UNLOCKEDProven tactical methods for email campaign success.

Spring 2014

EMAIL

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The information furnished herein is believed to be accurate and reliable. However, no responsibility is assumed by StrongView for its use, or for any infringements of patents or other rights of third parties resulting from its use.

STRONGVIEW and the STRONGVIEW logo are registered trademarks in the United States, other countries or both. All Rights Reserved.

StrongView Systems UK, Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales at 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW. Reg. No. 6398867. VAT # GB 925 07 6228. Trading Address: Adelaide House, Perth Industrial Estate, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4XX, United Kingdom.

US Headquarters

StrongView Systems, Inc. 1300 Island Drive, Suite 200 Redwood City, CA 94065 P: +1 (650) 421-4200 F: +1 (650) 421-4201

UK Headquarters

StrongView Systems UK Ltd. Adelaide House Perth Industrial Estate Slough Berkshire SL1 4XX United Kingdom P: +44 (0) 203 131 0144

APAC Headquarters

XCOM Media Unit 1 15 Lamington Street New Farm Queensland 4005 Australia P: +61 7 3666 0544

You spend a lot of time and resources on your email campaigns and expect them to deliver without a hitch. Unfortunately, with increased digital marketing budgets expected to rise 46% or more this year and 52% or more for email marketing campaigns,1 the odds are stacked against typical messages standing out from crowd.

The StrongView team gathered some of the best tactics to get your campaign past the clutter and into a first place slot. Of course, data, content and relevancy always plays a major part in your messaging strategy, but adding these proven tactics on top of your already stellar campaigns will push you past the competition.

SECOND WILL ALWAYS BE

4 TIPS TO HELP UNLOCK CAMPAIGN SUCCESS

1. Benchmark your campaigns, set your goals, measure, then repeat. Don’t throw ideas to the wind.

2. Relevancy is key. Are you offering your customer the right data with a proven marketing strategy?

3. Likes are nice, but Facebook isn’t the only social channel. Don’t forget others like Twitter and YouTube.

4. Be true to your brand’s voice. Harness it, and it will truly set you apart from the crowd.

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Mike Gentile, ACD- Over 15 years of agency experience directing Fortune 500 brands.

Connecting with your mobile audience is big business. “Mobile Commerce Daily” states that over 48% of retail email opens happen on a mobile device. To cater to your smartphone users that are most likely on the go, you need to bring the most relevant information to their fingertips. Always make sure your site is mobile optimized for a fluid transition. UNLOCKED: Mobile optimization success is all in the coding. Using techniques like hiding secondary information and displaying the most relevant information will result in increased action.

THINK MOBILE OPTIMIZATION

“Optimizing IHG’s multiple brand reservation email was a must since a majority of the opens are on-the-go.”

Jack Torlucci, Account Director

Video content is the fastest growing segment of online advertising. Even still, there are several businesses that are not so eager to jump on the video marketing bandwagon for fear that it will not produce a return on their investment. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In a recent study,1 marketers were asked to rate their satisfaction with the performance of various channels—video (53%) ranked higher than social (51%), games (47%) and live events (46%). UNLOCKED: Over 61% of email applications, like the native iOS client, Apple Mail and Outlook.com, allow recipients to play your video within an email.2 Other clients like Gmail and Yahoo display a fall back animated gif, which can still be very powerful.

VIDEO IN EMAILINCORPORATE

“Incorporating video into emails can improve click through rates by 2 to 3 times.”

Errol McKenzie Jr, Account Manager

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Increase engagement and sales by adding a sense of urgency to your email campaign by including a countdown clock. The countdown timer provides a moving element to your campaign, which captures viewer’s attention. It’s also a proven technique for encouraging customers to complete an action, especially when used in a flash sale. It is especially helpful for time sensitive offers, promoting an event or when concert tickets go on sale. UNLOCKED: Countdown clocks can sync up with the predetermined time and continue to count down indefinitely no matter how many times the email is opened.

URGENCY

“IHG has had huge success by adding countdown clocks to their promotional offers.”

Lana Mann, Sr. Account Manager

COUNTDOWN CLOCK

Include contextual content by displaying weather in your email campaigns. This solution takes your data and matches it to display the weather for a specific time in the relevant city. Displaying the weather in email, especially in the travel vertical, has been shown to increase engagement by 45%. UNLOCKED: Try using up-to-the minute weather while also targeting customers with a promotion based on the weather in their city. By showing predicted weather conditions at customers’ current location, you can offer relevant products or attractions that accommodate the elements.

