As companies race to harness the power of social media, marketers are becoming painfully aware that establishing a presence on social sites by creating a page and putting up content is the easy part. It’s getting people to actually read the content and engage with a brand that transforms a mere presence into a high-impact, results-driven marketing opportunity. Driving traffic is a daunting task for most companies given the intense competition in the marketplace for consumer attention and loyalty. But Rocketseed’s new interactive email headers and signatures are about to make that task a lot easier for businesses. Rocketseed’s new innovative solution can help any size business drive social media traffic and leverage leads, effortlessly.

Rocketseed inserts intelligent headers and signatures onto all of a business’ outgoing email traffic. Consider the headers as high-tech letterhead for emails. The headers and signatures not only provide an important opportunity for branding, marketing and sales, but because they are intelligent, they also contribute significantly to social media marketing. Live twitter feeds and RRS feeds from blogs and news can be streamlined into the headers, enabling a business to promote the content of their twitter page, news or blog in their email correspondence. The headers and signatures are also live links that can drive measurable traffic directly to Facebook pages, You Tube videos, Linked-In profiles and other social sites.

According to Scott Ellis, CEO of Rocketseed, “The ability to promote social media sites by integrating feeds into your email headers is a major shift for social media marketing. Historically, the focus has always been on how to get customers to your content, but with Rocketseed, you can now take your content to your customers, or at least teaser lines from your content. This opportunity links social sites with one of the most powerful communication channels that a business already owns: its everyday email correspondence. It’s the next step in marketing innovation.”

Rocketseed tracks all of the traffic flow that the headers and signatures generate and provides companies with both real-time alerts and monthly analytics that can be integrated with a company’s web analytics. The data that Rocketseed provides helps companies to fine-tune messages and content based on what’s attracting attention and what’s not as defined by the statistics. The reports also assist with lead-generation because they capture the email addresses for contacts who have engaged with the headers.

The ability to integrate a company’s social sites, blog, news and website with its everyday email correspondence can accelerate social marketing presence and impact. The audience that business’ communicate with through email, including customers, prospects, suppliers, distributers, business partners, and other business associates are the prime audience for social media engagement. These contacts already have some knowledge of the company and are already interacting with the company through email. Rocketseed’s technology enables a business to take that relationship to the next level and transition those contacts into fans and followers in a natural, easy and cost-effective way—through an email header. As stated by Ellis, “Instead of having blank space at the top of your emails, Rocketseed’s new technology transforms that blank space into a valuable and extremely cost-effective marketing opportunity for social media marketers.”

Westway Sports Centre, a large multi-purpose sports facility in London, is just one of many companies who have started using Rocketseed’s headers to drive traffic to their Facebook page. Westway achieved an impressive click-through rate of 12.4 percent, which is well above industry standards. Other headers that Westway ran achieved click-through rates as high as 22 percent.

Richard Walton, CMO of Rocketseed, believes that the headers and signatures are not only the next phase for marketing innovation but for basic corporate professionalism. As stated by Walton, “In the past, when businesses communicated through paper mail, a company would never think of sending a piece of correspondence out on plain paper, but instead used corporate letterhead. As companies recognize the value and importance of their email communication channel, we are going to see high-impact letterhead become a standard feature on emails. And with Rocketseed’s technology, that letterhead can now have dynamic functionality.”

Founded in 2002, Rocketseed delivers intelligent email marketing campaigns for companies around the globe, delivering more than half a billion branded email messages annually in a variety of languages. Rocketseed has four international offices in the USA, South Africa, United Kingdom and Australia.

Usually, this form of marketing employs bulk mail (typically referred to as newsletters) with lists of user email addresses obtained through newsletter sign-ups, lists bought from (un)trusted sources, or through meticulously accumulated email addresses of current / past / potential customers.

Wikipedia goes on to explain the workings of bulk mail marketing in depth, but it is the second part of the definition: “In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing.” that highlights the opportunity within everyday business email for effective email marketing. This is based on intrinsic trust / relationship between the sender of a personal business email and its recipient.

