The following are 5 of our favourite top marketing stories – though there are many more…

Procter & Gamble produced and sponsored the first radio soap operas in the 1930s. When soaps switched to television most of the new serials were sponsored and produced by the company.

Structured reality TV shows are starting to rival traditional soaps and reality TV shows. The most famous UK example, The Only Way is Essex follows the lives and loves of a group of 20-somethings.

From 1968 to 2003 Milk Tray chocolates were advertised with an action man undergoing hair-raising adventures to deliver chocolates to the woman he loved.

The creation of Marlboro man promoted the appeal of American stories about lone cowboys. In the 1950s filtered cigarettes were viewed as feminine, The Marlboro man changed this perception.

And most recently BT’s soap-opera styled advertising campaign following the ups and downs of ‘Adam and Jane’s romance’ is credited with helping to make BT the leading telecommunications brand for broadband and subscription TV in the UK.

If you’ve got a good story to tell about your product or service and you’d like some help to get it out there – give us a call on 01202 788333

(Adapted from Chartered Institute of Marketing – The Marketer September/October 2011)

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing

Fast on the heels of our LinkedIn Cheat Sheet comes one for Twitter. This  includes useful tips and explanations of the most popular terms and icons. Statistics for Twitter are more difficult to track down but Twitter themselves state that they have 175 million users worldwide – though how many of these are active accounts is debateable.

Love it or hate it you shouldn’t be ignoring it!

Twitter Cheat Sheet 2

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Email reporting data is generated from you email software tool, or via a partner (such as LexisClick online marketing) that manages your campaigns for you. There’s a lot of information generated so it can be overwhelming ! But it rivals any other marketing analytical data available because it’s available immediately and can give you a historical view of your performance over time .

It’s worth taking time to get familiar with some of the key metrics as these tell you which emails bounced, why they bounced, who opened your emails, what links they clicked on, who has requested unsubscribe from your emails and who forwarded them on.

Open rates

This is one stat that many marketers get excited about – but it can be misleading. Open rates are determined by a snippet of code in HTML emails that tracks when your images show up in someone’s in box but it doesn’t  necessarily mean that someone has ‘read it’. It could have appeared in the preview pane for a moment before being deleted.

In addition the default setting on an increasing number of email programs is to block images until the user clicks to enable them, but readers can scan emails without enabling images at all. Therefore open rates may have little meaning, but open rates over time, or between two versions of the same email can be an indicator of a developing trend and therefore have more meaning.

Clicks

Total clicks refers to the number of times a subscriber clicked on a link, while unique clicks refers to how many of your readers clicked on a link.

Click –through percentage of opens

Of all the opens how many clicked on a link. This can be a useful metric but due to the inaccuracies of open rates not conclusive. However, it’s useful to know how many of those that opened the email, actually were interested enough to click on a link, and comparison with previous campaigns will indicate how effective and interesting your content was.

Bounces

These are split into hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are permanently undeliverable emails – the email account may be closed, whereas soft bounces indicate temporarily undeliverable emails, which could be due to a full mailbox, or a server being down temporarily.

Unsubscribes

It’s important to view this metric over time as high unsubscribe requests could indicate irrelevant content, too frequent emails, or it could relate to the seasonal nature of your business. It’s important to spot any trends in this area before it becomes a major issue.

These are just a few of the campaign statistics available. We can help you interpret your campaign results and benchmark them, by comparing them with typical email campaigns from a large set of companies. We can measure to see whether you’ve achieved the objectives established at the beginning of the campaign, and compare current results with previous campaigns to check for patterns or trends.

If you’re happy to manage your own email marketing, we offer access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to an expert email marketing team there’s a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters with prices starting from £19.00 per month.

Contact us on 01202 788333 or visit www.lexisclick.com/email

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General