Well, spring is creeping around the bend and that can only mean one thing: SXSW IS HERE!

That’s right, once again the FanMail team has made the long, arduous journey to the center of the Lone-Star State for that one of kind event that brings the best brightest minds in interactive marketing, film, and (of course) music together for ten days of learning, drinking, and fun in the gorgeous city of Austin.

Throughout the event, David, Josh, and I will be keeping you up-to-date on all the new technologies and ideas we find intriguing (not to mention all the trouble we will inevitably get ourselves into–I’m looking at you Josh–I swear, we really can’t ourselves anywhere without having a good time).

Also, if you are in Austin and have a party you’d like to invite us to or know of a show/film/panel that cannot be missed, simply tweet the details and include the #fancentric hash-tag. Oh, and speaking of Twitter, be sure to follow us, @fancentric, to get the dirty on what we are getting into as it happens.

This merger sounds like chocolate and peanut butter: The most robust one-to-one marketing platform and the pioneer in twitter business relationships. I am really enjoying playing around with all the features in CoTweet and I am looking forward to all the  doors this relationship will open for eMarketers!

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Seth Godin has a post up on his blog about viral growth on social networks. His basic point is that providing relevant content to a few people creates the kind of viral activity that over time is far more effective that providing mediocre content to a whole lot of people. Relevancy rules, and you increase relevancy by generating better content.

In order to generate better content though, we need to know who it is we are generating it for. The average Facebook user has around 123 friends which means that you are getting around hundred more views each time somebody shares a piece of your content on Facebook. The initial impulse here is to say “Well, shoot, if I can potentially increase my reach by 100 times, I should broadcast to as many people as possible so that there are more chances for the content to be shared.” Very simply, this is wrong. This idea is based upon the false assumption the odds of somebody electing to share a piece of content are fixed and are the same across all people. This is the old mindset that almost killed the music industry: our customers/fans/ticket-buyers are not individuals, but are all the same nameless, faceless automatons. This is obviously not true. If it were the case that for any piece of content, the odds for a recipient choosing share it socially were fixed at say 1 in 100, then I would tell you to get your content in front of as many people as possible. But that is not the case. The fact is that most people are not willing to share your content, no matter what. So instead of worrying about the masses, why not instead focus on the small handful of individuals that are willing to redistribute your content?

The key then is to identify which fans/subscribers/customers are most likely to respond to your message so positively that they want to spread the word. Go to your Facebook Fan-page… What? you don’t have one? MySpace is fine and all, but really, MySpace users are less engaged than Facebook users and there are far fewer of them. So, like I said, go to your Facebook page and look at you number of fans. Now look at the other areas of your page: the wall, the discussions, anywhere that your fans can interact. Is the number of active posters equal to the total number of fans you have? Not even close. The fact that some of your fans have posted on your wall or contributed to the discussion boards shows that they are willing to speak up and be heard though. These are your target, these are your speakers. So listen to them. Listen to what they want, what they like and dislike. Listen to them and find the clues, and there will be clues, about what you could do that would really make their day. Then do it.

Just like in life, Facebook users vary dramatically even though the uniformity of Facebook pages makes this easy to forget. Also, just like in life, some Facebook users are more outspoken then others. Find your outspoken fans and give them something worthy of being outspoken about. Even if your outspoken fans have only the average number of friends, your message still will gain significant reach beyond just your initial subscriber list. However, I suspect that you will find that the more outspoken Facebook users also have many more friends than the average user. Also, they are probably friends with other outspoken people who may not be on your Fan list (yet), which means that they have access to entire tribes of folks that you don’t even know are out there. This is how viral activity works. Pretty soon, if your content is truly compelling, not only has your actual fan base grown, but your messaging reach has been increased exponentially.

Okay, homework time: Go to your page, explore it, read it, get to know like your fans get to know it. Then come up with one good idea based purely on what your fans express and do it! Then let me know how it goes.

They found from testing 3 c,ompanies email campaigns: AAA, Marketing Experiments and Pier One Imports , that design is way more than just following best practices, it is also about testing. They noted an increase in interactive market testing (from Forrester)  and offered many reasons why this increase in budget is necessary for ROI.

Here is what they found: They took three companies and asked 3 marketing agencies to redesign each companies email campaign to improve click-through rates. Each company now had 3 or 4 emails to compare to the control email they submitted for the study. They found a few surprising conclusions, after looking at the first email campaign for AAA they found that the email using “best practices” fell short to the email using a radical horizontal design. Don’t throw your best practices out of the window yet, this just means know the rules and know when to break the rules a little. Testing can show if you are breaking the rules in a good way.

In the second test using the Marketing Experiments email, they found that the email which added more graphics and less copy prevailed their tried and true template. The experiment offers this conclusion that “new” can be better. It shows that even a vigorously tested and successful email campaign needs to be updated once in a while. It leads clients to believe, ” your company is continually advancing, working and thriving”.

