With February being my birthday month, I’ve received a ton of notes to wish me well on my special day. This seemed like a good opportunity to talk about these feel-good emails that any business can send.

Step 1 to sending these is collecting the necessary information. Adding the birthday field to your sign-up form will solve that problem.

The next is to decide the objective for your birthday email program. Do you want the messages to be a branding initiative or are they to be a means for adding incremental sales? There’s no reason you can make both of these a goal for your happy birthday emails. Keep this in mind as you design the email’s template.

If you’re using these as an opportunity to merely have a favorable brand impression, your message doesn’t need to have a sales incentive, but the content should be strong enough to have a positive impact. If you also want to increase offline or online sales from the message, include an incentive, such as a special birthday discount, to drive purchases.

Here are some birthday message tips:

• Make the email pretty – keep your brand colors and look intact, but this is an opportunity to do something playful as well.
• Give people time to redeem the offer – Your contacts receive lots of birthday emails. Give them a chance to make use of your promotion.
• Test your campaign – this message can be used all year long. Keep an eye on what offers are performing best and which subject lines have the highest open rates. Adjust as needed.
• Send a targeted offer – use past purchase behavior or other information collected at sign-up to send a relevant offer.

As was expected, I received numerous emails to wish me well on my birthday. Here are some notes about a couple that stood out:

Atlanta Magazine:
What I liked: I’ve been a regular reader of the print version for several years, but their message included a discount to subscribe to the digital version of the magazine. In all, the message was short and sweet.
The offer: In addition to giving a discount on the digital version, a local museum also offered a discount on tickets to visit. This is one that I’ll definitely be using, especially since the offer is valid for four months – plenty of time to visit.

The Counter
This burger restaurant is a favorite of my family’s, but I’ve never ordered a shake after a meal there. The email itself looked pretty, but left me with more questions than answers. The message didn’t include any details about the offer (What size shake? When does the offer expire?) or even what types of shakes do they offer. When I clicked to learn more, I was taken to a web page with offer details written in tiny print. It’s nice that they wanted to wish me well, but I’d have had a much more enjoyable experience if I could’ve just printed the email (or shown it on my smartphone) to get my free shake. Is abuse of the offer really that rampant?!

Here are some other links that discuss birthday emails:
Silverpop: Your Blueprint for Building a Birthday Email Program

Marketing Profs: Birthday, Anniversary Emails Generate More Revenue

If a birthday wish is buzzworthy, your customers can become brand ambassadors. Be sure to include a sharing mechanism if you want to extend the “birthday party.”

Food trucks have entered the market at the height of social media. Of the trucks I follow in Atlanta, Yumbii, the King of Pops, Tex’s Tacos and Westside Creamery, none use email to market themselves.  Playing devil’s advocate, they could say, “Why should we? We’re selling out our inventory as it is using Twitter and Facebook. That’s enough marketing for us.”

But is it?  Here are my arguments for why food trucks need email marketing*:

