WebProNews

Tag: newsletters

  • Imgur Is The Latest Social Media Service To Launch An Email Newsletter

    Imgur Is The Latest Social Media Service To Launch An Email Newsletter

    Imgur is the latest social media service to launch a new opt-in email newsletter for its users. It’s called In Case You Missed It, and should serve as a way to get more engagement from its user base.

    A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews it seeks to ” help Imgurians avoid falling victim to FOMO,” or fear of missing out.

    “Imgur is a constant stream of awesomely entertaining images, gifs and visual stories,” the spokesperson says. “Many Imgurians try to catch it all — 17% spend 10+ hours per week (more time than most watch TV) and 50% are checking everywhere and all the time on mobile. But there’s so much to see it’s inevitable you will miss out on some of the greatest hits and hidden gems, so In Case You Missed It is a great weekly roundup of can’t-miss posts hand-picked by Imgur’s Director of Community, Sarah Schaaf.”

    “Imgur is a never-ending stream of awesomeness,” Schaaf says. “Every time you open the Imgur app, there’s an abundance of amazing and hilarious images, gifs and stories to discover, and it can be tough to see everything. Imgur’s In Case You Missed It newsletter is how we’re keeping you in-the-know with the most heartwarming, funny and must-see posts that grace Imgur each week.”

    The newsletter has been in beta testing for a few weeks, and according to Imgur, it’s had an “astounding” 60%+ open rate and a 15%+ click through rate, which is above average for social platforms, according to Mailchimp.

    Imgur has over 150 million monthly active users and gets 60 billion images viewed per month. 82% of users spend over three hours per week on Imgur, according to the company, and 17% spend over ten hours per week. That’s incredible.

    You can sign up for the newsletter here.

    As mentioned, Imgur is only the most recent social media service to turn to email to spur engagement in recent memory. We ran down some other industry efforts here.

    In June, Imgur announced that it had began testing promoted posts.

    Image via Imgur

  • New Facebook Ad Format Could Greatly Increase Conversions

    Facebook is testing a new ad unit called Lead Ads, which enable users to fill out forms on mobile with a few taps of the finger.

    A Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews in an email, “Until now, filling out forms on mobile has been tedious. Lead ads allows people to avoid a lot of the pain points, like having to leave one app and start a form in another app, and having to enter all of their information from scratch. Just a few taps and people are done.”

    As you can see from the image, it’s basically a three-step process for the user, and even the third step is simply completing the action.

    The ads automatically populate contact information like email addresses that users have already given Facebook. Some of the ads let people sign up for things like newsletters, price estimates, follow-calls and business info. They use a native signup flow within Facebook.

    As the company explains in a post on its business blog, “Like our other ad formats, we’ve built this ad type with privacy in mind. People can edit their contact information, and information isn’t sent to the business until a person clicks the ‘submit’ button. Advertisers may only use this information in accordance with their privacy policies, which we make available in the lead ad before people click submit. Advertisers are also restricted from re-selling lead information to third parties.”

    The ads could go a long way in increasing conversions because Facebook’s right. Forms, particularly on mobile, can be a pretty big pain in the butt, and the less the user has to do, the more likely they are to go through with the action you’re seeking from them.

    For now, the testing of the new format is only limited to a small group of businesses, but in various parts of the world. It’s unclear when the company might expand the test.

    Image via Facebook

  • NBCU Kills DailyCandy, Television Without Pity

    Last week, news emerged that NBCUniversal-owned DailyCandy and Television Without Pity are shutting down. Both are considered by some to be pioneers of an all but forgotten Internet era. The former was primarily an Internet newsletter in its early days, and the latter was a place for people to discuss TV shows in a forum setting.

    A “short goodbye” on Daily Candy says:

    Dear cherished reader,

    It is with the heaviest of hearts that we write today to say goodbye. After fourteen years delivering you the best in food, fashion, and fun, this train, as they say, is pulling into the station.

    Rest assured that every single day that we have published DailyCandy, we have done so with delight.

    Our mission was always to charm and inform you, whether telling you about an innovative new restaurant in Brooklyn, a trendy boutique in Chicago’s Gold Coast, or a groundbreaking San Fran band. Through the years, nothing made us happier than helping an emerging designer from West Hollywood find her audience or hearing that after we featured an attorney from Philly she quit her job to make brownies full-time.

    But all good things must come to an end. And this, friends, is ours. On April 4, we will close our doors.

    It’s been the ride of our lives, and we have loved sharing it with you.

    Yours,
    DailyCandy

    An even shorter one on Television Without Pity says:

    TWOP will cease operations on April 4, but our forums will remain open till May 31. Thank you for your support over the years.

    It appears that the sites were victims of the modern social Internet era. Kara Swisher reported on the closures, saying they just weren’t getting enough traffic, making them difficult to monetize. Competition has just been far too great as more sites and services have emerged over the years. 64 employees, with all but three at DailyCandy, are out of a job, says Swisher, who adds that they might be offered jobs at other NBCU properties.

    Doree Shafrir at BuzzFeed tells an interesting story about how influential and helpful both sites were, crediting DailyCandy with helping turn her own Tumblr into a success thanks to a feature in its email newsletter, which sent tons of traffic its way.

    Shafrir calls it “the end of an era’.

