I’m working on a new book (a follow-up to Understanding Digital Marketing) that will be published by Kogan Page next year showcasing forty of the best digital marketing campaigns in the world.

We’re sourcing case studies from various places, and will feature a mixture of different online campaigns in the book, from award-winners to more obscure but successful campaigns from all sorts of businesses spanning a variety of industries.

We’re a bit short of time to truly crowdsource all the case studies for this edition – but we are looking for your nominations to help us identify truly exceptional examples of online marketing that we may miss through other channels.

You can use this form to submit your favourite campaign for consideration. We’ll let you know if it goes on to be featured in the book.

Thanks a million for your input.

Join me and Damian Ryan in Dublin on Thursday 05 November along with  a panel of award winning online marketing creatives to learn how creativity and innovation in your digital marketing campaigns can give your business a boost.

Understanding Digital: CREATIVE will take place at the National College of Ireland in the city centre from 4-7 pm, followed by a drinks reception and  an opportunity for informal networking.  We’re hosting the event in conjunction with the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) as part of Design Week 2009.

For just €50 (€10 for current ICAD members) you get to share the expertise and insight of four leading digital creative minds.

Places are limited, and at that price they’re going fast so register now to secure yours.

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

Social media is the buzzword in online marketing today.

It’s still in its embryonic stages, and not nearly as critical to online success, or indeed as measurable, as some more established online marketing channels (search springs to mind as the online marketing granddaddy that dwarfs all others in terms of potential ROI and measurability), but it is gaining momentum fast.

People are flocking to social media sites around the globe, using them to connect more effectively with more of their peers, to share, entertain and communicate. And of course where the masses lead, the marketers are never far behind.

While Social Media may not be as fundamental as an effective search marketing strategy to your company’s online success (yet), there’s are some crucial differences. You can’t really compare the two directly, because they’re trying to achieve two very different objectives.

Image by DavidErickson via Flickr

Time to breathe a bit of life back into this blog.

Between writing and promoting Understanding Digital Marketing, work with SOHO Solo, Career Moves and other editorial commitments things have been pretty hectic. Damian and I have also just signed publishing contracts with Kogan Page to do a follow up book. So, interesting times ahead.

Distilling the very best in online marketing for you

The new book, which is set for delivery to the publishers by 31 January 2010, and should hit the shelves the middle of next year, will focus on how organisations around the world are harnessing integrated online marketing to drive their business forward, improve their ROI and enrich their relationship with their customers.

We’re in the process of putting together an international panel of online marketing experts – acknowledged leaders in their respective fields – to help us select the very best examples of online marketing in the world today. Together we’ll deconstruct them and analyse the lessons that others can learn from these innovative campaigns.

Stay tuned for more updates, and regular online marketing content here and on the soon to be re-vamped “Understanding Digital” website.

E-mail marketing delivery tips for successful e-mail marketing campaigns from the CEO of AWeber Email Marketing Tom Kulzer. Make sure your customers get the message by following Tom’s advice:

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Update — “Understanding Digital Marketing” is now available for pre-order on amazon

Our new book somehow seems very real this morning. I opened an e-mail from our publishers, Kogan Page, to find a link to the “Understanding Digital Marketing” page on their website.

It’s an exciting time.

Apparently:

Details of your book have already already been circulated to the book trade and to key online booksellers such as amazon. Your book will also feature in our ‘new books and bestsellers’ catalogue which is circulated by our Sales Agents to the international book trade

So, all good stuff then.

We’re planning to launch an accompanying website in the near future to support and build on Understanding Digital Marketing. This is still in the very early planning stages, but the vision is to build a dynamic and constantly evolving, community driven online marketing resource.

Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our RSS feed or check back regularly to see what’s new. It’s going to be fun!

Published as a part of a three article series in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo

Last week we looked at six ways you could use the internet to help you conduct efficient, cost effective market research. This week we offer another six suggestions that can help you get your fledgling business off the ground.

1. Create online polls and surveys: survey based market research can reveal all sorts of information about your potential customers. But putting together and undertaking an effective survey used to be a costly, time consuming and labour intensive process. Now, thanks to the popularity of the internet and sites like Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and PollDaddy (www.polldaddy.com) creating interactive online polls and surveys to canvas customer opinion has never been easier. Best of all, these services will collate and present all the results without you having to lift a finger.

2. Check out your competitors’ websites: competitor research is crucial for any new business – and what better place to start than your competitors’ websites. You’ll find specific information about the company, the services or products they provide, what they charge, and will be able to infer things like the market their targeting. What are they doing well (emulate them), what are they doing badly (learn from them), and what aren’t they doing at all (and does that present an opportunity for you)?

3. Search peer review sites: peer review sites can be generic, like Louder Voice (www.loudervoice.com) and Epinions (www.epinions.com), or industry specific like the travel review sites TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) and Boo.com (www.boo.com). Searching for specific keywords related to your business on both generic and industry specific review sites can tell you what people like and what they dislike about the services your competitors are offering, and your industry in general.

4. Harness the social web: social networking sites like MySpace (www.myspace.com), FaceBook (www.facebook.com), Bebo (www.bebo.com), and others are all the rage at the moment. Groups of like minded people are congregating in these digital social havens to interact, exchange ideas and to discuss anything and everything. If your customers are among them, these can be great places to engage, join groups, ask questions and share information about you and your business.

5. Feed me: RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a very easy and convenient way to keep up-to-date with the latest information online. Instead of spending time surfing a multitude of websites to see what, if anything, has been updated, your reader will pull all of the updates into one convenient location. All you need is a piece of software called an RSS Reader (Google offer a very capable, free online reader at http://reader.google.com), then simply add feeds from your favourite websites. To see what’s new all you need to do is fire up your feed reader and scan the headlines, then click through to the articles that interest you.