WEATHERUP TO THE MINUTE

“Providing real-time weather in a reservation email gives the customer an additional layer of useful content.”

Alan Tam, Sr. Email Production Specialist

Does your reporting track and report on post click-through and associated revenue? If not, you can benefit by adding a tracking pixel on the confirmation page of the customer’s website. When that confirmation page is displayed, the tracking pixel is requested via a tracking server, which then passes the information on to be reported. A solution like StrongView can then verify that the recipient received the mailing and document the conversion. UNLOCKED: The conversion pixel can be used to track revenue or acquisition such as event attendance or white paper downloads. Tracking conversions allows for better tracking of goals and revenue attribution to email campaigns.

CONVERSION TRACKINGDEPLOY

“Tracking pixels enables marketers to optimize their campaign strategies around more than just open and click metrics.”

Karrin Perez, Account Manager

Today’s digital consumers expect a true one-to-one engagement with the brands they love. Whether customers are visiting your web site through email promotions, search results or online ads, they expect to be recognized and treated accordingly. By leveraging preference centers and linking your email, mobile, social and display campaigns to a personalized landing page or web form, you are able to provide and coordinate a customer experience that will be the bread and butter of your cross-channel marketing programs. UNLOCKED: Capture multichannel communication preferences at every customer touch point while making sure your preference center is readily available. Don’t hesitate to occasionally remind your subscribers to update their preferences as they may change from time to time.

SURVEYCUSTOMER

“This level of customer control can help prevent unsubscribes from irrelevant or too frequent communications.”

Evelyn Perkowska, Project Manager

Email display retargeting allows marketers to reach specific online audiences with a uniquely relevant message that can leverage the existing profile and behavioral data. StrongView integrates email display retargeting directly within its solution, making it easy for marketers to leverage display within any multi-step lifecycle marketing program using StrongView’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The ability to orchestrate targeted display advertising based on email activity provides marketers with a powerful way to more precisely engage and convert customers with automated, cross-channel coordination. Email display retargeting is a particularly powerful way to keep your brand in front of your email list without over-mailing and risking mass unsubscribes. UNLOCKED: 23% of marketers planned to integrate email with display in the future. The results of utilizing multiple channels has been proven to increase engagement by over 30%.1

RETARGETINGDISPLAY

“Most clients show a significant increase in revenue over the control by including display retargeting.”

Li Fen Deng, Email Production Specialist

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Many companies communicate with customers in both social media and email; however, most companies are missing out on the benefits of social coupled with email integration. By integrating your social media and email marketing efforts, you can increase engagement and determine your most valued customers. Twitter, Intstagram and Facebook are all great canidates for capturing and sharing customer interactions with your brand. After all, there is nothing better than word of mouth advertising. UNLOCKED: Incorporating content from social networks into your email campaign, such as customer photos, videos or valuable social commentary, will help create a positive brand perception. Allowing customers to repost social content from the email will push that perception even further.

SOCIAL INTEGRATION

“Reposting content from your top social influencers makes for a powerful email marketing campaign.”

Yoalis Koren, Account Manager

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US Headquarters

StrongView Systems, Inc. 1300 Island Drive, Suite 200 Redwood City, CA 94065 P: +1 (650) 421-4200 F: +1 (650) 421-4201

UK Headquarters

StrongView Systems UK Ltd. Adelaide House Perth Industrial Estate Slough Berkshire SL1 4XX United Kingdom P: +44 (0) 203 131 0144

APAC Headquarters

XCOM Media Unit 1 15 Lamington Street New Farm Queensland 4005 Australia P: +61 7 3666 0544

StrongView is the cross-channel marketing software provider that gives enterprise marketers a stronger view of how to acquire and engage customers across email, mobile, social, display and web. Combining the strongest technology and proven marketing know-how, StrongView provides enterprise marketers unparalleled insight into how to deepen customer relationships and maximize results. The platform is offered as both SaaS and on-premise, allowing companies to deploy StrongView’s technologies in the manner that best fits their needs.

Based in Redwood City, CA, and backed by leading venture capital investors, StrongView has been helping global brands in retail, travel, finance, entertainment and online services overcome the limitations of other marketing platform providers for more than a decade.

For a stronger view of marketing go to www.StrongView.com, and follow us at www.twitter.com/StrongView and www.facebook.com/StrongViewInc.

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