Digital Marketing Intelligence (A report by Yesmail)
Capitalizing on Digital Market Intelligence
Yesmail Interactive has been providing quality email marketing and other marketing solutions for almost fifteen years. They have established themselves as a leader in their industry and an expert in multi-channel marketing. In coming up with a competent plan they have compiled quality research on digital marketing into an educational resource for hungry marketers.
The digital marketing arena is taking on more importance as resources and tools expand to help marketers take advantage of it. Marketers are now more than ever being able to build premeditated or real-time marketing campaigns, promote their brand with piggyback and combination offerings, evaluate campaign performance, and measure their progress with detailed metrics. Yesmail Market Intelligence brings all this together and provides a comprehensive plan to conquer platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Yesmail has capitalized on a breakthrough in digital marketing which allows them to quantify a relationship between email marketing and social media engagement. Because of this they’re able to drive home the importance of mastering the multi-channel platform, in combination with quality email marketing techniques.
Yesmail used a sample set of 20 leading retail brands to showcase this breakthrough. From Ralph Lauren to H&M to Eddie Bauer, Yesmail tracked the total social media engagement from Facebook and Twitter. They found obviously that brands with much larger followings garnered significantly larger amounts of likes, comments, retweets, and favorites. However, Yesmail formulated its own algorithm to properly gauge the amount of engagement relative to the following, and the rankings of the 20 brands changed dramatically. This is the type of research that helps them to assist companies in their marketing strategies.
Facebook easily has the greatest impact of all the social media platforms with its 900 million active members and 7 billion visits per month. Measuring the relationship between marketing efforts, users, and companies can be a rewarding effort if done right. But contrary to popular belief, studies are showing the trend in Facebook engagement is actually increasing faster than campaigns are being implemented.
There are some key factors to take into account when starting a Facebook campaign. The particular day of the week is one of them. Amazingly, according to the statistics Yesmail has found, Tuesday is actually the optimum day for employing a campaign, earning the highest ranking for engagement despite being the 4th ranked day from which businesses choose. Wednesday and Thursday weren’t far behind, showing that the middle of the week is a great option overall.
The time of day and frequency also come into play. This is where any Facebook campaign can flourish or struggle. Facebook thrives on users who take part of the website more than several times a day, so it’s important to know when users are online. Yesmail found that the highest rate of engagement took place from 10am-12pm. Surprisingly, this was one of the least used deployment times, the greatest being 11am-1pm. They also found that brands who implemented an excessive number of campaigns per month received the lowest engagement. Marketers should be careful to research a good amount of campaigns to release without over doing it.
The format for each Facebook campaign played a great role. From its research Yesmail found that photos far and away got the most attention, while videos did well but weren’t used as often. Simple statuses and links away from Facebook were the least successful of formats. Overall, brands which employed content that was interactive and incentive driven reaped the greatest results.
From its findings Yesmail determined that email marketing, when combined with Facebook campaigns, grew engagement anywhere from 50%-100%. Overall, the best strategies seemed to contain content that was offered on Tuesday, incorporated photos and videos, were deployed later in the evening, and were joint projects with email marketing campaigns.
Twitter is emerging as a strong and powerful platform right behind Facebook, but many businesses don’t seem to notice. As Yesmail tracked the set of companies they found after an initial peak campaigns took a steep incline while engagement steadily increased. This shows there is much of a great opportunity to capitalize on this gap.
Again, like Facebook, there was a disconnect in the understanding of when to deploy a good Twitter campaign. The most utilized day that was tracked was Friday, which interestingly enough turned out to be the least engaging day. The combination of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday once again showed they were the best days to use in terms of engagement.
Unlike Facebook, optimum times for Twitter engagement took place in the early hours of the morning and in the evenings. However, many Twitter campaigns are employed during work hours, or from 9am to 7pm, a time slot which only garnered 30% engagement. This data shows the opportunity businesses possess if they choose to think a little outside the box. Campaign frequency had similar numbers to the Facebook study, as companies who overdid it had the least amount of response.
Twitter campaigns that incorporated incentives, celebrity mentions, or famous quotes were the most engaging. Email marketing, when combined with Twitter exhibited an increase anywhere from 25% to 45%. While it may not be the most powerful of the platforms, overall Twitter showcased there was much more untapped potential than many realize.
YOUTUBE
YouTube stands alone as a resource with unmatched potential when it comes to digital marketing and creating online presence. YouTube ranks #3 in overall global site traffic, and that is a telling and impressive feat just in itself. However, while Yesmail tracked their set of brands they found while campaigns steadily increased, engagement decreased alarmingly and dramatically. This goes to show while there is much potential, significant effort must go into researching and analyzing what makes a good YouTube digital campaign.
The optimum day found when analyzing the weekday trend on YouTube was Monday, differing slightly from Tuesday which was the best day for Facebook and Twitter. Tuesday wasn’t too far behind, showing that it might be just as effective when employed with joint campaigns involving all three platforms. Due to the nature of its construct, time of day trends weren’t as important on YouTube, although Yesmail’s research found obscure and wee early morning hours showed the best results for engagement.
Other important factors included the trend in the duration of each video. The brands which had the most success incorporated videos that were less than thirty seconds, utilized celebrity presence and added user incentives. Based on their findings Yesmail concluded that the best campaigns would once again employ effective email marketing, choose Tuesday as a day to drop the campaign, keep videos brief, and link them as part of a multi-channel campaign effort.
CONCLUSION
The digital marketing arena has shown a great opportunity for companies, and it’s important that marketers take advantage of a multi-channel marketing solution to engage prospective customers. Not only are traditional techniques becoming outdated and expensive, but the potential for a greater online presence and a consistent means to evaluate that presence has increased the need to become more learned about the industry. Yesmail intends to help companies capitalize on this chance by using their cutting edge research to better utilize social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and take businesses to the next level.
By Candy Lowe
Qode Media Editorial Team