data stream
- Campaign management allows for key definition of target segments, audience levels, and more.
- Capable of managing multi-wave campaigns
- Tracks personal and dynamic content along a wide variety of channels, including email. This allows marketers to track multiple content fluctuations in a campaign.

ClickSquared CEO Wayne Townsend, provides insight to what makes Click 3G useful. “Now more than ever, engaging each and every customer is critically important. As a result, marketers need a platform that enables them to dynamically and nimbly manage a growing number of customer touch points and interactions.”

“In addition, this comprehensive offering allows our clients to serve up real-time, multi-channel marketing campaigns in a highly-targeted, automated fashion. Never before have marketers been able to seamlessly orchestrate cross-channel programs in this manner.”

ClickSquared has been offering marketing solutions since 1999, specifically in the area of email. Since its official use in 2008, Click 3G has been adopted by 60% of their client base. If you’d like to learn more about ClickSquared’s email marketing solutions,click here for more information.

But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several blog posts have foolishly been written about social media “killing” email. As my friend Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (client) says: “How can social media kill email, when you have to have an email address to belong to a social media site?”

And that’s the premise behind Flowtown, one of the most exciting new social media tools I’ve seen in months.

A Social Anthropologist, Hidden In Your Keyboard

Flowtown enables you to enter any email address, and the system instantly reports back where and how that address is connected on the social Web. Here’s the results for my friend and client  Indra Gardiner from Bailey Gardiner in San Diego:

Amazing, no?

Social Outposts Without the Mystery

I’m often asked by corporate clients where they should engage in social media. “Should we be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Linkedin, or YouTube, or some other places?”

Flowtown gives you the answer in seconds. Export your email subscriber or customer database to Flowtown, and you’ll know in minutes what percentage of your audience is on Facebook or some other social outpost.

They also have a nice integration with Klout – the leading service to gauge Twitter influence – automatically including Klout scores for each person.

Isn’t that worth the 5 cents per contact that Flowtown charges?

But Wait, There’s More

Recognizing that knowing who your customers are, and being able to do something about it are entirely different, Flowtown also has a built-in email component. So, if you want to instantly send an email to only your customers that are on Facebook, inviting them to become fans of your brand there, you can do it in minutes using Flowtown’s existing integration with MailChimp.

The fee for up to 75,000 sent emails per month is just $99.97.

Tip of the Iceberg

Unlike enterprise-class social anthropology services like Rapleaf, Flowtown is incredibly easy-to-use, and is tuned for the do-it-yourself marketer. But, the current system is just the beginning.

“We want to be the mint.com of social marketing,” says  Ethan Bloch, co-founder of the San Francisco based company. “We want to give SMB a complete tool to allow them to move the needle on the 20% of social media that matters.”

Features being considered for inclusion in new releases include CRM integration; deep analysis of customers’ social graph and content they’ve produced (keyword analysis of your Tweets, for example); and even semi-automated social media response mechanisms.

Not Perfect, But Useful

As with any data-harvesting service, Flowtown results aren’t bullet-proof. The more email addresses a person uses across the social Web, the less ideal the results. For example, Flowtown’s data on me isn’t particularly accurate, because I use several different email addresses.

But, the service goes a long way toward tying email and social media together in a coherent, actionable fashion, and is affordable for almost every company. I’m excited to see what these guys add next.

Thanks to my friend (and startup mentoring legend) Francine Hardaway for turning me on to Flowtown – she’s an advisor to the company.

If you take Flowtown for a spin (they have a free trial), will you please tell us all how it goes in the comments?

Comments

The study found the average open rate in North America was 10.76 percent. Europe had the best email open rate at 13 percent, more than 60 percent higher than the low score of 8.08 percent in Australia.

More than 40 out of every 100 recipients who opened a message sent from Europe clicked on a link. In North America, less than one out of every three opened and clicked on a link.

“Our study shows how serious the problems of e-mail fatigue and low engagement have become in North America,” said Simon Grabowski, CEO of Implix. “Fewer than one out of every three recipients opened and clicked on a link.”

“And only one out of every eight subscribers who clicked on links did it twice. We need to remember that top ISPs have begun to introduce engagement metrics such as opens and clicks into their deliverability equations. That means that ‘unengaged’ recipients can cause email campaigns to be blocked and automatically sent to spam folders. North American marketers have a lot of work to do in engaging their subscribers.”

