Passbook and Email Marketing

Apple's Passbook has dramatically helped email marketers. Now, consumers no longer have to find the email with a coupon as long as there is a link in the email for the user to click to add to Passbook. Some companies (like American Airlines) requires you to have the app on your phone for it to synch with Passbook.

For Passbook to be a boon to email marketers, there are some possible improvements:

1) Auto adding of coupons - for example, if you want to subscribe to receiving coupons from Bed, Bath & Beyond, a user should only have to add the vendor to their Passbook vendors so new coupons auto synch.
2) Organization of Passbook so you can sort by vendor, vendor category, expiration date
3) Synch up with emails to pick up new vendors from whom you are receiving coupons - so they get auto-added as in point (1) above and then removes the unnecessary spam

Just a few ideas...

Should Small Businesses spend time on Social Media?

Interestingly, Apple does not have much of a social media presence. They are too busy making game-changing products to spend time on Twitter or Facebook. It is argued that social media helps you manage your critics and any bad media fallout. However, for a small business, how much bad media fallout could occur - say as big as the Exxon oil spill - that could really impact perception of your business. I think small businesses should spend time building their business, making customers happy and ultimately, building a brand for the business. Social media can come later....

Making Email Marketing Successful

The whole point of email marketing is to build customer loyalty, strengthen your brand name and ultimately, boost sales by increasing traffic (preferably, revenue generating traffic) to your website. An unsaid objective is to avoid annoying the customer. So, what makes an email marketing campaign successful?

Know your audience

1.    Your email list should comprise of people who are actually interested in your product/service

2.    Recipients should be able to easily unsubscribe or customize their subscription

Deliver an interesting/useful message

1.    Do some research on emails/newletters that are successful. Wear your customer hat - why do you open some emails and not others?

2.    Develop clear marketing goals and what you want to achieve from the email marketing campaign. Also, consider that email marketing should be used for what email does best: increase revenue, generate leads, strengthen customer relationships, increase website traffic, and build brand awareness.

3.    Create a subject line that is compelling to the target audience. Avoid using FREE in the subject line - it is overused and gets treated as spam in the eyes of the customer.

4.    Balance the frequency of emails with the length of the message. Nobody likes to read a long email.

Choosing the right format

1.    Use a mix of rich media and text so recipients can read the content without having to view the rich media

2.    Put the most relevant information above the fold

Test your results

1.    Monitor results for each campaign through analytical results

2.    Tweak your message as you go along for the next email campaign