McKee Smith: digital media

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope all of you have a successful 2012!

I’m starting out the New Year writing about email marketing plans. Every company, no matter how small, should have an email-marketing plan. These allow you to directly reach out to your customers and convey your message. The cost per thousand impressions – in both dollars and time – is lower than anything else you can do.

There are many different email-marketing plans for a wide variety of price levels. Modern Media Answers offers a couple of different ones, but you should look at several and compare to be sure the one you pick is right for your circumstances. Be sure of three things:

First, there is an easy system to build and edit your list of email addresses. There is no reason this should be hard but different plans uses slightly different systems.

Second, there is an easy “opt-out” button that will automatically remove people who don’t want your email. Federal Law requires this and compliance is so easy with most system there are no reasons to even have a possibility of being in violation.

Third, make sure the system for editing is one with which you are comfortable. Different people are comfortable with different user interfaces – what seems intuitive to me might be unfathomable to others! To each his own and there are enough choices for everyone to find something that works best for him or her.

There are literally hundreds of resources for optimizing your email-marketing plan available from the web. I’ve found Email Marketing Reports to be a great resource. Another one is MailChimp.com. Here are a couple of surprising statistics I’ve found from Mail Chimp:

First, while you might think people have more time on weekends, Saturday and Sunday are the two worse days for people to open marketing emails. Thursday is the best.

Secondly, the more links you put in an email them more likely you are to have someone click on one of them. The chart shows lots of data points, but the overall trend is more links increases the click rate. The chart ends at 20 links so there probably is a point of diminishing returns. But the general rule is more is better.

Overall, an email-marketing plan is a very good way to use digital media to help you get your message out to the public. Now go communicate!

What is digital media? Basically, it is any media in digital form. Pictures are the most common form and they can be lots of different file types include JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs, Targa’s, Photoshop files, Illustrator files, and many other types. It can also be sounds that include music, spoken words, sound effects or any combination those. They can be MP3s, WAVE files, AIFF files or other types. Digital media can also include moving pictures like animations or full movies.

But more broadly, digital media also includes text and layouts on websites. When you post on Facebook®, you are using digital media. Every email you send is digital media. Even you Excel spreadsheets technically are digital media.

All of these different kinds of digital medias have multiple uses for organizations. The most obvious ones are marketing. That is driving customers to buy your products or services. But digital media can also help you communicate with your employees and other stakeholder faster and more accurately. Effective communication can improve moral, reduce turnover, teach and increase both internal and external interest in your organization. This can reduce costs and thus improve your bottom line and the effectiveness of your organization.

Digital media is a tool that can help your improve the performance of you business. If you use traditional accounting, it can both increase revenues and lower costs. If you use Throughput account – part of the Theory Of Constraints – it can increase total throughput and lower investments and operating expenses. Digital media is thus a very powerful tool.

Like any tool, it must be used properly or it can hurt rather than help your organization. And like any tool, few people are born knowing it’s most productive uses. The purpose of this blog is to help identify the best uses of digital media and show relatively easy, inexpensive and practical ways of implementing digital media to help your organization achieve it’s goals.