In Asia, one of every four subscribers who clicked on an email link did it twice. In North America, just one out of eight clicked on a link twice.

North America had the highest bounce rate (2.17%) and the second highest complaint rate (0.12%) among all the continents.

There are a few ways to go about discovering your user’s intent for email. First, is the direct approach where you can simply poll your readers and discover what they get most from their email. This approach might be wrong if you don’t have a trusting relationship with your readers. You can try the guess-and-check method, and request feedback about how to makes your emails more relevant in the future.

Once you’ve discovered a healthy campaign option, you then have to shape your email to match your findings. This can be difficult, especially if you’re used to conducting campaigns a certain way. There are a couple of general rules to live by though, and remembering these can help increase user activity.

Communication based emails can be tricky to develop. What should always be in the back of your mind is making your campaign feel natural. If your readers open emails to directly communicate, they don’t necessarily care about statistics or cold hard numbers. They want to hear from you, as a person and perhaps be allowed to respond back.

On the flip side of the equation, some people don’t care to communicate with their email. They simply use the tool as a means for finding deals, being alerted for various websites they’re apart of. They could care less about what you directly have to say. Thus, you should use this to your advantage. Here is where enticing readers with a financially beneficial title would come in handy. These folks might not want to directly communicate with you, but that doesn’t mean they’re uninterested in a good deal.

Email Marketers have it easy compared to the days of old. Email accounts are a dime a dozen now, and most people have multiple accounts. They generally use these accounts for different reasons, so it makes it easier on you to profile your readers. If Johnson proved anything in his article, it’s that people will surprise you with their email usage.

Here’s a little background information about the two parties: eCircle is an email marketing company that is more than ten years old, is headquartered in Munich, and has roughly 200 employees.  It counts both Nintendo and Samsung among its clients.

TA Associates, for its part, is based in Boston, and has put money into AVG, Sophos, and Tempur-Pedic.

A press release also stated, “Email remains a strong marketing channel and represents a growing subset of the 12.9 billion European online advertising market.  Forrester Research estimates that the volume of email messages will double, with the value of the market increasing from 1.5 billion in 2007 to 2.3 billion in 2012, as marketers use more sophisticated on-demand targeting, messaging and analytics to engage the consumer.”

This development represents a piece of good news for just about everyone connected to email marketing, then, as it supports the optimistic figures.

Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop had this to say about the figures, “When consumers’ purse strings tighten, savvy marketers remain respectful but attentive, so their brands are top of mind when their customers are once again ready to buy.” He continues, “Today’s marketers are mindful of the important role relationship building plays in a successful marketing strategy, and they understand the unique ability of email to engage customers.”

Customer engagement continues to be a high priority for most marketers. Along with engagement, behavioral targeting proved to be effective. Sending emails to customers based on prior open and click trends worked adequately for 28 percent of the marketers surveyed.

One of the main concerns of marketers continues to be what the survey refers to as ‘inbox clutter’. I’m not sure a survey was needed for that revelation, as it’s been a concern of marketers for quite some time. Coupled with this, many are struggling to provide content relevant to potential readers.

What I consider the most interesting statistic of the survey, is the number of respondents who will be incorporating social media into their campaigns. Eight out of 10 people surveyed plan to incorporate social media somehow into their campaigns. Along with social media, 38 percent will add some sort of SMS option.
This was quite an interesting survey to absorb. While many marketers are worried about the overall state of the economy, it seems most are prepping for an improving or stagnant year. This tells me there might be some underlying optimism for email marketing in a down economy. This really shouldn’t be a huge surprise, as email marketing has relatively low budgets compared to other marketing campaigns. Here’s hoping for a good 2010 to everyone reading this.

Of course, when you consider that 95% of the businesses in the US are considered an SMB of some shape or size it should make one think a little more about the impact this market segment has in the overall scheme of things. Unfortunately, ‘too big to fail’ bailouts don’t await the little guy. Instead the SMB needs to make due with what they have and be as smart about how they spend their marketing dollars as possible.

The Center for Media Research has released a study by Vertical Response that shows just where many of these ‘Main Street’ players are going with their online dollars. The big winners: e-mail and social media. With only 3.8% of small business folks NOT planning on using e-mail marketing and with social media carrying the perception of being free (which they so rudely discover it is far from free) this should make some in the banner and search crowd a little wary.

I suppose the question is just what does increased use of social media mean? Will there be money put toward it or will it just be that the effort by the SMB social media practitioner (usually also referred to as the business owner) is increased. We’ll see.