Day to day emails serve as the most powerful platform from which to run targeted marketing campaigns. With day to day emails hitting 95% open rates across the board and the majority of your recipients engaged in a peer-to-peer relationship with you, the audience you are addressing is already highly qualified.

This underlines the advantages of using Rocketseed to effortlessly run targeted marketing campaigns, through your everyday business emails. Using interactive content, you can create targeted and actionable messages, virtually guaranteed to be seen by your target audience.

Putting your most trusted communications channel to “marketing-use” strongly outweighs that of more traditional channels like print, radio and television, on cost alone. The inability to accurately track these more traditional marketing channels, or quickly respond to market changes, unquestionably supports the argument for Rocketseed.

Even when compared to other measurable channels like search engine marketing, the quality of leads and zero cost per click, starts to lean heavily in favor of an option that also gives you the confidence to experiment with multiple campaigns.

And finally, because the message contained within your email will always be the primary objective, it allows for virtually any form of promotion. Products and services, advertising, branding or publishing can be positioned around the message without jeopardizing the integrity of the message itself, or the sender.

This emphasizes the opportunities available within each and every email you send to:

a) Cross-sell & up-sell new products & services to current and prospective customers

b) Put your brand in front of potential customers; present a professional image that instills trust

e) Receive real-time email alerts from banner click-throughs, allowing for immediate follow-up

c) Secure new leads through recommendations, email forwards and brand recollection

d) Increase the qualified traffic driven to your website

Smart marketers would seize the opportunity to optimize the marketing real estate that exists within their everyday email, integrate marketing strategies and stand ready to profit from their efforts.

What are you doing today to make every email count?

One email marketing channel is being over-looked however, and it can reduce your SEM cost-per-click in the process.

Email marketing with a twist – branded business email

When you think about email marketing and your email marketing budget, two channels probably spring to mind – email newsletters and transactional email. Yet few marketers think about the most widely used email channel of all, everyday business email.

• Branding everyday business email, turns business email into your highest converting, sales and marketing channel.
• Sending branded email enables you reach your key customers, contacts and providers on a daily basis, allowing you to save on other more costly but less effective marketing initiatives.
• Segmenting your email senders and recipients means you can run targeted campaigns to specific individuals or groups, allocating targeted banners to the relevant person or department in the process.

SEM / Cost-per-click

SEM is an important part of most marketers armory. It is an increasingly competitive marketplace however , and your cost per click is on the rise. It is therefore important that other web-traffic driving channels are open to you on a daily basis; branded everyday business email is that channel.

With your organization’s emails reaching thousands of people on a monthly basis, branding your business emails is your alternative, trusted, cost-per-click marketing program. The only difference is, you don’t pay on a cost per click basis.

Reporting & ROI

Which brings us to reporting and measurement. Rocketseed’s reporting is compatible with all major analytics platforms and will feed the results directly into your website analytics reports. This makes your branded business email the most direct, effective and measurable marketing program in your armory, and that’s how you maximize your marketing efforts.

Having access to your own database of user e-mail addresses (and by your own, I don’t mean the proprietary tag that comes with buying a database, I refer to a database that you’ve collected overt time of people that have indicated they would not mind receiving your information) is a highly valued asset to any business with the grey matter to appreciate client relations and communications.

Not many companies have those types of databases though. So let’s look at the benefits of e-mail branding, where businesses have the ability to showcase more or less the same marketing message than they would on an e-newsletter.

1. Personalization: And I mean real personalization. For starters, you very seldom send an e-mail to someone whose name and surname you don’t have. And when you do, chances are that the recipient would be much more lenient toward your ‘unsolicited’ e-mail than he / she would to a newsletter.
2. Conversion rates: Selling Coca Cola to Coke drinkers are much easier than selling to Pepsi drinkers. More importantly, people who know that you’re in the business of selling Coca Cola, will come to expect that you would be marketing it in some form or another. E-mail branding works in a similar fashion. People expect you to market a service they full well know you provide, and secondly, the majority of your e-mail recipients are far more likely to fit your target demographic than some random database.
3. Reputation: We’ve entered a reputation sensitive era with the internet transporting opinions and recommendations at the speed of a click. Importantly, why take the chance to annoy droves of Pepsi drinkers with your Coca Cola branded mail shots when you can grace your own (admittedly much smaller) e-mail recipient base with unobtrusive branding?
4. Ownership: Your e-mail is yours pal and you can pretty much decorate it as you choose. Chances of receiving hate mail because of it are fairly slim, simply because the marketing message is secondary to the message you sent. If it’s relevant, the recipient will click on it in any event. In fact, I think most people would appreciate your marketing efforts if done tastefully.
5. Wow factor: Because you receive an e-mail notification when someone clicked on one of your links, you can imagine the coolness that comes with calling said person literally within the same moment that they’re browsing your website.

