Businesses have been urged to bring “gamification” to their email marketing campaigns.

Gamification is a relatively new term which basically means bringing the concepts and techniques of gaming to a completely different environment in which they would not normally exist.

As businesses see the effect gamification has on marketing, many are looking at ways in which they could bring it to their marketing campaigns, with the most recent being their email marketing, emailschools.info reports.

By utilising such tools as interactivity, online games and playful, fun interactions, businesses are finding they are more likely to encourage users to return more than once and spend longer on the site each time they do come back. This has been effectively demonstrated with numerous online competitions which give the user more chances to win each time they return to a site.

Now, it seems, the practice is coming to email marketing, with messages containing games and fun activities that offer users the chance to reach an end goal. Every time they then click through these emails to return to the site, they are building up a bigger and stronger relationship with the brand.

Writing for memeburn.com, marketing expert Wikus Engelbrecht explained: “Designing a gamified brand experience requires that you identify the behaviours or actions you want from participants, alongside their relevant value, and then identify engagement-based strategies to engineer a path toward your goal.

“Simply put, you identify the behaviours you want to elicit (awareness, click-throughs, recommendations, purchases) and then you determine motivators that can provoke each of these behaviours and notify your readers.”

Via: Pure360Marketing

Twitter had the hearts of advertisers a flutter this week with the announcement that it is to expand its promoted tweets feature. But not all within the industry are entirely enamoured by what the micro-blogging site has begun to test.

Promoted tweets have been around for a while – albeit only available so far to brands in the US (the UK is awaiting the imminent arrival of promoted features). In their previous incarnation, promoted tweets were ones by brands that sat at the top of a user’s timeline – provided that user already followed the brand in question.

But Twitter’s relationship with advertisers is about enter a whole new dimension, as this week it announced that promoted tweets would begin to show within the timelines of Twitter users regardless of whether or not they already follow the brand issuing them.

The promise by Twitter is that it will only allow promoted tweets to appear in the timeline of a user that has “relevant” interests – and for the advertiser a promoted tweet will only be paid for when a user clicks onto, replies to or retweets a promoted tweet. As a trial phase among US brands including American Express and Disney gets underway we will no doubt begin to get a feel for consumer reaction to the concept.

But what do advertisers make of this move to further monetise the Twitter platform? Early reactions are interestingly mixed.

“These promoted tweets will be going everywhere tweets flow – which means not only on Twitter’s own mobile apps, but [on] third-party services as well. Advertisers beware – according to a recent article [on Wired.com], people already ignore up to 71% of the tweets they receive – and those are from people they decide to follow”, warns Christopher Marriott, vice president of agency services at email and social media specialist company, StrongMail. “I wouldn’t advise our clients to go rushing into Twitter, except [to use it] as a listening device and a customer service channel.”

It does not appear that promoted tweets will immediately appear within mobile and third party apps, however a Twitter spokesperson has said that plans to integrate the new feature into the timelines of users of Tweetdeck and the like will happen “in due course”. Presumably this will happen after the testing phase has been carried out.

The fascinating thing is that Twitter is still so new as an advertising platform in itself that it’s hard to really know what the benefit – or curse (if consumers retaliate against it) – of a feature as new as promoted tweets will be. But then as James Devon, planning director of communications agency MBA points out, there are some early success stories. Coca-Cola for example, which purchased the second ever promoted tweet, saw 85 million impressions within the first 24 hours. “How did it do this? Through perfect timing, often the determining factor in creating a positive wave of engagement – [it ran] a tweet during the US versus England World Cup match”, he says.

One recent research study in America – where brands have been able to make use of promoted tweets for some time, suggests that 24.8% of Americans have seen a promoted tweet relevant to them, while 21.6% have obtained a discount and 21.2% have found out about a new brand in this way. Admittedly until this point, promoted tweets in the US have only shown up in the timelines of users who follow the brand in question – but could this new, more aggressive form of tweeting by brands actually take hold in a similar way?

“Promoted tweets are an interesting line of business for Twitter. The advertiser [though] must make certain that she or she is sharing content that is not only relevant to the query the ad is being served against, but also delivers valuable, non-promotional content to the viewer”, says Joe Chernov, vice president of content marketing at revenue management firm Eloqua. “Advertising in social media in a manner consistent with the social mores of the community is a delicate line for marketers to tread,” he adds.

Of course Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costello, is the most enthusiastic of all about the frisson between the micro-blogging site and advertisers. At a business meeting at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco last week he gushed that, “our users are engaged, they’re clicking on links in tweets, clicking on profiles, following people. The message we hear over and over from brands is [that] the level it is important to pay attention to is the level of engagement that is there.”

Will promoted tweets offer up an excited new ad platform within the social commerce arena? It’s early days and only time will really tell.

Via: UTalkMarketing

What is Promotion?

Promotion is a form of corporate communication that uses various methods to reach a targeted audience with a certain message in order to achieve specific organizational objectives. Nearly all organizations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, in all types of industries, must engage in some form of promotion. Such efforts may range from multinational firms spending large sums on securing high-profile celebrities to serve as corporate spokespersons to the owner of a one-person enterprise passing out business cards at a local businessperson’s meeting.

Like most marketing decisions, an effective promotional strategy requires the marketer understand how promotion fits with other pieces of the marketing puzzle (e.g., product, distribution, pricing, target markets). Consequently, promotion decisions should be made with an appreciation for how it affects other areas of the company. For instance, running a major advertising campaign for a new product without first assuring there will be enough inventory to meet potential demand generated by the advertising would certainly not go over well with the company’s production department (not to mention other key company executives). Thus, marketers should not work in a vacuum when making promotion decisions. Rather, the overall success of a promotional strategy requires input from others in impacted functional areas.

In addition to coordinating general promotion decisions with other business areas, individual promotions must also work together. Under the concept of Integrated Marketing Communication marketers attempt to develop a unified promotional strategy involving the coordination of many different types of promotional techniques. The key idea for the marketer who employs several promotional options (we’ll discuss potential options later in this tutorial) to reach objectives for the product is to employ a consistent message across all options. For instance, salespeople will discuss the same benefits of a product as mentioned in television advertisements. In this way no matter how customers are exposed to a marketer’s promotional efforts they all receive the same information.

Via: KnowThis