6. Look, listen, learn, engage: finally, the most important thing is to recognise that the web is an interactive and constantly evolving medium. Spend a bit of time “lurking” on relevant sites to get a feel for them. Listen to what people are saying and learn as much as you can from it. Once you’re comfortable though, you’ll get much more out of your online research if you choose to engage with and contribute to the online community your new business wants to reach. Just like in the real world the more you put in, the more you get out!

When you’re starting a new business one of the key things you need to do is market research. Who are your potential customers, and what are their wants and needs? What sort of demand is there for your products or services? Who are your main competitors, what are they offering, and how can you differentiate your business from theirs?

So many questions… when all you really want are answers. You obviously need to know all of these things and more to help you define a viable business plan and create an effective marketing strategy for your new business. But where do you start? Things like surveys and focus groups are often prohibitively expensive, and more often than not out of the financial reach of new businesses. You could make informed guesses, of course, but you’re really looking for something a bit more tangible.

Enter the Internet – that huge and ever growing ethereal melting pot of consumers and business. According to the latest figures there are some 1.3 billion people online, and they span the demographic gamut. There’s a pretty good chance that a healthy portion of your target market, and most of your competition is already online.

So what, you might think. Well, on today’s interactive web people are doing much more than simply looking for and absorbing information; they’re engaging in a two way discourse with their peers, a constantly evolving discussion about anything and everything that interests them – from how to grow runner beans to the relative merits of the Lisbon Treaty to what brand of hair-colouring they prefer. The web offers you a window into their world… a window of opportunity that could give your fledgling business that elusive competitive edge.

Web 2.0 maven Vanessa Fox, one of the guest speakers on social media at this year’s Search Marketing World conference in Dublin, believes that access to social media is levelling the playing field when it comes to market research. “Particularly for small businesses, who perhaps before didn’t have access to things like market research, focus groups and all those things that cost a lot of money, I think it’s very easy now for them to tap into the [online] conversation and see what’s going on,” she said.

Vanessa points out that there are all sorts of conversations going on online – not just about your business, but about key competitors, and about your industry in general – from which small businesses can glean real insight. “Even just the ability to hear what’s going on and take feedback from that I think is really valuable,” she said.

From conducting a simple keyword search to see who your main competitors are; to browsing through online groups, forums and blogs to identify the key influencers in your space; to setting up automated alerts and feeds that flag the conversations you want to track, and much more besides… there are a raft of tools out there to help you find out more about your customers, your competition, your industry and ultimately your business.

In the next article we’ll take a closer look at a few of them.

Image Credit: Explain market research by mafleen on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Prominent Irish blogger Damien Mulley recently pointed out the folly of focussing on some elements of online marketing at the expense of others.

Pursue more established online marketing strategies and ignore social media and your letting a golden opportunity slip by – but by equal measure, if you put all your efforts into social media and eschew more established online avenues you could be missing the lions share of online business.

Or as Damien puts it:

How many people have an email address, how many have a Facebook account?

Consider all your options

You absolutely can’t ignore the online "conversation"… but then neither should you neglect the more established elements of online marketing, like e-mail, SEO, PPC, affiliate programmes and even online display advertising if it dovetails with your particular audience. Also, its often worth considering how offline marketing can augment and complement your online campaigns.

Do your homework

Know what you want to achieve before you start, know your market and where they spend their time online, identify the key influencers. Then align your marketing strategy accordingly.

New marketing doesn’t kill old marketing

Marketing is evolving — but that evolution doesn’t eradicate what preceded it, it just adds more strings to the marketers bow, giving you a suite of new and exciting ways to engage with the people who really matter to your business.

You can see — or rather hear the proof of this in any outdoor market, anywhere in the world. From the street markets of London to the Souks of Marrakech to Asia and beyond,  you’ll find the very first marketing medium in history — the human voice — employed to hawk the merchants’ wares, as effective in the digital age as it ever was.

A more rounded future

I think we’ll see a much more holistic approach to marketing emerge over the next few years, and will gradually see the stark delineation between "traditional" and "online" marketing converge into a much more rounded whole. We’ll stop thinking in terms of “traditional” versus “digital”marketing… it will just be marketing, and we’ll employ a carefully tailored blend of techniques spanning a variety of media to engage effectively with our target market.

It’s going going to take time, of course… but it promises to be an intriguing transition.

The subject line is perhaps the single most important piece of content in your entire e-mail marketing campaign. It’s the line that differentiates your e-mail from the raft of promotional messages cluttering your readers’ inbox.  Will they open your mail, or won’t they… a lot of the time it can depend on your subject line.

Naturally, then, it pays to spend a little time, care and attention on your subject line. You want to craft a subject line that clearly states the value proposition of your message, and obviously make sure there aren’t any glaring typos in it that make your organisation seem unprofessional.

It’s a shame that Irish e-retail portal Buy4Now.ie didn’t do this with their latest missive. I just received the following e-mail promotion from Buy4Now.ie on behalf of Thomas Sanderson conservatory and sunroom blinds with a glaring typo in the subject line. Instead of “sunroom” they’d typed “sundroom”. A perfectly understandable typo… but why, oh why, wasn’t it checked and corrected before hitting send?

A closer look at the offending subject line showing the offending typo:

If I was Thomas Sanderson I’d be less than chuffed with this effort. It reflects badly on them and on Buy4Now. Come on guys… you can do much better than this!