To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://bit.ly/aZ4ILu

I attended the BtoB NetMarketing Breakfast on February 25^th at the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York City.  The Panel consisted of Emily Riley, Research Director of Interactive Marketing for Forrester Research, Matt Preschern, Vice President of NA Demand Programs for IBM North America Marketing, Brian Nizinsky, Online Marketing Manager for Eastman Kodak Company, and Mike Hardy, Social Media Manager for Pitney Bowes.

Below are a few of the key takeaways:

• With so many new digital marketing channels available, too many marketers are focusing on tactics rather than overall marketing objectives.  Marketers need to start employing a holistic approach to effectively use both digital and traditional channels.

• Though email will continue to be an important marketing medium, especially in the B-to-B space, database fatigue is likely to occur at higher rates and response rates will drop due to mailbox clutter.  For this reason, companies should consolidate their databases at the corporate level and frequency-cap their marketing email communications.  Lower response rates may also necessitate that marketers focus more attention on nurturing individual leads—behavioral triggers are often a great tool for this.

• Social media continues to be extremely popular; however, marketers should look to leverage these tools for more than just buzz.  Many companies are monitoring social media to understand how people are using their products, what consumers like and don’t like, and spot potential “PR disasters” (and proactively work to turn the situation around).  Others are using tools like twitter for real-time customer service.

• Niche communities with specific interests are an extremely powerful tool.  If developed correctly, these communities can provide a wealth of knowledge for both marketing and product development purposes.

• Search engines are “broken.”  New content has exploded on the web and there is no longer a search technique that allows people to easily find what they are looking for.  Panelists called this a transition period for search engines that would likely lead to more efficient search-tools and technology.

• Though attendees were noticeably curious about how to leverage video on the web — and panelists all agreed video is becoming increasingly more important — there were no real “revelations.”  Common uses for video included: marketing videos, branding videos, user-question videos, and instructional videos.  Panelists also stressed that videos should be named and tagged with the appropriate key words to enhance video-search performance.

• 2010 will be a year of “rebuilding.” Although most marketing budgets probably won’t be cut this year, it’s unlikely they will see great increases either.  Most companies will continue shifting their marketing budgets towards digital initiatives.

To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://emailexperience.org/blog/2010/02/integrating-email-marketing-social-strategies-what-do-you-think.

Social media – it’s here to stay!
January 28, 2010 — People are spending more time than ever on social networking sites (Facebook estimates that roughly half of its 300 million users log in to their account everyday) and the ad dollars are following suit. A study conducted last year by Equation Research found that 59% of companies already use social media and an additional 28% plan to implement it this year. Furthermore, 25% of companies said that they plan to “significantly” increase spending for social media, compared to 3% of companies that plan to increase spending for TV and 1% that plan to increase spending for print. Bottom line, if your organization isn’t already leveraging social media, they’d better start in 2010. It’s becoming an increasingly important channel and if you don’t start paying attention, you’ll be left in the dust.

Mobile is about to ignite.
There’s been a lot of hype about mobile for years, but it seems that now it’s here to stay. In the US, more people have cell phones than cable TVs, web access or home PCs and nearly 50 million use their cell phones to surf the Internet. With such penetration, mobile will be an increasingly important channel for marketers in 2010 and beyond.

Email marketing will continue to grow.
Given the economic climate, the low cost and predictable performance of email marketing can’t be beat. Social media may have taken away some market share, as people turn to sites like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with friends, but email remains the predominant communication tool in the business world. So, if you don’t already have an email marketing program, you’d be smart to invest in one in 2010. If email is already part of your marketing plan, bolster your list with lead generation techniques and offer value-add content to existing subscribers.

Popularity of online video will continue to rise.
More than 78% of US Internet users view online video and this number is increasing. People like video and current technology makes it easier than ever to capture, edit and distribute. If you haven’t already ventured into the video arena, 2010 is the year to do it. The right video can quickly turn viral and catapult products or organizations into the public conscience. With such a tremendous upside, why not give it a try?

GPS chips and triangulation technology?
With the rise of applications like Loopt, FourSquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc., Internet and mobile users have demonstrated a strong demand for location-based services. Add to this that more people are buying phones that feature GPS chips and triangulation technology, and it’s clear that the market for location-based media is expanding. Expect to see a lot of companies outside the technological realm leveraging this technology in 2010.

Search engine battles will spark innovation.
With Bing’s launch in June 2009 and subsequent agreement with Yahoo to power its organic and paid search results, Google has its first true challenger in years. In 2010, as these companies try to “one-up” each other, consumers and marketers will likely benefit from a slew of new search products and services. Google has already released Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), which displays real-time listings from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in search results.

Engage, engage, engage!
Engagement is no longer a buzz word; people want to interact with your brand and create an emotional connection. In pursuit of this, marketers should leverage social media and mobile as well as new video and ad technologies to manage the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs consumers have of their brands.

This article was published in Chief Marketer.  To continue reading go to:
http://chiefmarketer.com/disciplines/online/1022-triggered-email/

What is an open rate? It’s the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. Below are a few tips you can use to increase this critical metric: 

Your list: If you consistently send to an in-house opt-in list, be sure to practice list hygiene.

