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Industry insights from Red Door Interactive

July 16th, 2010 – Welcome to another RDI Click! post. Click! is a weekly collection of digital news highlights from Red Door’s most inquiring minds.

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Why Consumers Connect with Marketers via Email and Social – eMarketer
“Until recently, most efforts have focused on linking existing email strategies with emerging social ones. As combined efforts become more advanced, sophisticated integration will mean segmenting email and social audiences to understand how they overlap, what they want and how messages should be customized for the two tactics.

Based on research from ExactTarget, the motivation for opting in to marketing emails somewhat different from what most studies show regarding liking brands on Facebook or following them on Twitter. Discounts and promotions were the clear winner, followed by freebies and sales. Reasons like wanting to interact with the brand or show their support came in at the bottom of the list.  For social followers, discounts and deals are still highly important. They came in second in a March 2010 survey by Morpace about joining Facebook fan pages. Chadwick Martin Bailey found they were the primary reason to follow a brand on Facebook or Twitter in February 2010.”

When a user is signing up they are showing their affinity for the brand, or at the least, desire to get something in return, particularly some type of discount. Opting into an email provides a clear opportunity to leverage enthusiasm to produce multiple conversions. 

So, if your brand is going to make the effort to capture email, rather than bogging them down with extra form fields on an overlay, consider stacking the functions and give them the ability to extend their enthusiasm in their social networks. 
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RestEngine Social Application Messaging Platform Leaves Beta, Offers Tips – Inside Facebook
“RestEngine, a social application messaging platform and email service provider, has emerged from private beta after five months of refining the product while working with developers including Crowdstar (Hello City) and Lolapps (Band Of Heroes).RestEngine Social Application Messaging Platform Leaves Beta, Offers Tips

By sending emails that note a user’s score, energy level, friends also playing, or next in-game task, RestEngine’s clients enjoy high click-through rates and increased user engagement.”  Relevance is a key factor in the success of email marketing.  Targeting at this level of detail clearly exceeds user expectations when placed amongst the laundry list of ‘1 size-fits-all’ campaings.”
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The Social Media/E-Mail Connection – eMarketer
Following up on the recent flurry of email and social Click! posts, this simple article will help you determine how your brand’s efforts stack up against the norm.  Are you just average, or are you utilizing what have proven time and time again to be the Internet’s most powerful tools?

“One thing that’s clear is that marketers are very focused on linking their existing e-mail marketing with their emerging social media strategies. In a survey published by Econsultancy and Adestra, 37% of e-mail marketers (mostly UK-based, but some from other regions) said they already encourage people to share content on social networks, and another 31% said they are planning to.”
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Facebook Preparing To Announce 500 Million Users – Techcrunch
“Facebook is about to announce that they’ve hit 500 million users — a milestone that cements (as if it hadn’t already) the site’s status as one of the web’s biggest successes ever. Of course, at Facebook’s growth trajectory it hasn’t been a matter of if the social network would be hitting 500 million, but when it would (in fact, the movie poster for the upcoming movie The Social Network uses the 500 million stat in its tagline). Still, it’s finally about to become official.”
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Starbucks Surpasses 10 Million Fans, Closing In On Lady Gaga – MediaPost
“Starbucks’ success with emphasizing product promotions on Facebook seems to validate the results of a Razorfish study last year that found that traditional direct marketing techniques like offering discounts and deals are the keys to building engagement on social networking sites rather counting on some deeper connection to a brand.”
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BlueGlass Online Marketing Conference LA - July 19^th and 20^th
BlueGlass LA is an online marketing conference featuring the top social media, search marketing & business experts in the industry today. It has been designed to give you the best in topics, trends, strategies and networking possibilities.

Red Door Interactive’s John Faris will be attending this meeting.  Look him up if you’re planning on attending.
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A comprehensive list of noteworthy news can be found at http://delicous.com/RedDoorInteractive.  Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’d like up to the minute updates on our latest posts http://twitter.com/reddoor.