VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Your Social Media Planning Checklist

Just like we created our Checklist for Email Marketing Campaigns, our Social Media Expert here at VerticalResponse Jenna Jantsch created this Checklist for Integrating Social Media & Email. It's simple and great checklist for you to keep on track with your social media duties, we use it here ourselves. Cheers!

Use Email Marketing to Get Reviews!

I received an email this week from CB2, a Crate and Barrel brand. It was interesting to me because they used an entire email marketing campaign to compel their recipients to give their products a review. If you give a review you'll be entered to win $1000 shop card at CB2. I think this is a great use of an email campaign.

I went to their site and I found that they have an area on most of the product pages where you can post a review for each product. The only potentially negative issue is that CB2 seems to have control over these reviews so the reviewers may question if they are "filtering" them. For some reason I doubt that they are, but we just don't know.

All in all, a great idea of how to use email marketing to get people talking about you.  Hey CB2, get bold! I found you on Yelp, a review site, where you get some pretty good reviews. Next time why not include other ways in your email campaigns for people to review you? At VerticalResponse we asked users to post reviews to Yelp and our Facebook Fan Page as well as Twitter. If there's a problem, we know it pretty quick and can work to fix it. Transparency is good!

Do you have any experience with using email marketing to get reviews? Chime in!

Add a VerticalResponse Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Pages

I’ve posted before that you should put an email opt-in form on each page of your website. In today’s world your social media profiles like your Facebook fan page are becoming extensions of your websites. Well, thanks to Return on Subscriber, I have found a way to add that opt-in form to your Facebook fan page.

We just created a video for how to do this if written words bore you!

I did this in just under 10 minutes and I promise it isn’t hard at all. But before you start, it is good to know that FBML, the application that allows you to do this, requires you to have a personal profile. So if you don't have one of those find someone who does, or join us on Facebook!

Step 1: Create a FREE VerticalResponse opt-in form

• Go to the ‘List’ section in your VerticalResponse account.
• Click to create a new opt-in form
• Name it
• Design your form, don’t worry we make the design part very simple
• Choose a pop-up thank you page, Facebook will not let you redirect to another site.
• Choose if you want new registrants to be added to an existing list or if you would like a new list created
• Set up any alerts 
• And publish. Need a tutorial?

Step 2: Add the Static FBML application to your Fan Page

• Search "Static FBML" in the Facebook search bar or click here
• Click Add to my Page
• In the window that pops up select your page

Step 3: Customize for your Facebook fan page

• Click to edit your fan page
• Click to edit the FBML application within your page 
• Paste the VerticalResponse opt-in form code into the empty box
• Change the title of the box, maybe "Newsletter Sign Up Form" or "Email Sign Up"
• Save these changes
• Go back to your fan page
• Click on the ‘+’ icon on your navigation bar
• Move your newsletter sign up form around on your navigation bar so it is in an appropriate place

We have added this application on to our fan page so check it out if you would like to see what it looks like before you begin.  We also have a short video tutorial that walks through Steps 2 and 3.  You can watch that tutorial here. 

How Twitter & Email Marketing Work Together

Many small businesses understand they need to get on the "social media bandwagon" but you might not know how to start, or better yet, why to even do it. You just hear about social media and think, "My business needs a Facebook presence and a Twitter account" but you don't really know why. If you're reading this blog, chances are you've got a website and you're probably email marketing. So you might be asking, "If I'm already doing email marketing, how does Twitter fit in?"

We'll today, I'm uncovering ways for you to use Twitter and how it could benefit your email marketing campaigns, as well as how your email marketing campaigns benefit your Twitter followers.

Ready, Set, Email, Twitter!

For the newbies: Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages known as "tweets" that are no more than 140 characters long.

Get Started

Many of you might just be starting out on Twitter. What do you twitter about? Who reads your tweets? Many businesses set up a Twitter account, and write about new things that are happening in their business, what's going on in the industry, or they retweet articles they might find interesting. So how might this work together with your email marketing campaigns?

Get Followers 

You may have people that visit your site or location that aren't on your email list but they  might be if they knew all of the cool stuff or the "Email Only" offers you publish in your emails. So in order to get more followers you'll want to post your Twitter handle on your site, in your email marketing campaigns, on your business card, and in your email signature so that people can easily click on your link and follow you. For instance mine is: http://twitter.com/janinepopick or @janinepopick. Then start to track the number of followers you get.

Email + Twitter = A Perfect Match

Now, here are a few things you can do to combine your Twitter presence with your email marketing campaigns.

Twitter Your Subject Line - Now that you've created your email you sent it out to your  lists, take your subject line, which is hopefully less than 140 characters, and twitter it, then included a link to your hosted version of your email campaign. You'll likely be reaching part of an audience you never knew you could have. If they like your content they'll click through and read it, then they may even sign up to your list.

Think About Search on Twitter - Depending on the way people search for things on  Twitter and the content of your subject line, (check out the free service called TweetDeck that enables you to search and filter on keywords), people that never knew anything about you might see your tweets. 

One example would be a winery might be having a sale on their wines, and anyone that might search on "wine" using a tool like TweetDeck, would be exposed to any tweets that include the word "wine". This is a great way to get even more eyeballs on your tweets and ultimately your email marketing campaigns.

Include "Follow" Links in Your Email Marketing Campaigns - Make sure you include a "Follow Us on Twitter" link in all of your email campaigns. With the velocity at which emails get forwarded, a newcomer might want to "try you on for size" by following you on Twitter before making the commitment to join your email list.

Get Them to Sign Up - You may also consider adding a "Sign Up to Receive Our Emails" link so that those coming to the hosted version of your email for the first time from Twitter have a place to add themselves to your email list. Entice them to sign up by having "Email Only" offers or notices.

Use Twitter for Research - If you use free twitter tools that help shorten your links like http://bit.ly/ & http://tr.im/ (remember your entire tweet is limited to 140 characters) you can track how many people click on links that you include in your tweets. Then you can see which articles, offers or stories that you twitter about should be included and above the fold on your email newsletter.

If you've got any ideas for how you're using Twitter with your email campaigns we'd love to hear them!

Skittles Replaces Website with Social Media

In a bold move to spark some word of mouth, Skittles has changed its entire website and turned it into a social media extravaganza. Yesterday the Skittles home page was their Twitter stream, and today the home page is now their Facebook Fan page. They appear to be rotating through all of the social media outlets.

To get to different areas of their site you're now presented with the hovering navigation box. For instance, now when you click on "Media" you're taken to their You Tube and Flickr pages. Gutsy move especially if they don't always monitor these highly trafficked pages.

They do present visitors with a screen that asks their age and tells the visitor that there might be content not suitable for kids.

If anyone Tweets the word Skittles it will appear on the Skittles site in the Twitter stream.

In an interview with AdWeek, Carole Walker, VP, integrated marketing communications for the brand, had this to say, "Skittles' brand positioning was a border zone . . . Skittles lives in a world that is unexpected." 

Seems like instead of pushing marketing messages out to their consumers, they're letting consumers do it on their behalf.

Bold or crazy? I don't know. But I did see on their Facebook page they have 585,000 fans and growing, they've got 1,500 wall posts of people talking about Skittles, they have 16,000 pictures that match the criteria "skittles" on Flickr and countless Tweets by the minute. They are targeting their exact market with the tools that this market lives and dies by. Seems like they may have tasted the rainbow on this one but you tell me!