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The landscape of email marketing is constantly changing.  This has caused a need for shifting tactics through the years in order to attract email recipients.  Video marketing has become an important addition to the email marketing world.  It provides a new way to engage people in a fast and efficient manner.  Instead of having to scroll through pages of text when opening an email, a recipient can watch a short video that engages and impresses them in a small amount of time.

These videos can also provide your company with a slick and professional interface to send to your recipients.  Making and sending out quality videos can help the customers relate and put a “face” to your company.  By sending out videos, you will set yourself apart from the competition and (if the video is done well) look like an expert in your field.

There is a reason why YouTube is one of the top viewed sites on the web, and it is because people enjoy watching and sharing videos.  Some of the most forwarded email and retweeted lines on twitter are links to online videos.

The key to getting the most out of your online videos is being able to track them.  This is where using a video hosting site is key.  With the partnership between Cantaloupe.tv and Delivra, tracking your videos and implementing them is a breeze.  With VideoHere, marketers can add and manage their videos along with being able to track who watched them and for how long. Also, with the use of Cantaloupe's Backlight customers can not only embed their videos in their email campaigns, but also distribute videos online with ease.  In fact, Cantaloupe.tv's new Video Whitepaper can show you how to raise click-through rates for your marketing campaign by 2-3x.

Last, but not least, video is currently one of the richest ways to improve your SEO results.  Video ranks higher in Google search than any other content, so if you are an organization wanting to improve your web presence, incorporating video into your marketing strategy is sure to improve where you show up in search.  Join Cantaloupe for their upcoming Webinar to learn more about how video and SEO work so well together!

Why not incorporate the popularity and professionalism of online video combined with the ease of use of VideoHere that Delivra can provide.  Be on the forefront of marketing and start adding videos to your campaign and contact us today at 317-915-9400 or at info@delivra.com.

Patrick Love | Marketing

Over the years Marketing has evolved tremendously, and with the addition of new methods often comes confusion in terminology.  Recently, I was asked this, "What is an 'impression' anyway?"

In traditional advertising terms, an "impression" is a measurement of how many people an advertisement can reach, often measured by the audience size.  When you are talking about television or radio, this definition of the term makes sense because you are measuring how many people the advertisement might have been exposed to, not how many actually saw it.  However, as marketing has changed to incorporate the potential of online media, the term "impression" has taken on a new meaning.

In a Web 2.0 world, an "impression" became well-known as a measurement of how many times an advertising placement would be served up on a web site.  Then, along came social media into the mix, and the word "impression" became even more confusing, taking on yet another meaning.  When used in reference to email marketing, video, and social media, the term "impression" has become widely used as a descriptor for the end-user action.

Why the marketing lesson today you might ask?  Here at Delivra we are often asked about the measurement and tracking analytics behind our platform and it is important to understand the differences among the metrics.  First, email marketing uses these basic definitions:

• Open:  registered when the recipient either previews or opens the email (very similar to the "impression" metric for an online ad).
• Click-Through: registered when the recipient clicks any link within the email.
• Unique Open or Unique Clickthrough: the total number of recipients who opened or clicked, without regard to how many times they opened or clicked.

Beyond these standard measurements, we added additional metrics when we introduced our social media sharing functionality.  We wanted a way for our customers to embed social sharing links within their emails to make the content sharing process easy for their recipients.  Now that email marketers are incorporating this feature in their campaigns, it's time to circle back and talk about how to understand the tracking behind it--including "impressions"--and how three simple metrics can affect your future marketing efforts:

1. First, once content in an email is shared to a social network, our social tracking enables the sender to view exactly which recipients are sharing.
2. Second, they are able to see exactly how many times that content has been shared out to each network.
3. Third, they can see how many "impressions" occur once the content is shared--how many people, beyond the email recipients, viewed the email content as a result of it being shared on a social network.

How can you can apply these metrics?  Once you know who within your database is sharing content, you can tailor future communications and incentives to encourage further sharing activity.  Even more powerful is knowing which networks they are sharing to.  If you know the majority of your audience is sharing to Facebook, then focus your marketing efforts to that audience.  Provide incentives within that network and encourage those members to become fans of your organization.

As for the almighty impression, let's look at an example.  Drumroll, please...

Suppose you have an email campaign that you send to 10,000 recipients. Of those 10,000 recipients, 5% (or 500) share the email content with their social networks.  Of that 500 that shared, 80% (or 400) shared to Facebook.  If the average Facebook member has over 125 friends, the link to that shared content was seen by potentially 50,000 friends.  If just 2% of those friends click the link  and view the content, that's 1,000 "impressions"--additional people that took action to click and read more.

That's powerful when you think about it.  With social media, you compound your reach when your recipients share out content.  In addition,  you are potentially also attracting new fans, customers, and prospects during this process.  In fact, you may even gain subscribers when all is said and done.

Still think social media is a waste of time?  I sure don't!  Have questions or want to learn more?  Contact us today at 317-915-9400 or at info@delivra.com.

Carissa Newton | Marketing

Neil Berman, president-CEO, Delivra

Many e-mail marketers seeking new ways to engage their audience are considering using video in e-mail. Video is popular because senders can achieve higher click-through rates and better user engagement, and can control their brand while maintaining an ongoing conversation. While technology eventually will evolve so marketers can fully embed their video into an e-mail, today the best practice is to host the video outside the e-mail content with a play button graphic embedded into the text of the e-mail. This allows the recipient to have a visual call to action without affecting the deliverability of the e-mail.

With advancements in e-mail tracking and design, marketers can easily embed the play button into their e-mail content, host it from a branded landing page and track results in real time. This is powerful, considering how it will maintain a conversation with the audience and provide the marketer a useful tool in measuring the ROI of each and every campaign, video and landing page.

While there are many video hosting applications available—both free and subscription-based—consider a subscription-based model with a hosted solution so you can track results, achieve higher search engine optimization and control your brand, as well as the content that is viewed alongside your videos.

Neil Berman | President & CEO

Video + email, what could be more engaging? As part of our partnership with Cantaloupe, Delivra can now provide video within email hosted through the Backlight Application. Click to read more!

Imagine the ability to make your email more dynamic with stronger calls to action.  Video stories can help you do that in a way that is impactful AND measurable.  An additional benefit to hosting a video through the Backlight application is that you can essentially embed that video or deliver it in a number of various mediums (email, website, blog and social media, etc...) and all of the tracking on that video can be viewed in aggregate in the system.  Users can also optimize each and every video with keywords to further reinforce your SEO efforts. Here is a sample of how it works:

I hope you enjoyed this very cool new technology!  Contact Delivra today to learn how you too can embed dynamic videos into your email campaigns.