Capturing customer intent can prove to be a difficult task if you do not use the right approach. I recently attended a webinar on this topic, hosted by Blue Sky Factory clients, Chris Brogan and John Stone of CrossTech Media and CrossTech Partners. Many of you may know Chris Brogan from his excellent blog, where he shares his insights as a social media expert. Chris joined John and covered how to approach this issue in “Capturing Customer Intent: Digital and Face to Face Channels.”

The purpose of the webinar was to explain how to capture customer intent from a company’s standpoint. These stages are attract, engage, transact, fulfill, support, and retain. All of the stages are equally important and Chris and John stressed the importance of communication in each stage. The key points I took away were:

• Consider content marketing and relationship marketing strategies right away.
• Build an audience intelligence solution.
• Listen across your touch points and across the web.
• Integrate your digital marketing and live event channels.

They also touched on social networking, blogging, and building strong relationships. It’s not easy to find a connected process to deal with all of these stages, but if you can get it right you have the opportunity to improve customer retention, create new opportunities, enhance service, and lower your costs.

 To view the recorded version of this webinar,  click here.

 The results are in from our Mobile Device Survey:
* 70% of you use a mobile device to view emails
* 41% of you receive HTML emails with images on these devices?
* 64% of you save emails on your mobile device to view later on your PC
* 62% of you use the view in browser link on your mobile device

Social Media’s growth and influence on the web continues to explode. We’re interested to see what kind of tools you use! Click here to share your thoughts, and look our for the results in the near future.

Most email marketers agree that their subscribers can sometimes be impulsive and unpredictable. Often at times they ignore messages or respond at large to a particular email. A lot of us don’t have a clear cut understanding of why one subscriber may take action differently than another subscriber.

 Let’s face it: the interest of your subscribers are d ifferent. If you don’t recoginize the differences you may be in danger of losing the value of your message and the attention of your subscribers. To read tips on giving your subscribers, click here.

 Don’t miss another issue of Factory Direct, our monthly newsletter. Click here to sign up.

Have you ever wondered why people are opting out of your emails? Don’t be afraid to ask! You could learn some very valuable information from sending a simple survey to your unsubscribers.

This information could help you improve your email program and retain more subscribers in the future. To learn how to stop beating yourself up about your opt-out rate and use the unsubscribers as a learning tool, read our latest article from our monthly newsletter, Factory Direct.

I came to work for Blue Sky Factory less than one year after I completed my undergraduate college program. Finishing school and entering the corporate world was quite a shock, in more ways than one. During my college experience, the social networking site Facebook exploded. Just 5 years ago, many people may not have known about Facebook. Nowadays, it seems impossible that someone might not have at least heard of it. After graduating from college, I continued to Facebook faithfully. Like many other young professionals, I was using Facebook to keep up with friends without having to make that dreaded phone call, look at their photos and post my own, and keep tabs on people from the past.

Within my first month of working at Blue Sky Factory under our CEO, Greg Cangialosi, I learned that social networking communities could be used as a marketing tool and not just to keep up with old friends. I observed our company’s branding consistently grow through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I had never thought of the possibility of using social networking to build professional relationships, not to mention increase business exposure and branding! Not only does Greg use his personal page on Facebook to network and communicate with other professionals in the industry, there is a completely separate page for Blue Sky Factory.

The page features everything about our company that anyone would need to know - from our company’s overview, to upcoming events and recent blog updates. The page is maintained as a marketing vehicle and notes are frequently added regarding company news, stories from our monthly newsletter (Factory Direct), and other BSF updates. We use the page to not only educate people about our company and industry, but we also keep it up-to-date with information that people can use and that will keep them coming back. Our employees, clients and others who have an interest in our company are “fans” of the Blue Sky Factory page. To check out the BSF page or become a fan, click here. You can see who’s a fan of the page (maybe someone you know?), top stories, events, notes, and discussions.

As a new addition to the company, it is important for me to stay on top of the latest technologies and branding opportunities. I have learned that what I use in my personal life can be leveraged in the workplace as well. As more and more professionals and businesses join Facebook and other social networking sites, we will continue to see marketing opportunities present themselves in places we may not have thought of before, but that make perfect sense.

Each day email marketing becomes increasingly sophisticated. From MTA throttling techniques to data marts, the email marketing space has changed tremendously over the past few years. There are still basic building blocks to email marketing that the customer controls and needs to ensure are setup. Role accounts are one of those basic items that every person who engages in email marketing needs to setup and actively monitor. A role account is nothing more than an abuse@ and postmaster@ email account for the domain you use in your “From” email addresses.

Some users will not use your unsubscribe links and just forward their unsubscribe request to one or both of the role accounts. It’s important that you setup these accounts and actively check them. Another best practice with your role accounts is to register them with Abuse.net. Many ISP’s and blacklisting organizations want to see legitimate mailers with listings in this database. It helps to show you are not trying to hide where complaints should be sent.

Adding role accounts is very easy. Make sure your domain has them and that someone is actively monitoring these accounts.

How do you match up to your peers?  We’ve added a BSF quick survey to our monthly newsletter.  Take our most recent survey on what matters most in email marketing.  Once we’ve collected all the results, we’ll report back on the outcome.  Check back in to see how you compare to your fellow marketers!

You may have noticed a new addition to the more recent issues of our newsletter, Factory Direct.  By adding BSF quick surveys to our newsletter, we hope to provide you a way to stay up to date with the most recent email marketing trends. Our first survey focused on our readers’ daily email behavior and activity.  Listed below are the questions along with our readers’ responses:

·  On average, how many hours each day do you spend writing and responding to emails?
o  6.3% spend zero hours
o  68.8% spend 1-5 hours
o 18.8% spent 6-10 hours
o  6.3% spend more than 10 hours

Stay tuned for more surveys and results!

Most of you have noticed that we redesigned our Factory Direct newsletter drastically a few issues ago. While the general motivation for this was to refresh the overall look of Factory Direct, there is purpose behind the different elements of the design.

While what may work for Factory Direct may not necessarily work for you and your email campaigns, the general message is: don’t be afraid to think outside the email newsletter box! Take the step like we did and inject some personality into your newsletters, along with some elements of uniqueness. If all the positive feedback we’ve received from our readers is any indication, our Factory Direct redesign was a success.  Click here to read more about our re-design and how it could benefit your email marketing campaigns.

Click here to make sure you don’t miss another issue of Factory Direct!

Do you ever find yourself struggling to find an email that you have saved in your Email Library? Do you have pages and pages of saved emails, creating a hassle when you need to find one? Do you thrive on organization and order?

Many of our clients have answered with a resounded “yes!” for these questions, so we have created a new feature for the Email Library: folders. You can now sort every email that is saved in the library into its own folder, just like in your Outlook or on your computer. This handy tool will allow you to keep similar emails together in an unlimited number of folders.

The days of endless searching in the sea of saved correspondences are behind us!

If you have any questions about this feature, please contact your Account Manager or email Customer Support.

If you are not a current client and you would like more information about this or any feature of Publicaster, please contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com or call 866.216.BLUE (2583).