E-mail newsletters have its place…for everyday in between, there’s e-mail branding.

2. At the end of 2008, about 19% of internet connections around the world did so at speeds in excess of 5Mbps – a 21% increase from the year before.

3. South Korea reigns supreme in terms of internet connections and connectivity speeds. It connects at an average speed of 15Mbps, ten times the global average.

4. They also rank #1 for the amount of connections above 5Mbps, with a total of 69%.

5. The USA ranks in a #17, but enjoys top spot for unique internet connections globally, with an astonishing 401 285 817 unique IP addresses.

6. Sweden and Norway tops the charts for the number of connections per capita, at 0.46 and 0.42 respectively. The United States ranks in at #6 with 0.38 connections per capita.

7. Mayotte, Equitorial Guinea and Rwanda ranks as the countries with the slowest internet connection speeds with 98%, 96% and 96% of them accessing the internet at speeds less than 256Kbsp.

8. I guess it’s not surprising that the USA and China ranks #1 and #2 respectively for the countries with the highest attack traffic in the world with 22.85% and 19.3% respectively.

For the complete “State of the Internet Report”, head over to Akamai.com.

Viral marketing, unfortunately, is a natural progression of the perception (mostly accurate) of a brand in the eyes of the consumer, proliferating among them in a natural way. Fortunately, this does not mean that marketers cannot spark the conversation among consumers in a healthy and accepted manner.

The digital era has enabled us to leverage off the contacts and relationships that we form online. Clever viral marketing tactics often include a “pushed” campaign to a selected few influential and relevant contacts.

Where blogging is concerned it is often easier to identify such relationships. Upon reading a blog post and identifying the recipient to which some of the keywords are linked, one can easily track the conversation (albeit “staged”) and witness viral marketing in action.

I refer to this practice as staged, simply because the initial awareness around the campaign was forced. What happens thereafter is a natural threaded conversation (viral) via a hyperlinked digital sphere. For each blogger that subsequently reference the article in a blog post of his own, a unique audience is addressed. And so the message is able to spread among the blogosphere.

The more the original post is referenced, the more likely consumers will be able to find your material through organic Google searches. (That is smart search engine optimization tactics)

This viral marketing strategy can be employed in various manners through various media channels. The same principle in a “staged” viral marketing campaign can be replicated using Facebook, Youtube, and other social media platforms.

Referral newsletter campaigns also qualify as viral marketing in my opinion. Simply by pushing the campaign to a relevant newsletter recipient database, the consumer has the choice to either ignore or engage in it. Should the consumer engage in it the messages spread via the recipient’s friends and friends of friends. And so the buzz is born.

Staged viral marketing campaigns should always be relevant to the targeted contact, blogger relation or newsletter recipient. It is often witnessed just how easily a campaign can go pear shaped simply because it was driven to an audience with little to zero relevance, who in turn (will) do anything in their power to publicize their outrage.

This video illustrates 15 key elements of viral marketing:

What are some of the best viral campaigns you have seen?

[Image Source: Pandemic Blog]

To businesses and marketers wishing to gain the edge over competitors, this is good news though. RSS is too brilliant to ignore, and while many still fail to grasp the technology, my plea is to soldier on right passed the meaning and head on to the good stuff…why you should use it.

What it is:
“It’s the glue that holds everything together”, I was told this morning when I ran the question by some people I know. And right on the button I reckon. If you use any of the following services in your business, then RSS could (and should) add substantial benefits to your marketing:

1. The internet (Expected something profound? Sorry. If you use the internet, you should use RSS)
2. E-mail (Again…expected something different?)
3. Blogs
4. Social Networking like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or any of the other niche networking platforms.

