Happy Friday! It’s been another busy week at Movable Ink. CEO Vivek Sharma is over in the United Kingdom talking email and we’re debuting case studies about UK businesses using contextual marketing and research that take a look at the UK mobile commerce scene (available next week!).
We also:
- Published a case study about how Allen Edmonds used context in email marketing to boost click-throughs by 300%
- Created a video about how to include live web content in your emails
- Announced our partnership with (RED) to create storytelling that inspires
- Analyzed the click-through crisis in email
In other news, a lot of marketers are depending on the email services provided by marketing automation platforms instead of email service providers and I talked about content marketing and rethinking email in a recent podcast.
Read about that and more below:
1. Marketing Automation Eats ESPs
VentureBeat recently released research that showed that 77% of marketers are using the email tools available from marketing automaton platforms in place of an email service provider.
This has big implications. As the services converge, it’s up to every brand in the email marketing space to differentiate. Triggers, CRM systems, analytics, and other features are becoming a necessity instead of a nice-to-have.
Meanwhile, for brand marketers, this makes it harder to really find what you’re looking for and what you need as a business – coming up with a list of pain points and must-haves is crucial when researching potential email solutions.
2. Rethinking Email
This week, I was a guest on the “Hacks and Flacks” podcast, hosted by Jim Young and Manny Viega of March Communications. Among other things, we talked about content marketing, the evolution of marketing into media, and why brands need to put more emphasis on email than ever before.
You can listen to the whole podcast here.
3. Five Killer Instagram Marketing Strategies
Instagram has the most engagement of any social networking channel today, outpacing Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Our CMO, Miles Williams, wrote a piece for The Social Times that goes into detail on how companies can get started with an Instagram marketing strategy, citing several experts in the field.
Relevance & 1:1 Communication
Awareness is the biggest issue for every company today. Not just awareness, but differentiation. From the inbox to the website to the product, there’s competition waiting across every channel.
It’s up to companies to make their marketing communications so interesting and engaging that customers want to hear from the brand. And rethinking the customer relationship with email is a great way to start.