Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

One of the basic rules of data protection is, only give access to those that need it. Reducing the amount of people that can access the data reduces the amount of people who can lose their logins to hackers.

This is one of the benefits of the ‘Enhanced User Permissions’ available in Maxemail V6. Users have always been able to specify what areas of Maxemail are available as per the screen below, but if someone needed access to a single list, they would need access to all lists.

Now for each user, you can assign them to a group. Then against each folder in Maxemail, you can define which groups can read or write in that folder. So you could set a group of users to be able to view all of your newsletters but not actually create any.

This applies to everything you store in Maxemail – lists, emails, reports, segments, templates, forms or dynamic content – choose which users have access to which folders in each of these areas.

Another enhancement is aimed at our customers who have multiple customer spaces. Previously users could either see just one or all customer spaces, but now it is possible to choose which ones they have access to:

For more information on configuring user access rights and folder permissions call our support team on 01327 355871.

Emailcenter won the Silver standard award at the Travel Marketing Awards last night. We received this award for the innovative work we have done for environmentally friendly adventure holiday company – ResponsibleTravel.com.

This award is the latest in a long list of reasons why companies are turning to Emailcenter to deliver highly innovative and targeted email marketing campaigns to their customers.

By using behavioural data captured from their website, ResponsibleTravel.com were able to target their customers with highly relevant holiday emails, resulting in a 254% increase in conversions of prospects.

Read the ResponsibleTravel.com case study.

To discuss how behavioural targeting can help your email marketing get in touch >

No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

Another reason perhaps for this constant tirade of World Cup themed messages is the impact the event has on various businesses sales levels. Talking about the World Cup is not going to help here, particularly as you will be more reliant on your non-Football watching audience during this time. And don’t forget that less than 1/3 of the UK population watched the most popular England match so not everyone is footy mad right now).

What email marketers should be doing is the same as normal – cutting through the everyday inbox clutter by being relevant, timely and offering value to the receiving customer. So rather than keeping the World Cup in your subject line tell your customers what fabulous relevant products are in the email for them this time.

And now that England are out, please don’t just move onto Andy Murray as your next topic.

Facebook Connect is a tool that allows you to login into a website using your Facebook account rather than go through a whole new registration process for each site.

This gives website developers some fantastic benefits:

• An easy to remember login and simple registration process
• Access to basic demographic information on each person
• Greater potential for viral and referrer activity among the users friends
• Ability to recommend purchases based upon their friends activity

Now this all gets people excited about what they can achieve by making content richer, but there is a major downside. Facebook hides all contact information, so effectively there are no options to ‘push’ messages in order to establish a relationship after a customer has been on the site.

This is the sort of talk that leads to people coming out with the over-used and tiresome cliché, “The death of email”. A simple solution for organisations is to require an email address as a well as a Facebook login, on sites where the push capability is important.

The future of Email Marketing and Facebook Connect?

So what is the future of email looking like if we can use Facebook Connect to enhance messaging?

• What have your friends purchased or recommended this week? A new alternative of tailored content versus traditional segmentation which is based upon the individual, not their friend’s activity.

• More efficient and effective “tell a friend” which could actually mean none of these out of date viral emails but simple posts to Facebook walls instead

• Triggered messages around new friends signing up and encouraging the existing friend to do the relationship building for you, as opposed to a standard email based welcome programme (or indeed in addition to)

As with all social media ideas these are initial ideas on the back of a beermat that over time will become more thought out and tested by the market. Let us see what is happening this time next year and I’m willing to bet that Facebook Connect will not be a bad thing for email at all.