Last week, we began rolling out the newest version of our Landing Pages application. Not only did we add three new social networks to our Share-to-Social capabilities&mdash:Bebo, Delicious and Reddit (that makes eight and counting)—we also added built-in A/B page testing.

What makes the new A/B test feature uniquely powerful is that our clients can now test variations of landing pages—all within the application, unlike other products that require the use of an external Web-site optimizer. (Which, by the way, will integrate nicely, should you want to use one.)

We all know that marketers need to test in order to deploy the best performers, increase conversions and drive sales. According to MarketingSherpa's 2008 "Landing Page Handbook," marketers who didn't test landing pages were equally likely to see year-over-year conversion rates increase or decrease. Yet, marketers who ran even the simplest tests were at least five times more likely to see year-over-year conversion rates increase rather than decrease.

So, if we know we should do it, then why don't we? Too complicated? Well, not anymore. This new feature was designed to be über usable. Click, click, and you're optimized.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the growing popularity of online social networking, these social networking sites remain largely untapped by online marketers. And, it appears people like it that way.

According to a survey by media research form IDC quoted in this Dec. 5 article by eMarketer, people don't want brands following them around in social networks trying to strike up conversations. IDC reported that just 3 percent of social network users polled said it was appropriate for publishers to use their contact information in order to serve them targeted advertising.

With a slowed economy and the lukewarm reception for even targeted advertising, eMarketer projects social network ad spending will slow even more than other forms of online ad spending.

But (and this is a big but), email marketers who understand and respect the culture of the social networking environment can be both welcomed and successful there. Instead of intruding on your customers' and prospects' social spaces, you can be invited in and introduced to their friends. If you haven't already checked it out, download the white paper "Email Marketing Goes Social" by logging in to our preference center. It will give you lots of tips on how to get started. When you play by the community's rules, you become part of what makes it valuable to its participants rather than the noise that detracts from it.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeff Dernavich, Silverpop's director of product management, told me some great news today that I wanted to share.

Email deliverability provider and Silverpop technology partner Pivotal Veracity this week announced that users of its pioneering inbox rendering tool will now be able to see how their messages will look when recipients view them in the Firefox Internet browser.

The first solution of its kind, unveiled earlier this year, Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer shows how messages will look when viewed in the leading desktop email software, Web-based email platforms and mobile clients. The addition of Firefox is another first, according to the company’s November 11 announcement.

“We are thrilled to now offer our clients access to every major platform, email client and browser combination in the market,” said Michelle Eichner, vice president of client services.

We at Silverpop are likewise thrilled. Earlier this year we integrated the company’s offering into our email marketing platform, naming it Inbox Preview. We’ve confirmed that our implementation is Firefox-ready, and we are proud that our clients are among the first in the industry to be able to identify and address email rendering issues in the number 2 browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last month, we rolled out a shiny new feature we dubbed “Share-to-Social,” which enables email recipients to click a button in an email to share their favorite messages with their contacts/friends in their social networks. Not only that, but we made sure the marketers using this feature could track the results. (You can check out my blog post about it here.)

Well, we didn’t stop there. This month we added the same capabilities to our Landing Pages application, which enables marketers to easily create landing pages coordinated with their emails.

Also, we’ve added a few new social networks to the mix. We’re up to five and counting: Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

After email, landing pages are a natural next step for sharing marketing content into social networks. Think about it. MarketingSherpa estimates that up to 50 percent of visitors to a landing page will abandon it in the first eight seconds. So, for people who stick around, we’re talking about either: the most highly engaged visitors and/or the very best landing pages, able to grab attention and keep it. Either way, these are pages with a high propensity for going viral. They yielded the first click. They can yield the next. And the next.

If you’re taking the time to create fantastic, thoughtful landing pages that recipients are most likely to share, then this is one capability you definitely want to consider adding to your email toolkit.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Most of us at one time or another been forwarded a great email campaign, or have passed one along ourselves. But as email marketers, we know that creating a successful viral campaign is actually pretty tough to do. Email forward rates are low; recipients find forwarding to large groups time-consuming, or they worry that you’ll spam their friends if they use your form. For marketers, forwarding can break your HTML, and it can be difficult to track actions on the forwarded message.

But what if it suddenly got a whole lot easier for your campaigns to spread? If your recipients could quickly and easily share their favorite email messages, so that your message could reach not only your customers, but their friends, and their friends, too? And what if you could identify which recipients shared your content, and how many views and clicks each piece of shared content generated? Imagine what you could do with that kind of information.

By integrating social networking and email marketing, you can do exactly that. We at Silverpop have developed an exciting new “share-to-social” feature that allows email marketers to quickly turn emails into social-enabled viral messages. By clicking a button in their email message, recipients can quickly post the email to the profile page on their social network page—Facebook and MySpace for now, with more to come.

Branching out into social networks is a natural evolution for email. After all, social marketing is first and foremost about relationships, and successful email marketers have learned to engage customers in timely and relevant relationships. Social email marketing’s success rests on the ability to reach the right people with the right message—one they’ll want to share with others.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)