Blog – imailglobal.com

The new Facebook Messages incorporates email, SMS, and Facebook Chat and Messages into one convenient bucket. It’s a smart idea, but you should think twice before you consider ditching your current email address for Facebook email. Here’s why.

It is simply just not email, it’s a way of extending Facebook’s messages system. At the end of the day, it is just a way to communicate with your friends. Think of it as an extension of your IM. All the sms, emails, messages will be consolidated under one main conversation under from a single point of contact. Separate emails with different subjects are meaningless in Facebook Messages (though subjects sent from email clients outside Facebook are bolded in the conversation).

Point is, you can’t use Facebook Messages like email because, while it interfaces with email, it’s not email. It is more of a email lite version, where everything is simplified for the sake of consolidation. If you use your email for more in-depth conversations (as opposed to quick back-and-forth, chat-style conversations), or you like to communicate with the same person using different threads, it just won’t work.

Besides, email will always exist in your workplace, and some of the most important uses of it will be in the workplace, which does not encourage their workers to indulge in Facebook all day long. Companies like to have a record of all emails exchanges for legal and confidential reasons, so Email will always have a place in the workplace, which cannot be replaced by Facebook Messages.

Image and some text from lifehacker

UBS came to us to run a campaign targeting the extreme high net worth individuals for their annual golf event: The Hong Kong Open.
We were apprehensive of how the results would turn out because, as we all know, high net worth individuals are busy people who might not have the time for email advertisements.

Well, our worries were put to rest when the response rate was over 5%, and best of all, these individuals took time to forward the mails over a 100 times!

The secret? A very classy, clutter free email creative that strikes a cord with the high net worth individuals.

There are no screaming prices or huge red act now buttons.

It shows that subtlety works in messaging, when speaking to certain audiences.

Nice work, UBS and Starcom Hong Kong. Continue reading

Many brands are coming on-board the social media train by setting up Twitter or Facebook accounts, giving them a web presence. It may seem like a good idea initially but sometime it gets downhill, fast.

Imagine putting a poster on a crowded street corner with millions of people passing by it, everyone has a right to draw on the poster. There will bound to be a few of them who will be unhappy abut the poster and write something negative on it. Now multiply that by a few times, there is having a Facebook page. A Facebook page is excellent channel for brands to share with their customers and interact with them, at the same time, it presents an avenue for dereactors to vent their negative feelings and comments on it.

A good example of this is the recent Coach Facebook page, dozens of anti-fur activists flooded the Coach Facebook wall with graphic photographs of caged and skinned animals. They were likely followers of an ongoing campaign on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which is well-known for heavy shock value in an attempt to get its message across (as well as its sometime affinity for robot groundhogs), to convince Coach to dump fur products.

There is no right way to deal with this matter, remove too many negative posts and it will seem like big brother with heavy censoring and control. Leaving the posts will present a negative stain on your page. It is difficult to strike a balance in handling this matter and no matter how you handle it, it will seem bad for the image of your company. So it is important to decide on a strategic online plan for all social media channels, and to calculate the risks and gains from going social!

Read more at cnet

Hewlett Packard has run their 100th campaign with us. To mark this milestone, we will be doubling all inventory for HP’s booking made in the month of November, globally!

A man has been fined ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS (yes, really) for sending 4,366,386 spam messages that were posted on Facebook. He was fined $100 for each message, and including punitive damages he now owes $1,068,928,721.46. A ruling by by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal).

Yes this is a true piece of news, so it’s probably better to leave the email marketing to legit guys like us than to leave it to spammers, or DIY style. You never know what kinds of trouble it may lead you to.

Linked from canoe.ca

IE, the bane of all web developers and designers. We used to have to code 2 completely different sites, for IE and non-IE browsers, all the amount of manpower and time wasted on this wayward browser can now be put to good use .

And now some good news from techcrunch.com.

We can all rejoice in the fact that IE’s market share is falling and IE9 is touted to work in the same manner as other browsers, which means more time for all web developers to

IE has never been a good browser to begin with, it did things in it’s own way, it’s own standards. It was slow and clunky, a Chery QQ compared to the Ferraris and Porsches of the web-browser world like Firefox and Chrome. Why would  anyone want to use this piece of crap? Just because it was included Windows and most of the general surfing public just used whatever came with Windows, however as everyone got more net-savvy, once they switched to Firefox or Chrome, no one has ever turned back, except for all those working in companies with legacy “web applications” which could only be accessed through IE.

Speaking of these legacy web applications which can only be accessed through IE, isn’t it time to upgrade them to enjoy the fruits of HTML5 and Web 2.0 standards? Companies naturally want to save money, and once a system is built. They will want it to run for decades, but with the advances of technology and all the cool social media sites around, wouldn’t it be more efficient if these sites are rebuilt from scratch? The underlying backend can remain, but the user interface can be spruced up, which waste time click from page to page when information can be presented in the same page?

It’s time for change, only the best can survive now. If IE9 really lives up to Microsoft’s promises, I wouldn’t mind posting about how IE9 is gaining market share, but till then, please use Firefox or Chrome.

So, we have just reached the benchmark of 20 million emails delivered for our client’s campaigns this year. Our back end team went through the open and click behavior of our users globally and we are compiling snippets of the statistics to share with everyone.

Highest volume of mail opens and click throughs happen between 8 to 10 am on weekdays.

We will be bringing you the cardinal sins of Email Marketing every week, next up on the list…

This next one is from the big swoosh gods at Nike.  Notice anything weird about the screenshot?  It has some nice orange and grey colors to it, but that is about it.  Remember by default every email client does NOT display images, so it is probably a good idea to include a portion of text that gives a brief summary of what your EDM is trying to convey.  At least Nike gave us a view web version unlike the Eventbrite.  Just take a look at the before and after pictures below.  Could you even tell what that email is about?  Fail.

In this case a picture doesn’t tell a thousand words if the picture can’t be seen in the first place. So remember one little rule email marketing rule:

Images should add, not dominate.

We will be sharing with everyone some email marketing cardinal sins in the coming weeks. This is the second tip of the series…

Not Knowing Everything About Your Recipients

What’s wrong with the image above? Nice image of a girl, great deals, looks perfect? Wrong. This screen-shot was taken from a Banana Republic campaign sent to one of my good MALE friends. I love the ideas of companies sending sales and specials to their customers, but this is bad targeting and list segmentation. Fail!

Sending out EDMs to people on your list blindly is never a good idea, my male friend might not mind looking at some eye-candy, but what if you sent a cute little EDM with a cartoon pig character to Muslim? That is offensive and might cause you countless headaches and hurt your branding. Sending the right campaigns to the right people is very important, you can’t just throw everything out and hope some of it sticks, so sometimes a little targeted marketing will save you a whole lot of trouble.

Image from HubSpot