Why use it:
Even if your clients / target audience have not the faintest clue what it is, how to spot it or what to do with it, syndicating your content is the ideal manner to make sure they can reach your brand through the medium of their choice. Head’s up for convenience. You may pat yourself on the back now.

1. If you’re using the internet, aggregate the content of your most important sites into your RSS Reader. It saves you time, keeps you up to date on current trends and helps you make quick decisions when devising new strategies for your business.

2. If you have a frequently updated website, a blog with industry critical information or latest product offerings, display this information on every single e-mail you send and have your recipients benefit from learning about your business every day. (While you sit back and marvel at the genius of e-mail branding. If you’d like to see this in action, pop me a mail and I’ll show you.)

3. If you’re a blogger, or content creator (for the vainest of the lot), then someone should already have stuck a gold star on your forehead. Now exceed your own expectations by implementing RSS to see your content pop up all over the internet. Oh yes, and also put it in your e-mails as point #2 highlights.

4. You might find yourself in what I label as one of the “sexy industries”: Wine & Food, automotive, music, technology among others. This is when your target audience hangs out in places like Facebook, OpenWineConcortium, MySpace, Twitter and what not. Make sure that every time you publish a new information piece on your products or services that your presences on these social networks display it automatically as well. With RSS of course, what else?

Conclusion:
How the technology of RSS works is irrelevant. That it does work and the advantage your business will gain by using it is priceless.

If we consider the impact that Nelson Mandela had on brand South Africa, being the first president of colour, activist for the disbandment of Apartheid, the entry to a global society post the 1994 elections and the strides he has made in breaking down racial barriers and simultaneously changing the face of our economy, one can duly appreciate the efforts of this man. We are to this day still reaping the benefits of brand Madiba more than a decade after his reign. Not even the greatest of efforts of noble country men after him could succeed in tainting the image Madiba presented of this country.

Compare that to Barack Obama, who came from relative obscurity, certainly in nations outside the US, to drastically change the perception people have of America, including that of US citizens, virtually overnight. He has achieved what no man before him has done in an iota of the time it has taken arguably greater men before him. His anti Semitic beliefs was carried unobtrusively to the people. The impact his reign could have on the global economy is tangible. Diminishing the obscurity and sometimes borderline fraudulent face of the Bush-regime with sweeps of motivation across a multitude of channels have established himself as the benchmark against which all men after him will be judged.

The reality however, is that he hasn’t done a single thing yet. The entire reason for his election, for the thousands of journalists poising with desire to put pen to paper and for international politicians yearning at him in awe, is because of branding. Obama 2008 is a brand. A brand established by employing some of the smartest marketing tactics in (political) history.

What took Nelson Mandela decades to achieve through passion, dedication and an unmovable belief system, has taken brand Obama roughly the greater part of 2008. Mandela’s achievements speaks of work ethics beyond the comprehension of mortal men, of a commitment to the greater good of mankind and the right for equal opportunity for every citizen of his country. Brand Obama has achieved those same expectations from his countrymen through an audacious understanding of personal branding.

With Obama’s branding campaign, he has created an unquenchable desire among people to experience change. Knowingly, his brand leveraged off the rotten appeal the Bush administration left before him. His brand is different. It spoke of unification, of positive economic climates, of anti racism and is hell bent on steering the focus away from the previously perverted affinity to the war against terrorism.

This desire translated into expectation. With the branding strategy coming into its final stretch with his election, Obama now focuses himself on delivering on his promise to the people of America. It is a tall order, but if he can deliver against the expectations created by his campaign, we could soon boast in sharing in the company of two of the greatest men that have ever graced this planet.

Patrick Collings reckons, and I tend to agree, that “with recession looming, innovation in marketing and public relations is becoming even more important as marketing budgets are pared back.” But not only are marketing budgets pared back, so too seems the willingness to carry our clients’ brands through these testing times. Are we to busy staring at ourselves in the mirror to notice?

