You probably won’t find the word deliverability in your handy pocket dictionary, but here’s a definition for you.

de·liv·er·a·bil·i·ty (dih-liv-uh-ruh-bil-i-tee), n.

A measure of success at which an email marketer gets an email campaign into subscribers’ inboxes.

- MailChimp.com

A lot of different things can harm your deliverability rate.  Here are a few:

• Sending too many emails to non-valid email addresses (ISPs start blocking you)
• Having too many people click the spam button on your email in their inbox (you will start getting blocked)
• Sending too often (people get annoyed)
• Not sending often enough (people forget they signed up)
• Using spammy words in your emails (blocked again)

Keep Your List Clean and Lean

The gut instinct for most people is to try and grow their email lists as big as they can.  The shotgun effect.  The problem with this approach is that sending to large amounts of people that didn’t really ask or expect to be hearing from you can severely harm your deliverability rate.

With lots of people marking you as SPAM, fewer of your emails will make it to your customers that do want to hear from you – the ones that will give you much higher conversion rates.

Keep your email lists clean and focused.  Make sure you only send to people that specifically opted in to your list.  Keep your list clean of unsubscribes and bounces (bad addresses).  Your list will be much smaller, but you will likely see your conversion rates go up.

But where do I start, and who should be posting my content?

While you might think somebody within the company is the best person to do it, this isn’t necessarily true. They might know a lot about the company, but might not have a lot of social media experience. So posts could be informative, but not very engaging.

By hiring an agency with experience to build your social media presence, you can ensure that you’re using social media to its fullest. This means posting frequent, engaging content, and building relationships with your consumers.

Besides, you have your own Facebook status updates to worry about.

It’s only natural to want to include as much information as possible in your advertisement. When you don’t have much space, you want to use it to its fullest by packing in lots of information, right? Not necessarily. The problem with having your ad focus on information like the price point is that it devalues your brand.

When you focus on information like the price point, you’re saying that it is the main thing that differentiates your company from its competition. So instead of presenting a creative argument for why your company is better, or connecting with consumers through thoughtful insights, you’re leaving it to the numbers. If another company has a better price, there’s no reason for people to give you their business.

On the other hand, by using advertising that is idea-driven and connects with consumers on a greater level, you’re more likely to break through the clutter and get their attention. People will begin to associate your company with quality products, or the place to go for all their shopping needs, instead of dollars and cents. This builds brand awareness and does much more for your company than a sign simply claiming you have the best deals in town.

Because you want people to think of your company even when you don’t have the best deals to offer.

Case Study: National Arts Centre

Questions:

How do I convince people who are not coming to the NAC Orchestra, to come?

Brand Voice:

Recognizing that people who don’t go to NAC Orchestra concerts might find it intimidating, Fifty developed a campaign that was (relatively) irreverent and provided useful information about listening to orchestral music. The nucleus of the campaign was a website for new listeners and a social media campaign that drove them to it.

This is a question that had been debated by advertising agency creatives and marketing managers since the beginning of time (or at least since the 50s). Agency creatives will sometimes push for the logo to be as small as possible, to maintain the ad’s aesthetic appeal, while marketing managers have been known to perpetually ask for a bigger logo, in the interest of brand recognition.

The answer, of course, is somewhere in between.

The most important thing to consider is where you want your consumer to look first. There are a lot of ads out there competing for consumer attention, so the best way to break through the clutter is with an engaging idea, communicated through copy and visuals. Therefore, the consumer should see the content of your advertisement first.

After seeing an ad, the first reaction is to find out who it’s for. This is where your logo comes in. It should serve as the period at the end of a sentence. It should be the last thing your consumer sees that both completes the idea and leaves a lasting impression. When it’s too big, or too small, your logo becomes a hindrance and fails to do the job it was meant to.

There you have it. The definitive answer to the question that has caused strife in the advertising industry for years. Next up: world peace.

Here are some incredible Facebook statistics taken from Facebook itself.
Amazing what can happen in five short years.

• More than 500 million active users on Facebook
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
• More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
• More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every mont
• There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are two times more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

Hashtags help narrow searches on Twitter. The hash symbol, # is placed before a key word which allows it to show up in searches that use only that term. For example, if you used the term #windsurfing in your search, any articles to do with windsurfing, the sport, show up as opposed to tweets about how windy it was on Friday.

Hash tags can be very effective when pushing content to your audiences with a key word that is motivating. They can also be useful when searching for audiences who might be interested in your product or service. There are some basic guidelines to remember when using hashtags.

• Explain your hashtag in one of your tweets so people don’t have to guess what you mean
• Don’t use too many hashtags in your tweets. Use too many and you might be mistaken for spam.
• Be clear in your hashtag wording. Make sure the language you use helps followers organize their Twitter searches as opposed to confusing them.

92% of web users have used search engines to find websites that they visited. Therefore ensuring that your website appears in search engines is critical. Research shows that viewing websites is now the number one way that consumers research purchase and other major decisions — especially where the decisions are not based on impulse. Studies also show that search engines are the most effective way to drive customers to your site.

Knowing how to properly market your company through search engine optimization is virtually the only way to be found on the Internet without undertaking extensive online advertising. Today’s search engines operate much like the phone book used to—just on a much larger scale. Search engine marketing positions the pages of your website for maximum visibility among the billions of pages available on the Internet.

A Shift in Customer Service?

It’s interesting how the customer is taking things into their own hands. This shift is further evidenced by Twitter’s new approach to customer service.

Salesforce has added a new application to its “app exchange” so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It’ll be available this summer.

With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.

Service Cloud already helps clients keep tabs on the likes of Facebook, Blogger, and Web forums.

Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM’s senior vice president of customer service and support, said that with the abundance of social-media tools on the Web, people are turning to “crowdsourced” help with customer-service issues. I don’t blame them. When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?

• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
• Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
• It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

Marketing dollars go further if you use them to build, nurture, and develop existing customer relationships. This isn’t as difficult as you think. Building these relationships means treating your customers and clients as if they are your strategic partners and showing them that you truly care about them.

It’s important to try to satisfy them with the right products and services, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Customers can easily detect indifference and insincerity and they simply will not tolerate it. Long-term client and customer loyalty is a long-term challenge that you must strive for every day and with every transaction no matter how big or small.

As a practice, Relationship Marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages.

With the growth of the internet and mobile platforms, Relationship Marketing has continued to evolve and move forward as technology opens more collaborative and social communication channels. This includes tools for managing relationships with customers that goes beyond simple demographic and customer service data. Relationship Marketing extends to include Inbound Marketing efforts (a combination of search optimization and Strategic Content), PR, Social Media and Application Development.

Social Customer Relationship Management is an approach which engages the customer in a 2-way dialogue. The result is a relationship which is transparent and based on trust.

The old fashioned CRM was a power based relationship that the corporation owned. Social Customer Relationship Management acknowledges that the customer has choice and as a result, ultimate power.

The following points are from Maria Ogneva, the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer.

Who Is the Social Customer?

The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook favoring what her network has curated and surfaced as important information.

The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts her social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.

The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in her social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets her needs at that particular moment.

The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where she hangs out, listening to her feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.

The social customer expects you to listen and engage with her, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when she needs you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or she will either move on to a competitor, or tell her friends about her bad experiences.

Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, she expects everyone she talks to from your company to have the same background on her issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.

Bottom line

The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn her trust.