The above will no doubt be a familiar scenario for many who have commented on an acquaintances status or someone you know, without knowing most of their friends. The mass of irrelevant ‘comment’ emails that follow are pretty frustrating, causing many users to turn notifications off. Although turning off notifications would stop the flood of unwanted emails, it would also stop you being notified of comments you would be interested in.

Facebook have attempted to address this frequency and relevance issue and have announced the following:

Whilst the debate into the optimum frequency of send is normally applied to marketing emails, brands need to consider this issue even if they are ‘just sending notifications’ and ‘not trying to sell anything’.

Facebook is trying to sell its users something – a place to spend time whilst online. As such Facebook need to treat all emails as marketing emails and ensure they contain more relevant notifications at an appropriate frequency.

All users are different however and wish to be notified of activity to varying degrees.  It is good to see that Facebook is directing users to their preference centre, where users can decide the exact type and frequency of emails they receive – something all senders can learn from.

Facebook’s new found respect for its users is likely down to the emergence of its first main competitor in recent years: Google+.

For more information on the optimum frequency of sending emails, read Choosing the right email frequency by Sean Duffy.

What’s the big deal?

There are more than 500 million people across the globe using the social media power house that is Facebook, spending more that 5 billion minutes online per month!

To put that into perspective if Facebook were a country it would easily eclipse the United States!

If you also take into account that the average user is connected to 80 community pages then you’ll begin to understand what all the fuss is about.

The challenge for the modern digital marketer is to integrate the different social media tools available and start putting them to work. I see Facebook and Twitter not so much as a sale’s tool, but more as a relationship tool. They help to maintain the relationship and hopefully keep your customers interested, active and buying!

As many of you will already know Maxemail has a powerful form tool that not only allows you to create different forms using the builder, it also has the Form Handler which allows you to handle form data from external sources such as your website, blog and…. Facebook?

We are pleased to announce that it is now possible to integrate the Maxemail Form Handler and Facebook using the Static FBML application.

To see how this is done please click here

What does this mean for you?

Previously all Maxemail forms had to be hosted on a dedicated website or integrated into a home page.
This new integrations means that you can integrate your forms within the Facebook window as a tab or as a box. As we have below:

What do I need to do?

First of all you need to have a page for your business. Don’t have a page?

Then read the Hosting Email Sign-up Forms on Facebook page of our manual

The key thing to remember is why have they joined your page? To answer this you need to think of the reasons why you join a page. The common reasons are normally to hear about offers, discounts, sales and competitions so make sure that you put the effort in if you wish to benefit from lateral engagement.

There are many other ways to integrate your web page with Facebook, if you’d like to know more then Facebook have a great plugins area or feel free to contact Client Services.

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.

I have recently received two emails which have stood out from the rest because of their use of video. If  a picture paints a thousand words a video paints a few more than that.

Retail brands can spend millions on the creation of their TV adverts, not to mention the thousands spent on advertising slots between prime time TV programmes.  It therefore surprises me that more brands don’t make the most of these ads by sharing them with their email subscribers.

Below are the two emails that have used video to good effect:

1) Toys R Us

Despite the layout of this email leaving a little to be desired, the email message itself did interest me. The main message highlighted that the much loved “Geoffrey Giraffe” TV advert will be shown again for the first time in over a decade. I didn’t think it had been that long?

Recipients are provided with a link to a landing page containing a selection of Toys R Us adverts from throughout the years. You can share the adverts via social networks and even become a fan of Geoffrey on facebook!

The Nostalgic feelings stirred up by these adverts will help remind recipients why they shop at Toys R Us and why they subscribed to their emails in the first place.

The purpose of the email is to create/grow a community around the Toys R Us brand using Geoffrey as the face man giraffe.

‘Warm and fuzzy’ brand building is not the only effective use of video within emails though, John Lewis (below) use video in a slick sales approach.

2) John Lewis

In this email a member of the John Lewis marketing team introduces the TV advert and the campaigns strapline – Remembering how Christmas used to feel.

What John Lewis do very well apart from further promoting their great advert in an inexpensive way, is that they also lists the products shown in the advert within the email itself. This reinforces the value of the email as a shop window and is a good example of integrated marketing communications.

Again this video as with the Toys R Us video evokes nostalgic feelings, feelings which at Christmas can be a very powerful marketing tool.

Videos are effective at getting a message across in the way it was intended, whether that be to remind recipients of a brand’s values, or to promote a companies products or services.

The traditional email a friend has a few flaws, namely that it is always easier to hit forward in your email client than actually finding your friends addresses and copying and pasting them into the form you have provided. Secondly many people don’t have their friend’s addresses anymore and prefer to communicate via the likes of Facebook.

A better approach is to add a share button to the bottom of you email, like the “Add This” button you can find at the bottom of this page. Your customers can then share your email with their friends via the social network of their choice. Whether it be Facebook, twitter or anything else.

Then their friends can choose to add it to their news feed, re-tweet or whatever the appropriate terminology is for each social network, creating true viral activity. Already there are a number of brands generating significant sums of revenue from this technique.