This past December, Amazon announced a variety of new features to its very popular product, Amazon Echo Speakers. Currently, the voice assistant, Alexa, can play your favorite song, play your podcast, make phone calls, order items from Amazon and more. Now your Amazon Echo Speakers can read your emails. According to CNBC, this feature is being tested in the United States and only supports email address from Gmail, Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live.com. This type of access will allow consumers quick access to their emails without actually looking at their phone, laptop, or tablet etc. Why should you care? Think of this update as your email being transformed into an audiobook or a podcast. Visual items like images, formatting and even emojis are completely out of the picture (no pun intended). Which leaves just the context to stand out among several emails. The ultimate goal is for the recipient to keep reading. The next best thing would be to at least have the recipient save it for later. How to Succeed To accomplish this, focus on your subject line. A captivating…
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Grocer Pod – Episode 11
[iframe style=”border:none” src=”//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/7528199/height/100/width//thumbnail/no/render-playlist/no/theme/custom/tdest_id/685026/custom-color/9932cc” height=”100″ width=”100%” scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen] On this month’s show, we talk to Michael Barber about email marketing and what you can do that goes beyond simply sending out your weekly ad. Then Bob Miklos joins the show to talk about AWG brands.
GDPR – What Retailers Need To Know Now
Have you noticed all the emails you’ve received recently with information about organizations updating their privacy policies? When you visit websites are you seeing the bar on the bottom informing you about cookies and data collection policies? If so, you can thank the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) policies now in place in Europe. While the United States hasn’t adopted the legislation yet, that hasn’t stopped organizations based in the US from paying attention to what’s going on. That’s why the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association recently held a lunch with David Cacioppo of emfluence and Neil Watkins of Asureti to walk through some of the basics of GDPR. Below are some of the things you might want to at least be aware of as GDPR gains traction. Require Opt-In Now GDPR dictates that a company must obtain consent from a consumer to process and share their information. When it went into place in Europe, that meant consent had to be given for data that had already been collected. That means you might as well start making sure you have…
emfluence And Then Some 2018 Recap
I attended the And Then Some conference hosted by emfluence on August 24. It was a day full of ways to improve your email marketing. After the conference they sent a list of “10 things to do post-conference.” Not only is this a great example of email marketing, but it makes my job recapping the conference easier, so I really appreciated it. #1 GDPR – The GDPR deadline came and went a couple months ago. The biggest thing that has come from it so far is that no one was truly prepared for the requirements. No more checking permission boxes automatically. Tell people exactly what information you will be collecting from them. Don’t collect more information than you need. If you can make these changes right away that will help a lot. These regulations are coming to the US, so it would be smart to get ahead of it. #2 Post-Sale Series – If you make a sale, add a new subscriber, or anything similar add that address to a workflow to send them a series of emails explaining…
Subject Lines, Like Headlines, Are The Only Thing You Read
I attended the Digital Summit – Kansas City on May 16-17. Over two days I was able to see presentation on everything from podcasts to SEO from a variety of industry experts. The highlight for me was a four hour workshop on email. Honestly, I could write 10 blog posts about what I learned from Michael Barber. Perhaps I will in the future. Today we focus on subject lines. I hate to break it to you, but most people aren’t opening your emails. That means the subject line is often the only part of your campaign that anyone reads. They can quite literally make or break an email marketing campaign. How much thought are you putting into subject lines? We all know that the audience is busy and needs a reason to open your email. Should you include prices? For a long time we thought prices were a one way ticket the spam folder. Not only is that not true anymore, but having a price in the subject line increases click-through-rates by 246 percent. “Worth” and “deal” increase 134 and…
Optimizing Omni-Channel Grocery Shopping
Marketing Communications Strategies for Independent Grocery Retailers If you’ve read my past blog posts or follow me on social media, you know I’ve been busy with graduate school for the past three years in addition to working at AWG. Good news: after a full year of researching, writing and finally defending, I have competed my thesis and graduated with my master’s degree from Mizzou! So what does this mean for you? I’ve condensed my 80-page thesis down to a quick summary of what I learned. The What The lovely title of this blog post is also the title of my thesis. In layman’s terms: I studied how independent grocery retailers (like AWG members) can successfully market and communicate their online grocery shopping offerings to their customers to secure sales online and in-stores. I did this through marketing email communications. The Why Besides the fact that I work at AWG each day and have a vested interest in helping our retailers, omni-channel grocery shopping (online and in-store shopping options) is constantly evolving and grabbing headlines in the news. For example: “By…
Print vs Social vs Email: A Smackdown
On Tuesday, Feb. 15 KCIABC held an event pitting three experts head to head to head. Jessica Best, represented email, Clifton Alexander – print, and Angela Crawford – social. Below is an animated reenactment of the event.
Email is Still King
My name plate may say “Web Designer” however give me a little time and I can design a mean little custom email that gets hits on your website. You would think emails would eventually phase out over time, but they are getting stronger, even among your millennial customers. Adobe (think Adobe Acrobat .pdf files) who develops WAY more tools than Photoshop put together a survey about emails last August. About a 1000 white-collar workers took the survey about consumer emails. It seems this is a pretty popular topic. I first found this article from (I know) a monthly email I get from webdesignerdepot.com, more or less. After reading the article: “Adobe Reveals the Secrets of Email”, I noticed a link to an article on the Adobe website: “Consumers are still email obsessed, but they’re finding more balance”. THEN I found a rather dry overview of the survey results and a SlideShare in LinkedIn. So out of these three resources, I tried to pick out the topics our retailers might be interested in, then I’m sprinkling in personal comments on how…
How to Promote Your Online Shopping…Online
Does your store offer online shopping? Do your customers know about the program? …are you sure that they do? Online shopping is part of the future of grocery retail. In 2016, one in five shoppers had an online purchase and that will likely increase to one in three this year. Yet in a survey of 500 consumers, 41% of shoppers didn’t know if their stores offered online shopping (2017 Online Shopping Forecast). As Kate mentioned in a recent blog post, online shopping isn’t an “if you build it, they will come” program. When launching an online shopping program, your marketing and advertising campaigns need to inform your customers about the program and teach them how to use it. Kate also noted that digital marketing is key to these campaigns. While in-store promotion is necessary, digital marketing will point customers directly to the online shopping platform and that gives them a chance to see it and hopefully try it! Here are some examples of AWG retailers who are using digital marketing to promote their online shopping programs: Website Do more than…
Trends in email marketing
The marketing platform company emfluence held their annual conference Friday, Sept. 25. The event had plenty of speakers and there were tons of people there to learn from. If you are involved with digital marketing in anyway I highly suggest you attend. The session I got the most out of was a panel discussion about trends in email marketing and automation. Here are some of the trends they highlighted: Web-based email account for 31 percent of all opens. Gmail claims 21 percent market share. – The big news this year is the increased ability in adding creative elements to emails. Gmail now allows for responsive designs, improved font styling and better support for many CSS properties. HTML5 Video is now supported in iOS 10. – Apple supporting HTML5 allows video to be embedded in emails. This allows for a more interactive experience right in the email instead of having to go to a website. Interactive emails – More things are able to be done right in the email than ever before. This lowers the barriers for engagement and makes clickers…