Claire Rollinson's blog

In my last post I highlighted the hierarchy of testing, paying particular attention to lists and keeping your data up to date. In this post I am going to highlight some of the aspects you should test when sending email campaigns.

When organisations are faced with having to make cuts to their expenditure spend, quite often one of the first things to get the chop is the 'marketing budget'.

Depending on which blog posts or industry experts you listen to, it seems one marketing channel is always being heralded over another in terms of driving direct response and ROI.

When email came along, many signalled it would be the death of direct mail, and it wasn’t long before the same was said about email when social networking (Facebook, Twitter and Youtube) became global phenomena.

Over the past week or so I have been to a number of social media events; from the social media workshop with Steve Bridger and Euan Semple at our very own Annual conference; social media for membership organisations at Freshnetworks; and via live feed (oh the technology) the ‘rock star’ social media event of the year – Likeminds in Exeter.

In my blog post last week I highlighted how we organisations increasingly need to be interacting in a dialogue with our customers and supporters. Twitter and social networks are ideal for achieving this, breaking down the walls between you and your audience.

On Tuesday night I attended a lively media140 event where people from agencies, commercial companies and a few brave souls from the voluntary sector met up to discuss the role of twitter and social networking in our organisations today.

So slowly we are beginning to see 'advert tweets' and companies that promise you money for tweeting relevant adverts to your followers. Now I don’t know about you, but I am finding this a rather worrying development.

Isn’t the whole point of Twitter and social media to have meaningful relationships, to share; to learn; to debate with our customers and supporters?

What are your average email open rates? 10%? 30%? 50%?
Whatever they are, and the average for most organisations is around 21%, there is still a large group of people who are not opening and reading your email campaigns.

Chris Anderson, author of ‘Free – The Future of Price’ and Chris Brogan ‘Trust Agents’ both highlight that the major currency of the internet (due to the advance of the social web) is fast becoming non monetary.

Now the valued currency ‘online’ is not the dollar or the pound, but trust, reputation and influence.