1. Not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. According to a December 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 77% of American adults use the internet. 92% of those adults use email, while only 61% use an online social networking site. While Facebook may have 500 million active users, 50% of which log on in any given day, if you’re not following your favorite truck, you’re likely to miss out on their location or schedule.  Same for Twitter. Even though the service is adding 500,000 accounts daily, according to this report from May 2011, only 8% of Americans over the age of 12 are using it. Using Census figures, that’s ~20 million people. Awareness of Twitter is at 92% of Americans of the same age (12 or older), but adoption is clearly lagging.
2. Email is shareable. Yes, I know Facebook has its “share” button, which is intended to make it easier to spread items among your network on the site. But the trucks I follow post their daily locations as status updates, which aren’t shareable (i.e. no “share” button for that feature). And when was the last time you forwarded a Tweet? I suppose you could re-tweet the tweet of your favorite truck and cc your Twitter friend as if to say, “Want to go?” But what if the friend you want to make plans with isn’t on Twitter? Or you can’t immediately recall their user name? If you’re using Twitter on an iPad, you can mail a tweet. But wouldn’t it be nicer if the information were already in your inbox? I just know that if I were emailed a truck’s schedule for the week, there’s high probability that I’d forward it to a friend to make plans for a meal.  It’s hard to do that with a Facebook status update or Tweet.
3. Space limitations. Tweets are restricted to 140 characters and Facebook status updates are generally fairly short. Perhaps this is why posts are done on a daily basis – there’s not enough room to convey an entire week’s schedule in one place. (Though some do say something to the effect of “Our weekly schedule is up – check the website” with a link to the applicable page on their website.)  But they’re missing the opportunity to share more information about themselves that an email affords. An email, in addition to informing the recipient of the week’s schedule, would also allow the truck’s owner to highlight their menu or feature a particular item. In an email message, one food truck owner could even feature another food truck that offers a complimentary menu item (dessert feature in an entrée food truck email, or vice versa). No harm in some co-promotion among food truck friends, I don’t think.
4. Segmentation. Email allows you to get to know your audience in a way that Twitter and Facebook cannot. As part of the email sign-up process, a food truck could ask for the person’s home and work zip codes. This would allow food truck owners to send subscribers special notices when the truck is going to be in their area. Twitter doesn’t allow food trucks the luxury of targeting, and neither does Facebook (unless you count paid advertising, which I’m not in this case).
5. Email can be distributed via social media. It’s possible to “tweet” an email and broadcast its contents to your followers or “share” an email on Facebook. However, it is possible to share the content within an email via a “tweet this” button, Google’s +1 or a Facebook share button so a particular piece of information, photo or video to be shared via a social network. Similarly, many email software providers offer functionality that will allow for web-hosted versions of the entire email to be distributed via Twitter and/or Facebook when the message is sent. In some cases, these web-hosted versions have a toolbar at the top that includes a button for Tweeting or sharing on Facebook, so even if someone wasn’t on the email’s original distribution list, they can still pass along the email via social media. Also, when an email is posted to Facebook as the campaign is sent, it’ll likely be as a news item with the “share” option included. As I’ve said earlier, Facebook status updates don’t include that option.
6. Email can go viral: Thanks to the forward button, an email recipient can send an email to as many friends as they’d like. If you can’t share a Facebook status update or forward a Tweet, a food truck owner is banking on someone to remember to have an offline conversation about their truck. Given the trucks’ success, it’s happening. Tweets can be retweeted, thus they can be shared many times over beyond the food truck’s network, but it’s worth mentioning that an email has the same ability to go far beyond its original distribution list, even without ever being posted to a social network.

* This was not intended to be a “why email is better than social media” post. Rather, I’m aiming to highlight the food trucks’ missed opportunities by limiting their marketing plan to Facebook and Twitter. I’ll admit that social media is better for last-minute change of plans. Food trucks have the benefit of picking up and moving to a new location when sales are slow or the weather doesn’t cooperate. But since their customers use more than one channel to get information, in my biased opinion, I think food trucks should also diversify their marketing efforts beyond social to expand their reach via an email marketing program. A few additional fans wouldn’t hurt should they ever decide to add a second (or third) truck to their fleet.

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of Facebook. But just so we’re all clear, it’s a “social networking service and website” (to quote Wikipedia) that connects people to their friends, family members, co-workers, etc. for the purposes of sharing information about their daily lives.

But can it really help your email marketing program? Of course! Here are a couple of tactics for using Facebook to enhance your email marketing program – and vice versa. This post is part 1 of 2. More tactics will be posted this time next week.

Email sign-up forms in your business’s page
This is low-hanging fruit. If you have a Facebook page for your business, incorporate a sign-up form for your email marketing program into the page. Some email software providers (ESPs) have a means for users to build the form directly into your page. Otherwise, link to it from your welcome tab.

By doing this, you’ve converted a Facebook fan into an email subscriber and have an additional channel by which to communicate with them.

Make your email messages shareable
You’ve created a fantastic email campaign and want to enable your recipients to share this message on Facebook. (You’ll first need to create content that your recipients will want to share. What’s considered shareworthy will vary from sender to sender, and even recipient to recipient. That’s an entirely separate posting, but here’s a link with concepts for sharing B-to-B content. Some of the ideas could apply to B-to-C as well.)