The third email test of Pier 1 Imports provided some interesting results! One email redesign DECREASED the click- through rate by 52%. Holy Crap… I hope you are testing your campaigns. That is ROI your company could be missing out on! So test your campaigns and start your campaigns with ROI in mind: what do you what this campaign to accomplish? Once you set a campaign goal you can easily measure your goals and test different email designs.

Check out this whitepaper for more tricks and tips. It has a wealth of information!

So, what does that mean to you as a direct-to-fan marketer? Well, hold tight, social forward will be fixed soon, but also keep in mind these new wall features that can really impact how you communicate with your fan base. Jay Baer wrote a blog on Facebook news feed changes called, “Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?”.  The blog offers a great marketing perspective reminding marketers and company social media users that Facebook  decides what actually shows up on one’s news feed. This is based on what you’ve “liked” and commented upon in the past, and what your friends have “liked” and commented upon, according to Jay Baer that can mean that, “only 2 out of every 1000 Facebook updates will show up in your news feed”. Which means , that you are competing with every “friend’s” mom, brother, husband, wife, friends and co-workers for feed space.

So, make every message count and involve your “friends”.  Ask questions, encourage interaction. Jay Baer notes that one can now easily  use one-click the share functionality for facebook updates, but only updates with links, videos or photos. So, make your updates include these– It will help weed out unnecessary posts as well.

Another great idea is to incentivize the friendship.  Many marketers use this tactic to get people to opt-in to their email, sms or voice campaigns. We suggest offering a free download for becoming our friend or a social contest where the winner gets merchandise. Check out what the indie-rock/ soul band Dr. Dog did to interact with their fans: They posted on their Facebook Page,  “Get us to 20,000 fans on Facebook, and we’ll let you hear the first track off the new album”.

This simple, incentivized call-to-action took their fan list from 7,000 fans to 17,493 just two weeks after posting. So, be creative, include your fans and keep an eye on Jay Baer’s awesome blog on social media.

Granted we grew up on these movies and as a 9 year old, the Millennium Falcon was one of my most prized possessions, but the thrill these days is in the experience. The full orchestra, massive HD screens and a well coordinated narration through the saga is a must see event.

Needless to say, FanMail is really excited to be supporting this through our clients Another Planet Entertainment as it travels the world. Check out the tour dates, take the family and be ready to experience a really one of a kind concert event.

I feel a bit like Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School”.

As CEO of a pretty well respected direct-to-fan marketing shop, our clients kinda expect us to already know quite a bit on the topics of online, social and so forth. And we do. And we pitch and deliver outstanding programs every day. So it is a bit of a running joke around the FanMail office that that I might be bit overqualified for the class… and so likely doomed to failure based on murphy’s law.

I got a C on my first assignment for not answering the whole question, “Please outline your top 10 pros and cons (5 each) of a direct-to-fan sales and marketing approach. Which traditional outlets do you think are still effective for selling and marketing your music?” I got the 10 pros and cons but skipped the question on which traditional outlets still work. Rats… the details get me every time.

But it is the dialogue that I’m most interested in. That is the good stuff. The grade is really negligible for me.

I mean the music industry sucks for open dialogue. Generally there is just too much ego and posturing and and self congratulation and fierce competition for the industry to actually openly discuss what works or doesn’t work in their marketing methodologies. It is interesting. If you go to any number of main stream “corporate” marketing conferences often you find presenters (one person showing a case study or telling a real story of success) or round tables (open dialogue with the audience and a moderator). But in the music industry it is all about “The Panel” (a group of hand picked experts who are really there to propel their own agendas).

So I’m looking to Academics for dialogue and I applaud Ian and Shamal and team for bringing it into a forum where such things can hopefully thrive. My fear of course is that the promise of open dialogue here could quickly be clouded by the marketing agenda. We shall see.

I’m also interested in the Topspin platform. I don’t think that it is akin to the second coming of Christ as the hype would lead us to believe, but I do think that it is a game changer and puts some pretty powerful tools in the hands of artists and their team. At FanMail, we are hoping to expand our programming over the next months to execute services for our clients on the Topspin platform. This is a good way to “dip our toe in the water” without taking a full dive.

We have a number of clients who use both FanMail and Topspin in tandem. FanMail for email, sms, automation and database management and Topspin for transactions, media and widgets. I’m hopeful that as the dev team continues to build out their APIs, that the doors will be opened where these two world class systems can continue to compliment each other. Ian, can I hear an open source yelp?

To top it off (and inspired by the class project) I’m working with Josiah to bring The Lion’s Rampant album “It’s fun to do bad things” to market for a March release on Topspin. This band it too much fun and I’m sure there will be more insights on this to come.

Ok, I’m off to find an apple for the teacher.

Until next time!

David

Bowles’s blog offers 5 ways to improve your email marketing:

1. Integrating Email With Social Media

-Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page. Which reminds me, click on the blog homepage to get the full “Is Email Endangered?” white paper.

