How We Work : Blog

Listen up people. The war against terror is already lost!

As we remember the events that happened on 9/11 5 years ago today, we surely must reflect on how successful the world has been in this war against terror. The western world has brought together its collective might to fight wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and many more parts of the world with the singular aim to make us feel safe again.

How many of us feel more secure now than we did 5 years ago? We live in a world that is filled with “caution”, though some might call it paranoia. The aim of terrorists is not to kill every single human being on earth, that’s just simply not efficient.

Their one greatest weapon is to disrupt our daily lives with the threat of random violence. A single bomb killing thousands is nothing compared to the millions of lives that are affected due to the threat of a bomb. Look at the recent British airport scare, they didn’t even need a successful detonation to inflict significant loss of time and money to.

We live in a different world now. Our mindset against the people that use terror as their arsenal is not “if they will strike” but “when the strike will come”. No matter how secure our defenses or how informed our intelligence agencies, how can we stop a single minded person willing to sacrifice his own life for a greater cause.

Its time to face the truth. We will never be able to live in a world where we can go about our everyday lives without some kind of paranoia. It is this fear that is the true measure of the victory of terrorism and not the number of bombs that goes off.            

Daniel

Nivea recently expanded into the premium product arena with the launch of its new anti cellulite product, Goodbye Cellulite in Singapore.

What is interesting about this that while it encompasses TVCs, print and outdoor creatives – there was no mention of online. It would seem to me to be a product ripe (no pun intended) for the online medium. Users would appreciate having access to product information, testimonials and perhaps register for a sample or 2. With the end customer invisible to most consumer marketers, the web is a good means to get information about and from them. The messaging of this campaign: centered around friendly, confident girls also makes an online grassroots marketing effort appealing.

A recent campaign by J&J’s Neutrogena, Visibly Pretty, saw more than 1,500 video blogs submitted within a 2 week period. Girls liked sharing and talking about their beauty secrets. The company leveraged a community blogging site, skyblog and used its sister radio station to drive girls to the site. Consumer generated content raised awareness about the brand and also provided the company with an opportunity to interact and learn about their audience.

Especially among women, sharing experiences and word of mouth play a significant part in how we make purchase decisions (Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty springs to mind). Get your audiences and customers involved and they will respond in helping you drive the brand (and the product – check out Brewtopia and Jones Soda). With the persistent popularity of social networks and consumer generated content, it’s a better time then ever to utilize such mechanisms in the marketing mix.

Joanne

We've expanded our email tips into a complete white paper for your easy consumption. If you are looking to improve your campaign open-rates, clicks and conversions, download your copy here.

Together with Microsoft, we organized the "Get Ahead with Online Marketing" seminars on March 30 and 31. It was an enjoyable and educational time for all involved.

Participants enjoyed sessions by speakers from Microsoft and earth9. Topics covered include Paid Search, Email Marketing Made Easy and Get the Most from e-Marketing

Besides that, the participants spent one-on-one time with our team of experts to prepare for a free trial of MSN's new paid search advertising platform, MSN adCenter and got to take home a gorgeous Galileo thermometer.

If you would like to be kept in the loop for similar upcoming events organized by earth9, send an email to web@earth9.com with your name, company and contact information.

It has been busy period for us with a bunch of pitches and new projects. Christmas week is typically a planning period but we are abuzz and on the verge of going into quite a project high.

On the email marketing front, we've been running quite a few campaigns as well as introducing minor new enhancements to our solution. 

Thought I would share a few thoughts here from our own experiences as well as studies we've been following.

1. Segment, Segment, Segment
A recent study by MarketingSherpa said segmentation had a dramatic impact on open and click through rates even for very small lists (lower than 5,000). We've found this true, if you want your messages to be more effective, its well worth the effort to segment and craft customized messages. 

2. HTML Visual Checklist
- dont' use forms or javascripts in your emails
- keep style reference within the body tag
- provide your images with 'alt' references 

3. Catching the right time
Another recent research paper found that for B2B email campaigns, the highest response rates were towards the end of the week and the lowest were mid week.

4. Regular Content Checklist
- link to see the content on the web 
- why the user is receiving your email
- instructions for adding your email address if they want to continue receiving mails from you
- means to unsubscribe

5. Test-Blast Checklist
a) Depending on your audience base, test blast your campaign to
- important web-mail providers such as Google, Yahoo, MSN...Myrealbox
- mail clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes (especially if your audience includes government addresses for Singapore), Thunderbird, Eudora Pro
Recently we spent a lot of time validating HTML code for a campaign because the email could not be seen in Lotus Notes, it turns out Notes is really strict about HTML. Check this out as well.
b) On another note, test blasts are also important to seeing if your emails are getting past the spam filters-they help you understand if you are using spam-friendly terms. The funny thing is, due to the large amount of spam I get, my spam filter, is turned to 95%-block - this often means I send out test blasts and have to go find them in my "Possible Junk Mail" box. It's a fun challenge to try and beat your own security systems!

-Food for Thought-
Incorporation of RSS feeds into Yahoo Mail / Google
Google and Yahoo both have have implemented betas of RSS integrated into their web mail products. This will change the way we view and use RSS as a marketing tool...hopefully more on that later.

• Email vs RSS
• Y!mail and RSS
• Gmail Clips

If you are keen to get our help with your email campaigns, let me know!