E-Mail Marketing

This week in class we looked at Email Marketing: one of my favorite types of marketing simply because it has such immediate results.

We had a look at setting up a campaign within Mail Chimp one of the widely used systems available for email marketing campaigns. For work I use Campaign Monitor which is another highly ranked system for such campaigns. I find email marketing highly effective as it is a message directly into the mail box of customers who have signed up to hear about your offers- they are people who are highly likely to buy your product.

A new thing I learned about e-marketing and available systems were how to set up subscription forms to allow people to sign up to the newsletter. We already have a built in sign up on our website but not on our social media sites. Since class I have created this sign up form for both Facebook business pages I manage and promoted them to our followers.

We discussed the importance of Subject Lines and some tricks on how to get better opening rates with better subject lines and why giving people a reason to sign up for the newsletter is also important. Some of the challenges of email marketing is that people receive many emails on a daily basis, some of which they will start to see as spam. The key is to provide them with useful information in your emails to entice them to continue opening the emails in the future.

Media Planning Tools

Also in week five we explored some helpful media planning tools media buyers and agencies might use.

Media Planning Spreadsheet

The media planning spreadsheet is essentially a list a media buyer will have to keep track of the various publishers and relevant information on each. This list could have different tabs to divide up publishers who would target different audiences- e.g. Sports Websites, News websites, e-commerce sites etc. The list would include Impressions per month, visitors per month, audience demographics and ad formats available.

Google Ad Planner is a very useful tool to use to compile this list. On it you can search a website and it gives you information on the traffic statistics, demographics, audience interests and the ad specifications.You can also create your media plan within the Ad Planner.

Measuring, Ad Server (Double Click)

An ad server can be used to create tracking codes or tags to track while the advertisement is online. Double Click is a very useful tool for this. Both the advertiser and the publisher must be using the system and Double Click will create the tags and will measure click through and impressions. Using this system means both the advertiser and the publisher can see all the measurement statistics from the running advertisement.

Double Click for Publishers (DFP) also gives the small publisher an easy to use ad management tool for their website. the publisher can manage all their various advertisements running on the website and plan dates and times to run each accordingly.