What’s the big deal?

There are more than 500 million people across the globe using the social media power house that is Facebook, spending more that 5 billion minutes online per month!

To put that into perspective if Facebook were a country it would easily eclipse the United States!

If you also take into account that the average user is connected to 80 community pages then you’ll begin to understand what all the fuss is about.

The challenge for the modern digital marketer is to integrate the different social media tools available and start putting them to work. I see Facebook and Twitter not so much as a sale’s tool, but more as a relationship tool. They help to maintain the relationship and hopefully keep your customers interested, active and buying!

As many of you will already know Maxemail has a powerful form tool that not only allows you to create different forms using the builder, it also has the Form Handler which allows you to handle form data from external sources such as your website, blog and…. Facebook?

We are pleased to announce that it is now possible to integrate the Maxemail Form Handler and Facebook using the Static FBML application.

To see how this is done please click here

What does this mean for you?

Previously all Maxemail forms had to be hosted on a dedicated website or integrated into a home page.
This new integrations means that you can integrate your forms within the Facebook window as a tab or as a box. As we have below:

What do I need to do?

First of all you need to have a page for your business. Don’t have a page?

Then read the Hosting Email Sign-up Forms on Facebook page of our manual

The key thing to remember is why have they joined your page? To answer this you need to think of the reasons why you join a page. The common reasons are normally to hear about offers, discounts, sales and competitions so make sure that you put the effort in if you wish to benefit from lateral engagement.

There are many other ways to integrate your web page with Facebook, if you’d like to know more then Facebook have a great plugins area or feel free to contact Client Services.

However not without a significant issue for email marketers.

One of the first things we have noticed is the alignment of your email and some background colours are missing when using a user reads your email in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or any other browser which is not IE.

This is nearly 70% of Internet users according to w3schools.com

Here is an old versus new Hotmail example on an email:

Old version of Hotmail:

New version of Hotmail:

As you can see it looks like the email is now left aligned and the grey background has gone. What has actually happened is Hotmail will only display your email as wide as the maximum defined width in pixels – either from a table width in pixels or the width of the widest image – whichever is wider.

So if you have a containing table used to help set alignment and background colours at a width of 100% it won’t work. If your inner table which is set to a fixed width rather than a percentage of say 600 pixels then that is the width your entire email will be shown as.

So the background colour and alignment is as we defined but your 100% width table will only be 600 pixels wide and therefore none of it will be shown.

Why does it do this?

Essentially Hotmail has some code on the page which will always render the width of the email as the maximum fixed width you defined.

How do I fix it?

You could force the containing table to be say 900 pixels – but those viewing it in low screen resolutions or only a partial screen will not be able to see your full email. Indeed Hotmail even prevents you from scrolling to see these parts.

What you need to do is tell Hotmail to change it’s code and you can do that with a CSS reference. The items that restrict the width are much further up the page.

Simply put this CSS within your email and this will fix the issue:

<STYLE type=”text/css”>
.ReadMsgBody
{ width: 100%;}
.ExternalClass
{width: 100%;}
</STYLE>

This tells your browser to change the code that Hotmail uses to restrict your email width.
And to prove it works here is the email with the fix:

New version of Hotmail (Email Fixed):

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No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

Another reason perhaps for this constant tirade of World Cup themed messages is the impact the event has on various businesses sales levels. Talking about the World Cup is not going to help here, particularly as you will be more reliant on your non-Football watching audience during this time. And don’t forget that less than 1/3 of the UK population watched the most popular England match so not everyone is footy mad right now).

What email marketers should be doing is the same as normal – cutting through the everyday inbox clutter by being relevant, timely and offering value to the receiving customer. So rather than keeping the World Cup in your subject line tell your customers what fabulous relevant products are in the email for them this time.

And now that England are out, please don’t just move onto Andy Murray as your next topic.

Emailcenter recently took part the annual J.P. Morgan Round the Island Race. This one-day yacht race around the Isle of Wight attracts 1,700 boats and 16,000 sailors, participating in a number of different classifications. The race is one of the largest yacht races in the world and the fourth largest participation sporting event in the UK after the London Marathon, the Great North and South Runs.

Emailcenter completed the 50 nautical mile course in an impressive 9 hrs 20 mins, finishing 40th out of 60 in our class.

A new edition into the Maxemail reporting suite is our “Email Engagement Report”.

One of the questions marketers often ask is; if I get 20% open rates for each email campaign, is it the same 20% or a different 20% each time? And how many subscribers never open an email?

The engagement report answers all of these questions by providing an open and click rate for each individual recipient based upon the emails you select. For example if a recipient has received 5 emails, but only opened one and not clicked on any, the report will show their open rate as 20% and click rate as 0%.

The report also shows the last time that someone opened and clicked on an email. This means you can either target those who have not opened in the last 90 days with a different message or even simply create a segment to suppress those that have not opened or clicked in the last 365 days.

Of course you don’t want to suppress those who have only recently signed up, so the report also outputs their first email and a count of how many emails they have received.

Additional data fields can also be added to the report to show how different segments are more or less engaged with your email marketing.