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.
The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=URL

Just replace URL with the link you want to share. In the case of an email message, it would be the URL to view your message online. Don’t forget to include a call to action to “share this message”, preferably using a Facebook icon or linked text.

For example here is the link for the blog post of this message arranged so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

When you create a link such as that, a preview window will open with optional image selections from the page URL provided. There will also be a place for your email recipient to include their thoughts as to why this link is worth viewing. Once they hit the “share” button in that window, the link is posted to their Facebook profile profile, their wall is updated and the URL will appear in the news feed of their friends with your recipients’ endorsement. Your message now has a personal referral to your recipient’s Facebook network!

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage your recipients’ entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family – and so on and so on.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment or post to my Facebook wall. Otherwise, stayed tuned next week for a couple more ways Facebook can enhance your email marketing program.

“I hope that social media will forge a way to lessen people’s anchor to their inbox.”

To put that comment in context, he thinks people will soon rely less on email and more on other channels to get their news. Is this foreshadowing for the end of email? Not necessarily, since according to this blog post from the DMA, email’s growth rate was greater than that of Facebook and Twitter in 2010. But to Hernandez’s point that there are multiple news sources consumers can use to get information and email is just one of them.

Since we’re in the email business, let’s talk about how we can apply the rules of Journalism to email marketing:

Know your audience: What are they expecting to hear from you? Stick to the promise made on your sign-up form in terms of frequency of communication and the content of the messages.

Don’t bury the lead: Just as a news story opens with the main point, an email should quickly make its purpose known. Don’t bury your call to action in the fine print.

A newspaper’s headline is akin to an email’s subject line: The same way a headline tells what’s to be expected of the story below, a subject line should do the same for an email’s contents. In just a few words, address what’s to be expected of the message being shared.

Tailor your writing for the medium: A TV reporter doesn’t write the copy for their story the same way a newspaper reporter would write theirs. Modify your content for the parameters of an email message. Not sure how to do that? Less is usually more.

(A disclaimer – all of these points could be expanded into blog/newsletter posts as individual topics, which may happen in the future.)

But, to go back to Hernandez’s comment, if people are relying less on their inbox as a source of information, how can you get the most out of your email program? We’re vested in our email program and want to get the most of this channel.

Improve relevancy: This chart shows some tactics to improve relevancy and the percentage of companies that responded to the survey who use them.

Think of email as the hub of your communications efforts: Use Twitter, Facebook and SEO in conjunction with your email campaigns. Toss out the idea that the channels are silos.

Your mailing list has (presumably) volunteered to receive email from you. Make the most of this consent by keeping these points in mind and your email program should continue to flourish. Feel free to comment on this post or send me an email if you want to add to or continue this dialogue.

There are a few ways to repurpose your newsletter’s content and disseminate this information via social media.  Here are some options:

Create Your Newsletter From Your Blog Posts – Instead of creating new articles for use only in your newsletter, post the content for your blog and have it feed into your newsletter automatically. (MailChimp’s RSS-to-email is one option). Or, include a summary of a few of your most recent blog posts in your newsletter and link back to the original post for the full article. 

Tweet every Newsletter – It’s a best practice to include a link at the top of every newsletter to view it as a web page. You should also include your address on the distribution list for every newsletter you send (one reason being that you experience getting a newsletter just like your contacts do).  Create an account with bit.ly and paste in the link at the top of the newsletter to shorten it and share it via Twitter.  Bit.ly allows you to see how many clicks your link received, as well as the source (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Share on Social Networking Sites – Facebook and LinkedIn allow users to post short messages either as a status update or a network update. Paste the subject line of your newsletter and bit.ly link into this box.

These options allow you to cover all of your bases to spread your company’s good news.  Email is a universal channel. The other networks mentioned above will help you reach those not on your email list with the ultimate goal of converting them to newsletter subscribers.  Don’t limit your bragging to the people who are already believers – reach out beyond your core audience!