Tagged: Securities and Exchange Commission
Survey on email reveals boost in spending
While digital marketing tools abound, email remains one of the most prominent, effective — and personal — marketing platforms we have for reaching our readers. The mass amounts of email our customers are receiving in their daily professional lives necessitates a smart, proactive strategy that touches the right buttons when customers need them, as well as a marketing professional who can tweak campaigns on the fly to improve results.
The Audience Development Committee at ABM conducted research in late 2012 focused on the effectiveness of email for b-to-b content delivery and customer outreach. The research produced benchmark data intended to allow media professionals to compare the effectiveness of their email efforts to those of similar companies. The survey results suggest the following key takeaways:
List clean-up after hard and soft bounces: A plurality of 35% report removal after three soft bounces. Almost half (48%) report removal after one hard bounce, with another 26% reporting removal after three hard bounces. 61% do not “rest” bouncing email addresses before removal, while 13% retry after 1-2 months rest, and another 13% retry after a 3-6+ month rest.
Email metrics: Email newsletters (with editorial content) have the lowest bounce rates (1.5% on average) and the highest open rates (17.6%) and click-through rates (3.9%). Lead gen emails (mailed on behalf of a third-party sponsor) scored lowest, with internal marketing email (to promote house products or house events or house subscriptions) falling in between.
Company investment: More than half of respondents report increasing email marketing budgets, while less than 10 percent report decreases. Graph below shows responses to the survey question “Over the last year, how has your company’s investment in email marketing changed?”
For more information and the survey results, click here: ABM’s Email Effectiveness Survey.
By Michael Moran Alterio
The legal minefield of social media marketing
Last week, Netflix was hit with the news that a Facebook update might cause the company to face legal action from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In July, CEO Reed Hastings updated his Facebook page, in a public post, touting that Netflix subscribers streamed one billion hours of content in June, a company milestone, and congratulating his team. That post, says the SEC, might violate the Regulation Fair Disclosure rule, which requires information to be disclosed to publicly to investors at the same time. According to the Chicago Tribune, the SEC’s case will fall down to whether that milestone was substantive to investors and, if so, whether investors knew Hastings planned to disclose important company news on his Facebook page. If the SEC finds Netflix violated the rule, the company can face civil action.
Increasingly brands expect social media to be part of any media company’s offerings. According to the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 94 percent of businesses with a marketing department use social media as part of their marketing efforts. There are plenty of benefits — exposure, lead generation, establishing customer loyalty — but this recent case shows there are some pitfalls as well, and legal ones at that. Here are four other legal cases involving social media, and tactics you can take to avoid legal trouble.
MediaPace 