Crucial point in SUBSCRIBER, FAN, and FOLLOWER acquisition efforts through embedded email opt-in, social widgets, and data collection forms.
Website analytics provide performance and behavioral data that you can use to optimize website performance and tailor personalized messaging to SEEKERS and JOINERS.
CHALLENGES: Depending on your website’s complexity, it can require a significant investment to build and maintain with proper technical, design, content, analytics, and other staff.
Search engine visibility is at the mercy of Google and other search engines as they evolve their indexing methodology and search algorithms.
Requires investment of time, people, and money (advertising, branding, promotion, etc.) to build direct SEEKER traffic (those who bookmark or type in website URL versus searching).
Competing organization priorities can lead to websites that serve too many masters and, in so doing, serve none of them well.
1. “User Experience Quotes,” TheoMandel.com, accessed August 5, 2013, http://theomandel.com/resources/user-experience-quotes/.
2. “Wendy’s Refresh Continues with New, Interactive Website,” QSR Magazine, May 24, 2013, www.qsrmagazine.com/news/wendys-refresh-continues-new-interactive-website.
3. Lee Odden, “Landing Page Optimization Deep Dive: Interview with Tim Ash,” TopRank Online Marketing Blog, April 2010, www.toprankblog.com/2010/04/landing-page-optimization-deep-dive-interview-with-tim-ash/.
4. Stan Schroeder, “The World’s First Website Gets Its Original Web Address Back,” Mashable, April 30, 2013, http://mashable.com/2013/04/30/worlds-first-website/.
5. Allison McCarthy, “Worldwide Internet Users: 2013 Forecast Report and Comparative Estimates,” eMarketer, May 17, 2013, www.emarketer.com/corporate/reports, available to eMarketer SUBSCRIBERS.
Chapter 9
Email: The Bedrock Audience
In an ironic twist of fate, it turns out that email is social media’s secret weapon . . . [I]f you want to drive retention and repeat usage, there isn’t a better way to do it than email.1
—Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson (@FredWilson) is one of the most social media savvy VCs (venture capitalists) you’ll ever meet. He was an early-stage investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Etsy, and he has been blogging about the VC life since 2003.2 As a result, when Fred speaks, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, and social media managers tend to listen. And that is what made his above statement such a bolt from the blue.
It was May 2011 and headlines were proclaiming that email was “dead,” killed by the rise of Facebook and Twitter. As someone who understands the inner workings of online marketing, Fred knew the truth: Email remains the hidden engine driving much of the engagement, reengagement, and e-commerce activity on the Web. But email doesn’t get the public adulation because:
Email remains the hidden engine driving much of the engagement, reengagement, and e-commerce activity on the web.
Email marketing requires more effort to create and send messages than it takes to post or tweet.
Email marketing’s financial impact lies hidden from public view because companies are under no obligation to disclose it.
Email’s cost-effective nature means that it commands a smaller portion of marketing budgets than Paid Media. Less budget = less attention.
Email SUBSCRIBERS are private assets to whom companies send personal messages through private systems to individual inboxes. It is therefore impossible to compare SUBSCRIBER counts or engagement among competitors as directly as one can with Facebook FANS.
Many people don’t think of transactional messages such as receipts or friend alerts as email marketing.
So Fred—with his behind-the-scenes startup insight—blogged about the continued power and relevance of email, dubbing it social media’s secret weapon. Suddenly, a lot of folks stopped suggesting email was dead. And a lot of “social media gurus” started email newsletters.
The Origin of Email
The ubiquity of electronic mail (i.e., email) today makes it hard to believe there was ever a time before email, but there was.* In 1971, prior to the debut of the Internet, engineer Ray Tomlinson invented the “@” structure of email addresses (user@hostdomain) and sent the first email (which he characterized as “completely forgettable”).3 Fortunately, someone remembered that email; and in 2012, the Internet Society inducted Ray as part of its inaugural Hall of Fame class.4
The date of the first permission-based commercial email is probably an unascertainable bit of trivia, since only God, Chuck Barris, and the CIA know what government scientists were up to in the 1970s.5 However, legend has it that in 1978 Gary Thurek, a marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), sent the first unsolicited commercial email (a.k.a. “spam”).6 While he was chastised by many recipients, DEC went on to sell 20 of the $1 million systems. The Pandora’s box of email spam had been opened.7