- Leveraging social media to offer different ways to interact with the subscriber– twitter feed promotions, rss feeds and a monthly newsletter

2. Focusing on Engaging Subscribers

-Personalize subject lines

-Incentivize click-throughs

-Make it as easy as possible for an email to be shared on social networks and forwarded

3. Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers

-Incentivize and create reasons to open the email ex, free trials or whitepapers

-create sense of urgency around an ending subscription

-segment inactive subscribers and cut back on the frequency of communications

4. Creating Viral Campaigns

-Instead of generic terms like “forward to a friend”, tailor them to a specific email/campaign (Ex. “Forward these tips for building credit to a colleague”)

-Make content available to everyone and easy to forward

-Vary the placement of share this links

5. A/B Testing and Optimizing Landing Pages

-Use this testing to find out the best response and layout for an email

I highly recommend that you read this article and utilize these tactics! We have found these techniques invaluable.

In 2001, when we first met the 4 founders of ExactTarget at a dry cleaning conference, who could have guessed where our two businesses would be today? We could have partnered with any number of technology providers to help us drive our direct-to-fan vision… and these days there are dozens if not hundreds of database/email/voice/social/sms service providers out there that run the spectrum in quality and cost.

“Email marketing is a commodity,” is what one exec told me not long ago. Yeah, well sort of… The ability to send lots of messages to lots of people is a commodity, but the ability to accomplish great marketing is not. Permission marketing is not a commodity… it’s a premium. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time through the right medium is not a commodity… it is a premium.

So, yeah we were lucky. Out of all the partners we could have picked, we picked the one that understands that it isn’t about sending emails but about helping organizations connect with their customers in real and meaningful ways. Great technology is just the beginning, but real and true customer relationships are the glue that keeps it together.

This partnership has been incredibly valuable to FanMail and has allowed us to push some of the most sophisticated direct-to-fan marketing initiatives ever seen in the music and entertainment industry. The technology which ExactTarget has built allows us to ask “how” instead of “if” when it comes to complex direct, lights-out and lifecycle marketing programs. Almost anything we want to do is possible. In addition, their dedication to the FanMail Reseller Partnership and our vision and commitment to the music and entertainment vertical has permitted us to bring ExactTarget technology to our customers in a way that is accessible and cost effective for them.

So, we were not surprised to hear that ExactTarget has swept the field in the latest Forrester Wave report. Earning the title of “Leader of the Pack”, ExactTarget dominated the competition.

The Forrester report analyzed the products and services of 15 top-tier email service providers, using over 70 criteria and found ExactTarget dominated in nearly every category! In fact, ExactTarget earned perfect scores in 6 of the 14 categories – Product Roadmap, Vertical Strategy, Executive Vision, Strength of Management Team, Employees and, most importantly, ExactTarget was the only Email Service Provider to earn a perfect score in the Customers Category – a clear validation of realizing their core value of “Make clients look like heroes.”

The graphic above is a quick synopsis of the report. Notice ExactTarget’s placement in the upper right, making them a “Leader in the Industry.” It’s clear that it’s become a two-horse race between ExactTarget and Responsys. The data behind the graphic tells an even more compelling story. We beat or tied Responsys in 11 of the 14 categories, and ExactTarget beat them especially where it counts: current offering, technology platform, services and customer satisfaction! ExactTarget distanced themselves even further from the rest of the competitive pack, including e-Dialog, CheetahMail, Epsilon, Silverpop, Lyris and EmailVision. Even Forrester made mention in the report of ExactTarget’s acceleration and separation in the market. “ExactTarget has vastly expanded its organization to cater to marketers in any market segment. It offers a highly usable self-service application and has a growing services organization that offers the ability for its personnel to be deployed at the client location.”

Congratulations to the ExactTarget team. This show a tremendous amount of work and dedication to being the best of the best. As we enter 2010, FanMail is very proud to have such a prominent technology leader as our partner!

>> Download the complete Forrester report here

Author Jessica E. Vascellaro only did half her homework. She claims that, “a new generation of services [are] starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world”.  What she fails to notice, is the fact that all of these online networking communities are powered by email. Without email, one cannot opt-in to any of these communities or continue to communicate within them . Secondly, lets think about MySpace. Myspace was the premier social network before Facebook and Twitter took over. Companies poured money into harvesting their communities, only to find out that everyone left and moved on to the next community. If they “owned” those relationships through email, it would not matter what community the consumer subscribed.

So, what does this all mean? Email is not dead or dying, but rather the opposite, it is fueling these new communities. Email allows the user to share articles they enjoy or shows they would like to attend or even updates about what band is coming to town. What savvy email marketers should take from this, is how to incorporate an eco-system of marketing.

Sean Corcoran recently wrote an awesome blog which explains all of the relationships that can form a successful eco-system, incorporating owned relationships (email) with partially owned relationships (social networking sites). He states that, “Owned media is a channel you control. There is fully-owned media (like your website) and partially-owned media (like Facebook fan page or Twitter account). Owned media creates brand portability. Now you can extend your brand’s presence beyond your web site so that exists in many places across the web – specifically through social media sites and unique communities”. Using this idea, email is still the big mama jama. Incorporating social media to your marketing plan is great and it plays real nice with email. Check out Sean’s blog for more ideas to create a solar system of owned media and rest assured that nobody has usurped email’s throne.

[courtesy of Sharethis.com]