Traditional marketing and advertising agencies are finding it tough to keep head above water simply because many of them don’t have the capabilities to adapt to evolving economic climates. Traditional marketing and advertising remain, and will keep remaining it seems, exactly what it is: expensive and well, rather traditional.

There’s nothing wrong with tradition of course, but alarm bells should be ringing aloud when it starts picking away from your bottom line. The fundamental problem is not that we as marketers need to cut back on our expenses or wallow in self pity, the problem lies within our stubbornness to embrace change and roll with it.

Also true to the digital marketing sphere, one that perceives itself as God’s gift to marketing, the proverbial silver lining, which is infested with self adoration and obtrusive egos. In an industry that is fairly new, but has also suffered one of the greatest economic disasters of modern times, it’s a real travesty that we demand our self righteous position as top of the marketing food chain, despite still soiling our nappies because of our dependency to leverage off our “traditionalist rivals”.

If the digital marketing arena continues on its merry ways, we should have a hall of fame of fallen angels ousted from a heaven that they themselves have created, because talking about progression doesn’t automatically imply it. Digital marketing is not as glorious yet as we have hoped, and by simply sharing our time on hopes and dreams for a fully commercialized digital future with our fellow marketers, hours which should be billable actually, will not constitute a sustainable business.

During the times of a recession it is branding, and not arrogance, that will keep businesses afoot. Reverting back to basics is not something that sits well with these “self-proclaimed progressionists” as technological advances, entrepreneurial knack and yes, idle banter accompanied with elitist back patting seem the only perverse reason each of them are happy to succumb to sleep deprivation.

I wonder where the clients’ needs fit into this.

At the opposite side of innovation, a Ukrainian entrepreneur invented the re-sealable soda can. You flip up the top as usual and when, for any mysterious reason you’re not able to finish the beverage, just turn the top tab to give the can a completely gas-tight and liquid-tight seal. An added incentive toward this idea’s adoption is a space on the resealed top for advertising.

And finally, some moons ago a young webtrepreneur created the Million Dollar Homepage. He sold little advertising blocks, 1 pixel by 1 pixel in size, to businesses for one dollar each. Within months, the entire space was filled with advertising leaving this chap one of the quickest dollar millionaires in modern business history.

There are a couple of things that stand out from these examples. The first is that these ideas are so obvious, yet extraordinary cases of innovative thinking.

The second is that you didn’t think about it.

The question begs then: Is there any other form of marketing that is so obvious that it seems businesses are completely oblivious to it? The answer of course, is yes. E-mail has been a ‘man-made’ marvel for ages. It’s quicker than letters, more immediate and can be used as catalyst for viral effects. Shockingly, it’s also used for communication.

E-mail forms about 85% of business communication today, yet there is a stark contrast in branding between your e-mail and your regular stationary. Many businesses, most probably yours too, spend a good fortune on the printing of letterheads, business cards and other stationary, yet most seem somewhat oblivious to the acres of white space left on each of the thousands of e-mails sent on a monthly basis.

Some of you may argue that you do in fact “brand” your e-mails with signatures. These vary from e-mail footers with a name, contact number and web links to custom templates packaged with e-mail clients like Outlook and HTML templates that do your brand more harm than any good. Have you recently made an effort to see how many different e-mail signatures are used by your staff, the people most responsible for handling your brand?

If 85% of your business communication is conducted by e-mail, why then do you spend your marketing budget on everything but your e-mails? Simple math calculates that a business with 10 employees sending 10 e-mails per day, equates to 24 000 e-mails during a working year. That is 24 000 marketing and branding opportunities for you to embrace on a yearly basis.

If client retention is easier than acquisition and the majority of e-mails are sent to current clients, business associates and potential clients, then using e-mail real estate to exploit potential cross- and up-sell opportunities seems rather…ordinary, yet critical.

The French paradox suggests that Parisians that eat fatty foods and smoke like a chimney live longer than the average human being because of the copious amounts of wine they consume. The average business man and woman reckons the longevity of their brand rely on the amounts of money they spend on advertising in magazines, websites, billboards and television commercials.

Keeping your trusted and loyal brand ambassadors in constant contact with your brand is a marketing principle that is reiterated ad nauseam, yet not everybody seem to grasp the simplicity of it.