• Segment the email addresses for people who have not opened your email in 90 days and ask them to update their profiles. This will either prompt them to opt-out or specify what type of information they want to receive from you.
• Only send emails that are relevant to the type of information the recipient has opted-in to.
• Remove all email addresses that have never opened your emails. Removing these people may decrease the size of your database, but will leave you with a more responsive list.

Open rates are not 100% accurate: Different email clients (Outlook vs. Gmail) and email formats (Text vs. HTML) will affect your open rate. Here are some of the discrepancies you should be aware of:

• Many email service providers (ESPs) place an invisible pixel in each HTML email and when this pixel is displayed, it reports back to the ESP that the email was opened. This poses a problem for text only emails because they don’t include this pixel. Although people may be reading the text email, they are not being counted.
• Microsoft Outlook counts an open in the preview pane (reader does not have to actually double click and open)
• Web email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) actually has to be opened to count as an open. Additionally, email clients usually have image blocking on default. If recipients view your emails in Gmail but don’t “download images,” it does not count as an open

Your Subject line and “from” field: Your subject line and “from” field is the first thing your recipient sees. Therefore it’s extremely important to make them relevant:

 From Field:

• Your “from” field should be a name your recipient will recognize and trust, such as the company name or maybe the company’s CEO’s name.
• Keep the “from” field consistent for specific types of email communications (i.e. survey vs. sales email vs. customer service email, etc.)

 Subject line:

• Make sure your subject line is relevant to the type of information they’ve opted-in to.
• Craft your subject line to peak their interest – don’t be vague
• Avoid words that commonly get flagged as spam in your subject line.
• Be honest – do not try to “trick” your recipient into opening your email
• When possible, use a mail merge (such as their name, etc.) in the subject line
• Test, test, test – whenever you send out an email, split your list segment in two and test two different subject lines (short vs. long, mail merge vs. no mail merge, etc.)
• If your testing subject lines, be sure to go back and analyze your results

Date and time your email is sent

You will often hear people say that either Tuesday or Thursday is the best day to send a marketing email because studies show emails sent on these days receive the highest open rates. I would advise you to take this information with a large grain of salt. If everyone followed this advice, it would mean seriously overcrowded inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Do you really want to add to this clutter?

The only way to find out when your subscribers are most likely to read your emails is to perform your own tests to see which day performs better. Start off by testing days of the week and once you’ve identified a trend start testing the time of day.

With up to 266 million Facebook users (O’Reilly Research) and around 44.5 million unique monthly Twitter visitors each month (comScore), it has become undeniable that social media is here to stay and can greatly impact the success of your business.

Contributing to the undeniable success of social media (especially Twitter) is the plethora of third party applications and tools. Below are some third party applications and tools you can use to better leverage social media for your business.

Lexicon:
Facebook’s Lexicon tool, the Google Trends of Facebook, allows you to see patterns for keywords in public places like walls and status updates. They have two versions of this tool, the latter being more robust. See if anyone is talking about your company, or you!

  • Old Lexicon

  • New Lexicon

Twitterholic:
If you want to know the top 100 tweeters, this is the place to visit. Twitterholic scans twitter multiple times a day to keep us up to date on who has the most followers, tweets, their locations, number of updates and how long they’ve been a member. The list may surprise you.

  • Twitterholic

Virtual Business Card:
There are many applications you can use to send a virtual business card, I have chosen just two. Simply create an account, customize your own business card and send your link to others via your social network of choice. Think of it as a more personal Outlook V Card.

  • businesscard2.com 

  • card.ly

Twitter Voicemail:
This tool allows you to leave a virtual Twitter voicemail. Sign up for an account and enter the name of the user you wish to leave a private voicemail for. Pockets will then call you, prompting you to leave a message. It then sends the private message via @ reply.

  • Pocketsapp

Link Shrink and Track:
These URL tracking tools are great for marketing initiatives. They shrink your URLs down so you can fit them into your 140 characters, or elsewhere, and even give you a report for clicks, locations, etc.

  • bit.ly

  • retwt.me

Posterous:
A new way to blog for those on the go, Posterous allows you to post to your blog via email. This is especially great for those interested in live blogging from their smart phones. You can even attach pictures and mp3s and use your own domain name.

  • Posterous

Twellow:
Perhaps the most popular Twitter directory is Twellow, which was created by the folks at WebProNews. Twellow allows people to categorize themselves in the directory, add links, create an extended bio and follow others you find in Twellow.

  • Twellow

File Sharing:
FileTwt allows you to tweet files (up to 20 MB) using your Twitter login and password. However, if you want to send files via private tweets, you must create an account.

  • filetwt.com

Geographic Trends Map:
Twitter doesn’t yet (to see what’s in store, read here) allow for location targeting, so marketers trying to find followers locally can settle for something like the Trendsmap.
Seeing trending topics by geography can mean great implications for local businesses.

  • Trendsmap

What the trend?
Perhaps my favorite of all the tools listed, What the trend? is great for people who never understand why Twitter trending topics are trending topics. This site shows a real time feed of trending topics and next to each is an explanation. You can even click through and read the tweets on the topic to piece it all together.

  • whatthetrend.com