Should Your Email Marketing Campaign Be More Interactive?

Editor’s note:
This is a guest contribution by Amanda DiSilvestro. Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory – Business.com.

Companies are still working to discover the cure for email marketing deletion. You might have your list perfected, your newsletters segmented, and a lot of great images, but for some reason people tend to delete these emails even before they get to that great attention grabber you worked so hard to create.

(Image source: Fotolia)

Email marketing is a great way to get your content in front of consumers, but getting it to stay there, that part has yet to be perfected. The question then is this: What will get consumers interested in our messages?

One of the latest and greatest tricks is interaction. Consumers like to be involved as much as possible with the things they see online, so bringing that element into an email marketing campaign is a great idea. Although most companies have stuck to catchy headlines and interesting graphics in the past, 2012 is going to move email marketing into an interactive state. After all, turning away from a piece of content and ignoring a link is easy, but it’s a bit harder to turn away from an opportunity to participate in something.

The trick to email marketing interaction, however, isn’t to send readers to another webpage where you have something interactive planned. The cool, fun way to interact should be right there in the email marketing message itself. For this reason, some types of interaction work well, but others are better left for a different campaign.

Consider the following types of interaction and whether or not you should use them when marketing through email.

[Good] Surveys and polls will not take up a lot of space in your email marketing message, yet it will give readers the sense of participation. If you’re trying to prove a point or ask for opinions, it might be a good idea to ask a question and hope for feedback. People will be more likely to pay attention to something that they know is quick and easy; and if they’re interested in the results they may be more willing to read the content.

(Image source: Fotolia)

After all, it’s much easier and faster to vote on an issue than read an entire piece of content on the issue. If you can configure the message to show a chart or graph after each vote, people will likely feel even more engaged. After all, why vote if you can’t even see the results?

[Bad] Putting up a video or offering a live chat is a great idea, but not in an email marketing campaign. Videos are notorious for taking a while to load, and with email marketing you don’t have a large enough window of time. When people open up that email, they need to be engaged, and looking at a black screen that says “buffering” just won’t cut it.

The same problem occurs with live chat. If you want to give readers the option of clicking a link to view a video or chat live with a team member, by all means go for it. Just know that this isn’t quite interactive within the actual campaign, so likely won’t gain any new readers.

[Good] Unless today is the first day you’ve been online since the 90's, you know that social media has exploded onto the scene. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Google+, social networking is becoming more important than ever. According to Facebook statistics, one in every nine people on Earth has a Facebook account. In other words, people love to share things they find online with their friends and those starting a small business can’t get enough of these networks.

(Image source: Fotolia)

Place social sharing buttons on your email marketing campaign, and you’re sure to have more interaction than if you were to send out a plain piece of content. This will also show readers how often an article has been shared; thus giving it even more appeal (people tend to listen to their peers as opposed to the company trying to make money; nothing personal).

[Depends..] In general, I would say that infographics will help keep people engaged. Although this isn’t necessarily interaction, it is an alternative to plain text. According to Jungle Minds Digital Consultancy, ’87% of people who saw an infographic read the accompanying text, whereas only 41% read the text of an "ordinary" page.’

In other words, infographics can be extremely effective. They will work great in an email message if you keep the infographics simple. If you have a huge infographic that takes too long to load, you will lose your readers. If you can keep it simple and engaging, then an infographic will work great.

[Bad] Directing people from one page to a different page for interaction simply won’t work. People enjoy interaction, but not enough to go out and find it. If it’s there, they’ll take a look, but otherwise they will probably pass. Simply clicking on a link is the most basic form of interaction. In fact, with all of the other types of interaction available, clicking on a link hardly counts.

Ultimately, having quality content is the most important thing in an email marketing campaign. You can have all the bells and whistles and fun interactive opportunities you want, but none of it will matter if your content is poorly written. People will be able to see through all of the exciting interactive elements, so make sure that interaction is the last piece to your email marketing puzzle.

This post is published by a Hongkiat.com staff (editors, interns, sometimes Hongkiat Lim himself) or a guest contributor.

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WordPress Conditional Tags (And Snippets) for Beginners

One of the best features of the WordPress could be the conditional tags. It allows you to tell the code to act differently in specific situations. For example, you can check if the user is using Windows or Mac, and display different content based on the systems. You can also redirect to post if search query only returns single result. You name the situations, the conditional tags can recognize them all!

Despite its flexibility on determining actions based on different situations, it’s also extremely easy to learn, and there are even tutorials and resources spread over the web for you to actually master it. That said, in this article we’ll go through a detailed introduction about the conditional tags, how they work and when to actually use them.

In the last section of the article we’ll also show 10 useful snippets for you to achieve the most with conditional tags, so get them all to make your WordPress site acts more intelligently to unique situations!

With PHP if statements you can ask if something is true or false, 1 or 0. If your statement is true, your code will be executed, and if it’s false nothing will happen, depending on how you decide the actions in the conditional tags. Check out the example, and I’m sure you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

You can also use elseif which lets you add another statement, and else that will be executed if your first statement is false.

That’s all you need to know about if statements for now, let’s get into WordPress conditional tags! However, if you want to dig deeper into PHP if statements, head over to php.net for reference.

When using the native WordPress function like is_home(), you simply ask WordPress if the user is currently on the home page or not. WordPress will then answer with 0 for no, and 1 for yes.

For a complete list over WordPress conditional tags you can visit their codex.

There are cases when you might want to check more than one statement. This is easily done by using AND and OR.