This quote from helps to frame something that most know already but have had a hard time changing.

Janine Popick, VerticalResponse CEO and founder, says “… small businesses continue to allocate portions of their budget to… email and social media, despite the downturn in the economic climate… (but) marketers (still) need to help small businesses to see the value of integrating search engine marketing… into their campaigns.”

Honestly, I am a little confused by some of the findings here because in the next breath we see the following:

According to the study, the most important tool for small businesses to succeed in 2010 is search engine marketing, while email marketing, public relations and social media cited as crucial for success.

23.8% of all small businesses reported that search engine marketing was the tool most needed for their business to succeed in 2010.

So which is it? Do they or don’t they use or want to use search marketing? Or is the better question can they or can’t they? Maybe the way that these findings seem a bit muddy is just a reflection of the struggles that many businesses have with the shift from traditional marketing to the online space.

In 2010 it looks like the rubber is really hitting the road as the Internet marketing industry matures while many may end up just being left behind.

Your thoughts?

Comments

The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.

Now, here comes an equally bleak picture on what marketers do with email about their brands according to e-Orchard, a survey by London creative agency Stephens Francis Whitson.

Brand Republic reports:

[…] The report claims to have uncovered evidence of brand owners bombarding customers with irrelevant, mistimed and inappropriate emails.

It splits the brands into ’saints’ and ’sinners’, with the likes of Mini, BA and Ocado showing how it should be done.

While economic pressures are driving more brands online, many of the companies in the survey “are sending out blanket email campaigns simply because it is cheap to do so,” the report claims.

The e-Orchard survey covers companies operating across a range of sectors such as retail, financial services, FMCG, travel, entertainment and leisure and argues that some brands surveyed showed:

• Scant evidence of differentiated communications depending on customer knowledge, behaviour or value
• Poor co-ordination of on and offline communications
• Dangerously high frequency of highly repetitive, hard sell messages
• Brands stuck on transmit: little attempt to engage in any genuine dialogue with customers
• Rare examples of genuinely clever, creative, smart brand and commercial thinking

This looks like a worse picture than that suggested by the PR email survey.

Small comfort for anyone.

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Tagged.com has been ordered to pay the state of New York and Texas $750,000 in damages for intruding on member’s contact list in order to send out millions of promotional emails to potential users. The website is a social networking platform, and is one of the most visited sites on the web.
You might be saying to yourself, ’sounds like a pretty creative idea. It would be if Tagged.com sent the emails out as themselves. Instead, the site misled their recipients by making the emails appear to be from friends on Tagged.com. Hence, the scandal.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, reached a settlement with Tagged.com to pay $500,000 in penalties, and to change their guidelines involving information use of their members.

What Tagged.com was doing was actually genius, while being sinister as well. The website would send out emails to people making it seem that they came from the user who had just posted photos on the site. This of course led to clicks, and provided a reason for more people to sign up for the social networking site.

Cuomo stated specifically, the reason for his prosecution, “Unsuspecting users had no idea that Tagged had hijacked the email addresses of their colleagues, families and friends for the purpose of blasting them with spam,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “This agreement holds the company accountable for its invasion of privacy and puts the proper safeguards in place to keep it from happening again.”

If you’re an email advertiser, this story has you understandably angry. In a day and age where so much content in emails is met with cynicism, it’s hard to run a clean and decent campaign. Spam will always be around, but we like to think that many of the industry leading companies are above the pettiness that bots and spammers resort to.

Tagged.com didn’t just penalize themselves, but set back email advertising as a whole.

The report found a positive connection among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake email usage.

“The total number of social media users is rapidly increasing, but often these users jump in quickly, only to curtail their use of social media over time,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.

“Email on the other hand, is woven into all online interaction, making it an essential tool that consumers continue to use more and more.”

The increase in consumer email usage is not only tied to its close relationship with social media. Smartphones are driving increased usage of email as well, even among the college demographic.

“Nearly 40 percent of students use smartphones and two-thirds of those use email,” said Mike Hanley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research in the study.

“The increased use of mobile email is significant because it reverses the five-year trend of declining email use among college students.”

ExactTarget identified two key tactics marketers should use to drive continued success with email:

· To break through consumers’ inbox clutter, marketers should deliver timely, relevant and personalized emails to consumers.

· Due to consumers’ being increasingly open to promotional messages via text, marketers should develop mobile messaging strategies.