    As far as Television Without Pity is concerned, it’s not hard to see where such a site would have trouble competing with social media at large, where so much conversation around TV shows happenss in real time all day every day.

    Image via DailyCandy

  • Marketers Fear Gmail’s New ‘Promotions’ Tab Will Send Their Messages Into The ‘Depths’ Of Invisibility

    As you may know, Google recently launched a new interface for Gmail, which includes a tabbed categorization system. Among the tabs are: Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.

    It’s that “Promotions” tab that could pose a problem, and some companies who rely on email marketing are voicing their concerns, and going so far as to send their subscribers instructions to get their messages away from this tab. The question is how well will this work?

    According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, companies like Delta, Gap, Groupon and LivingSocial have been instructing their subscribers to make the necessary adjustments to keep messages in their “Primary” inboxes. For some, this could be a hard sell.

    Marketers are also worried other webmail providers will follow Google’s lead. The report shares the following quote from LivingSocial CMO Barry Judge:

    “We think other email providers will be adopting this as well. We don’t know when and we don’t know who, but we think they will…We clearly just want users to see our emails.”

    The report also shares the text retailer Kate Spade has sent to its subscribers, which says the “new inbox settings may have started filing away your Saturday.com emails into the depths of something called a ‘Promotions’ tab.”

    The depths. That’s just it. This is a tab that users know they can go without looking at, as it it is just filled with people trying to sell them stuff. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be. We’ve seen non-marketing emails, like simple email newsletters filled with real content, appear in this tab as well. These are emails that users opted to subscribe to for said content, and now they’re likely getting ignored in the “depths” of this tab.

    The situation is complicated even more by the fact that Google is putting its own ads in an email-like format in this tab – always at the top, of course. These aren’t actual emails. They just look like emails. Yes, they’re labeled as ads, but they look like marketing emails, and they compete for attention in the Promotions tab, where it’s already hard to get users’ attention.

    There has been a little early research indicating that users who are “routinely engaged” with marketing email are reading a slightly higher percentage of their marketing email now. That’s according to Return Path, but it’s still early to have any truly reliable data on this.

    One thing marketers might find solace in is that users who don’t like the tabbed interface (which includes pretty much everyone I’ve casually spoken to about it) can adjust the settings to make the interface more like the old style (without the tabs). It would be interesting to know how many are really reverting.

  • Here’s What’s Working In Email Subject Lines

    Adestra put out an interesting report on what works in email subject lines and what doesn’t. Character count, word count and the keywords themselves are all key ingredients, and the study compares variables across different types of emails.

    For the report (via MarketingCharts), the firm analyzed 1.159 billion emails sent within the last year. They looked at the length of subject lines, as well as word selection.

    “In the B2B world, it’s clear that either short or long subject lines work best. Short subject lines (<30 characters) perform strongly, as do long subject lines (>90),” write Parry Malm and Mark Bonner, the authors of the report. “The key point here is to consider what the end objective for your campaign is, and tailor your subject line around that.”

    “More benefits can be communicated by using more characters,” they say. “In contrast to this, shorter, snappier subject lines that used 30 characters or less also performed well: this is the case for transactional or direct-action emails. Using a mid-range of characters in subject lines doesn’t yield strong results: the worst of both worlds. Anywhere between 30 and 60 characters is a dead zone, and will reduce the chances of opens and clicks in an email.”

    Subject Line Character Count

    Whe picture for word count looks similar:

    Subject line word count

    The report also examines different keywords for different types of emails. For discount offers, the word “sale” worked far better than “discount,” “free,” “save,” or “voucher”. For news emails, “news,” “update,” “breaking,” “alert,” and “bulletin” all worked better than “newsletter”. “Issue” worked better than “forecast,” “report,” “research,” “top stories,” “interview,” “video” “whitepaper” or “download”. “Latest” worked better than “special,” “exclusive,” or “innovate”.

    For business emails, using words like “money,” “revenue,” or “profit” worked better than using words like “ROI,” “asset,” or “industry”.

    It’s a pretty interesting study. You can download the whole thing here (it’s free).

  • Twitter Now Sending Out “Best-of” Emails

    Twitter Now Sending Out “Best-of” Emails

    Don’t have time to waste time on Twitter? Now you can keep up with all of the people you follow with a “best-of” weekly email from Twitter. The micro-blogging service will now be sending out weekly email digests that will feature a summary of your Twitter stream. Popular tweets by the people you are connected with on Twitter will be featured in the mailing, as will popular links to stories. You may have already received one of the unsolicited emails, as they began rolling out this afternoon.

    Othman Laraki, director of growth at Twitter, announced the new newsletter-type email with a post on the Twitter blog. He stated that the emails are designed similar to the “discover” tab for the recently updated iPhone and Android Twitter apps. Which of the people you follow shared a particular story will be displayed below each story, showing you who it was popular with. Also, you can see related tweets from the people you follow and tweets can be sent directly from the email.

    Note that not all of the tweets in the digest email will be from people you follow. Some will be tweets that were popularly retweeted by the people you follow.

    If you don’t enjoy this new Twitter feature (or are annoyed that Twitter didn’t ask your permission) there is a link at the bottom of the email that will allow you to unsubscribe. Alternatively, you can change the option in your notification settings directly on Twitter. I’ll let the emails come for a few weeks before I decide whether or not I enjoy them. Of course, if they begin putting ads into the emails, the entire feature is a no-go for me.