Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

At Pinpointe, we just started using Twitter – our page isn’t too impressive yet, but you can find us at www.twitter.com/Pinpointe. 

Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. Nearly 4 million times a day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000+ weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006.

The marketing opportunities on Twitter are obvious.  For example, when we post a useful tip in the Pinpointe blog, schedule a new educational webinar or post an on-demand Email Marketing best-practices video, we take 60 seconds to also post a “tweet” about it, and even though we just started, we’re starting to see visits to our website from Twitter.  It’s simple to share headlines and updates about products and services to our growing list of devotees who want to be plugged into up-to-the-moment tweets through pretty much whatever Web or mobile technology suits them. And Tweets can have a compound effect – creating a kind of “ambient awareness.” For me, it’s the same feeling as when I move from email to instant messaging: instant response vs. emails’ delayed response.

Social media keeps blurring and redefining communication lines, and Twitter is a perfect example.  It’s free, simple, informative, useful and for many, an extraordinary way to never unplug. And as you’ll soon find, it’s addictive.  Twitter gives us marketers yet another channel to communicate with our prospective audience.Twitter might not stay free for marketers for long. Mr. Williams replied to Fast Company’s question earlier this year: “When and how will Twitter start making money?”

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Our theme for the start of 2009 is – squeeze every bit of performance out of every campaign. The only way to do that is to test, measure, optimize, and test again. Since one of the cool new features in Pinpointe 2.0 is split testing (so you can automatically optimize campaign results), I thought it would be a good time to talk about split testing.

Here’s a screen from Pinpointe 2.0’s Split test campaign feature:

For example, if you have a list segment of 100 contacts you can send one campaign to 33% of your list, another to the next 33% and another to the final 33%. You can then see which had higher open/click rates and send that to your entire list.

Split tests are a great way to test multiple versions of an email and see which one gets the best response. In the above example, I might leave the email content identical in all 3 campaigns but just change the subject line in each to see which gets me the best open rate.

I wanted to talk about another way to do split testing – with your website using the free website optimizer tool from Google.

What is Google Website Optimizer?

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To view the unsubscribed contacts:

1. Go to Contacts -> Search Contacts in the menu,
2. Choose “View specific contacts from within the selected lists below”,
3. Select the list you want and click Next, and
4. Choose the Activity Status “Unsubscribed” and click Next.

You should now be presented with all of the unsubscribed contacts of the lists you selected. You can click ‘Edit’ for a contact and set their Activity Status to “Active” again.

There is no way to set the Activity Status of contacts en masse. Generally there is a very good reason why a contact is labelled as unsubscribed or bounced, and changing this manually could result in your server being blacklisted.