Hotmail

What is growth hacking and do you need it?

Just when you think you can know everything there is to know about digital marketing, someone slaps you in the face with a new phrase.

During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too. Today I’ll be looking at growth hacking. 

Of course the phrase ‘growth hacking’ isn’t actually that new. 

Let’s check Google Trends for the term. That’s always a fun job…

What growth hacking teaches us about marketing

What is growth hacking? If you haven’t heard of it, growth hacking is a marketing technique that uses analysis and creativity to sell products and gain exposure.

It differs from traditional marketing by focusing on social metrics and other digital channels to analyze user behavior and deploy innovative or low-cost alternatives to traditional demand-generation and campaign-based marketing.

Perhaps the most famous example of growth hacking was Hotmail. By employing a signature on every out-bound email that said, “Sent from Hotmail. Get your free Hotmail email today!”

Hotmail was able to drive incredible growth numbers in a very short amount of time.

How to get your emails into the Hotmail inbox. Step one: welcome new subscribers

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog on how the new Microsoft WSRD data was impacting email marketing. For webmail accounts managed by Microsoft, WSRD data is increasing effecting whether your email goes to junk, or into the inbox.

These accounts relate to quite a high percentage of some retailers’ email lists (50%+) so how Microsoft treats your mail can have a large impact on the revenue you make from email.

In order to ensure your emails stay in the inbox, this post takes you through developing the customer relationship and increasing user engagement through producing a welcome/nursery programme.

Hotmail WLSRD. Email marketers, be afraid, be very afraid!!

Nothing stands still in the world of email marketing. The only constant is change, and some of the new stuff to rear its head is certainly going to be changing how things happen in future.

That said, some of this “new” stuff isn’t really new at all and has actually been around for a while now, just keeping a low profile.

One such development is Windows Live Sender Reputation Data.

The system that enables recipients to vote for whether certain emails are junk or not has been around for years so why is it so important now, and for those email marketers that have never heard of it, why should they bother about it at all?

Whoopsy daisy log-ins: a further look at good and bad micro-copywriting

I wrote a piece about micro-copywriting earlier this year, and in my ignorance thought this was a new concept, and that I may even have coined the term.

Shows you what I know. It’s a term that’s been used for a number of years, and great examples have been collected already, e.g. this Flickr Microcopy Group (thanks to Doug Kessler for pointing to this).

As the last post was popular I thought I’d bring together some more examples. So here’s a look at some micro-copy from the log-in error messages of four big players in the tech world.

These were easy to collect as I didn’t have to remember my passwords. In the end I found that although this could be an area where it’s not worth trifling with a user’s frustration, there’s still a lot to be improved upon.

And although looking at some of these fine-grained areas could be seen as the pedantry of a dilettante, I like to think of these little things as a microcosm of brand identity.

Hotmail declares war on newsletters

A recent Hotmail blog that
announced changes to the way they handle
mail, and as the world’s largest email provider, these changes are significant for anyone in the email marketing business.

After declaring that it has reduced true spam to about 3%, Hotmail has set its sights on the Bacn (email you wanted, but not right now or never again).

So what are the changes and how will they affect email marketing in the lead up
to Christmas?

IM most meaningful for brand conversations: report

When it comes to influencing consumers, many brands are investing heavily on Facebook. The logic: consumers are on Facebook, and they’re talking about us there, so we should be there too.

But according to Microsoft’s Talking Brands survey, which looked at 4,500 conversations mentioning brands in the UK, Spain and France, one-to-one interaction tools like Hotmail and Messenger are more meaningful than one-to-many conversations on Facebook.