Conditional tags are great when you want to change your content depending on the answers of question relevant to your site. Is the user logged in? Is she using Internet Explorer? Is there any post to be shown?

To get an example of conditional tags in use, we can look into Twenty Eleven’s (the standard theme in WP 3.2) index.php, line 20.

... posts ...... search field ...

This checks if there is any post to show, and if the answer is no, the search field is displayed.

Below is another example of WordPress conditional tags:

if( is_admin() ): # User is administatorendif;if( is_home() AND is_page('1') ): # The user is at the home page and the home page is a page with the ID 1endif;if( is_single() OR is_page() ): # The user is reading a post or a pageendif;if( !is_home() AND is_page() ): # The user is on a page, but not the homepageendif;

The conditional tags available in the WordPress codex page are pretty limited to the big parts of WordPress, like posts, pages and such. There are, however, a lot of small and useful statements available if you look around the web.

This will be a handy snippet if you have a blog with users registered, as it checks whether your user is logged in or not.

if ( is_user_logged_in() ): echo 'Welcome, registered user!';else: echo 'Welcome, visitor!';endif;

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A good snippet if you have user registration feature in your site, and you want to let visitors to know about whether the registrations are opened or closed.

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Want to provide specific content based on the Operating System that users are using? Here’s the snippet for you.

if( stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"mac") ): echo 'Hello, I'm a Mac.';else: echo 'And I'm a PC.';endif;

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If you are using Google Analytics and you only want to track the visitors other than your authors and writers, you can probably use this snippet to achieve the purpose. Be sure to change UA-XXXXXXX-X to your Google Analytics ID.

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Using the conditional tag below you can check if the current post is in a specific custom post type, for example, books.

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Add this snippet to your WordPress theme‘s functions.php to redirect your search to post automatically when WordPress only returns a single search result.

post_count == 1) { wp_redirect( get_permalink( $wp_query->posts['0']->ID ) ); } }}?>

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The chances are if you’re using separators between your posts you probably don’t want to include it into the last post of the page. Include the conditional tag below into your loop where you want to display something only if it’s on the last post.

current_post + 1) < ($wp_query->post_count) ) { ?>

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There are times when you want to know the role of the users, for example you only want certain links (edit, etc) to be displayed for authors. The function current_user_can() works like what mentioned above, and here is the code:

[Source]

Ever wanted to disable the Tinymce HTML editor for everyone but admin? Here’s the snippet for you.

user_level != 10) {echo ;}}?>

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StumbleUpon is a great social media which is able to attract traffic to your site. Here’s a trick to attract the Stumblers: display a special message to welcome them by using the conditional tag below which checks if the user comes from StumbleUpon.

Hello StumbleUpon user!

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Hopefully you found WordPress conditional tags to be as awesome as I do. It saves me tons of time while developing templates, not having to come up with my own statements.

Also make sure to take a look at the WordPress Codex to see what else can be done with it. Happy coding!

Looking forward to make your WordPress site even better? Here are the resources for you!

Flip is a web developer & Wordpress enthusiast from Sweden. He is also the founder and editor over at WP-Snippets, and co-founder of Pixby Media AB.

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How to Rename Facebook Page Vanity URL [Quicktip]

Have you ever created a Facebook Page but found it necessary to change the page name after? Well, you are not alone, in fact many businesses face the same situation in the midst of figuring out the best name to put on their Facebook Page.

If you do not already know, Facebook Pages only allow name changes to be made to your Facebook page as long your fans or ‘number of likes’ is not more than 100. The general idea is that on the 101st Like onwards, no more name changes are allowed, no matter how big a spelling error you have made on your Facebook Page name.

However all is not lost. There’s a chance for you to change your Facebook Page name even with more than 100 Likes to your page, but it’s subjected to Facebook’s approval.

Recommended Reading: 10 Tips & Tricks For Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page

Since the FB Timeline for Pages was only launched recently, some of you may still be using the old Facebook Page for your businesses. Therefore in this tutorial, we will guide you on how to rename your Facebook Page in both classic Facebook Page as well as the new FB Timeline for Pages.

If you are still using the classic Facebook Page, go to your Facebook Page and click on ‘Edit Page’.

If your Page is on Timeline, go to your Page and click on the button ‘Admin Panel’.

Then click on ‘Manage’ and go to ‘Edit Page’.

Now on the left menu, go to ‘Basic Information’.

When you are already in the Page, look for ‘Name’ and change the existing Page name with your preferred new name. Click ‘Save’ and that’s it.

For whatever the reason you may need to change your Facebook Page, but find it unable to do so since you have amassed more than 100 Likes. Head over to this link and fill up the form. Fill up the ‘Current Page name’, ‘Desired Page name’ and provide the ‘Link to Page’ of your current Facebook Page.

On the dropdown menu, please select the best reason why you want to change the Page name. Click on the ‘Send’ button to submit to Facebook.

Take note that there is no promise that Facebook will immediately make the changes for you, but logically, provided that you gave them a valid enough reason for the changes to be made, Facebook will make the change.

Changing your Facebook Page name is not as hard as you may think, but please also be reminded that the ease of it all is only applicable to pages with not more than 100 Likes. When you have reached 101 likes on your Facebook Page, the changing of the page name will require approval from Facebook. When all else fails, you may need to sacrifice this page and create a new Page.

What is your experience in renaming the Facebook Page? Have you tried submitting the form before?

Mustaza is a traveller, social media lover and a freelance web designer with years of experience working collaboratively over the Internet.

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