New Twitter cards to allow email sign-ups

Twitter has unveiled a new lead generation card that allows brands to gain email sign-ups direct from tweets.

The new tool, which has been tested with a few brands already, allows users to sign up via their twitter credentials within the app or website. With one click their username and email address is completed for them and then securely sent to the brand.

This seems to be further expansion by Twitter to appeal to brands, especially following some high profile hacking that has taken place recently.

Currently the lead generation card is only available to Twitter's managed clients but there are plans to roll out globally and to small to medium businesses in the future.

Find out more on their blog.

Small business owners not focusing on marketing.

In a recent survey by Pitney Bowes it was discovered that the majority of small business, from a sample of 500, did not have a marketing plan in place, with only 20% saying they did, whilst 35% admitted to dealing with marketing on an ad-hoc basis.

The study went on to find that SME's lose focus and prioritise low level tasks over marketing, including buying the stationary, cleaning and office repairs coming before marketing.

Whilst multitasking is important, it would appear that many are concentrating too much on the day-to-day running and not looking at the bigger picture. Always difficult when you are running a small business.

Those that are marketing tend to favour print ads, whilst email marketing is still strong.

Read their full report here.

'C' word used in announcement eShot

Disaster hit soup restaurant chain Hale and Hearty last week when an eshot was sent out  to its customers with some quite surprising text.

Don't read on if you are easily offended.

The eshot announced the opening of a 'new' location and then added, "As an added bonus: Mary- you know the cxxt from 47th street- will serve you personally in any manner you choose. So cum one and all to our new location at 464 West Mount Pleasant Avenue, Livingston, NJ."

So how did this happen? Was it a disgruntled employee or placeholder copy that never got caught? No, it was a case of email hacking.

Apparently the passwords have now been changed so hopefully it won't happen again.

The secrets behind email marketing revealed

B2B Marketing, the online community for B2B marketing experts, has unveiled its latest Benchmarking Report on email marketing.

The report, which is produced in association with Circle Research, provides a comprehensive insight into the trends, attitudes, metrics and investment in email marketing by B2B brands in the UK.

The research polled 250 client-side marketers on methods of email marketing that provided the best results to boost the performance and success of emails.

Joel Harrison, editor of B2B Marketing, said, “Despite the growth of social media and concerns over inbox overload, our latest benchmarking report has found that email still continues to be a critical weapon in the armoury of B2B marketers.”

Results found that the three key factors that influenced success were Subject, Subject Line and Data.

The research looked at various areas including usage and frequency of email marketing, email marketing budgets and allocation, database relevance and accuracy, ROI and measurement as well as use and performance of email marketing.

You can download a report summary by clicking on the link below or click here to go to B2B Marketing to puchase the full report at a cost of £150 - it looks like invaluable reading!

B2BM Email Marketing Benchmark Summary.pdf (1461 kb)