Few people know the ins and outs of Facebook better than Nick O’Neill. In fact, his blog AllFacebook now attracts hundreds of thousands of readers each month looking for resources and news regarding the world’s most popular social network.

Recently, O’Neill wrote a wonderful post offering advice to readers on how they can leverage Facebook to increase their reach and generate sales. The end result was this funnel you see on the left that he dubs “The Facebook Sales Funnel.”

Look familiar? It should.

Look closely at each segment of the funnel and you’ll notice that each of these phases can be applied to just about any marketing scenario whether it’s inside Facebook or not.

Unless you’re selling widgets, where his alternative 3-step sales process of click, learn and purchase can be applied, you’re probably going to be looking at similar funnel as the one O’Neill created.

As he highlights in phase 5 of his article, Facebook marketing (much like the marketing of higher education) is all about relationship marketing.  It’s not so much the initial purchase that matters, but the long-term value of retaining that customer and earning their loyalty. As defined in Wikipedia, “Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or “Intrusion” marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.”

Across all of your relationship building and recruitment efforts, you’ll have periods of discovery (students find you or you find them); education (students seek out more information about your offerings or you offer them resources for to learn more); engagement (there’s now a mutual interest between student and institution so you find ways to connect on a deeper level); action (application, admission and enrollment); analysis (see what works and what doesn’t).

O’Neill takes this methodology and applies it specifically to Facebook, but you could and should give thought to how each of your marketing channels can help you navigate through each phase of the relationship.

In a previous blog post that included another funnel created by Brad J. Ward that touches on this notion, we spoke about social media as a channel.  O’Neill’s marketing funnel not only serves as great advice for leveraging Facebook, but as a reminder that social media may just be a new way (that works in concert with other media) to tackle an old problem…moving constituents from the discovery phase to the action phase.  

When it comes to maximizing conversion on your email campaigns many of you are familiar with some of the the basics:

• Provide strong, relevant content to your email subscribers
• Create a compelling call-to-action
• Manage frequency to avoid list fatigue

However, while content is king, design also plays a critical role in enhancing your email marketing efforts. This week there were a couple of interesting articles that remind us that design matters a lot. As reported by MarketingVox, a recent survey of the top 100 internet retailers found that horizontal navigation bars, emails with fewer links, HTML coding (vs. images) and special tactics to highlight sales, seasonal specials and featured departments work best in emails.

One question that comes up quite a bit is how to best design emails. MediaPost’s Email Insider included a great piece yesterday that reminded readers to design for preview panes and don’t forget about your landing page design (it’s kind of critical part of the conversion puzzle).

Finally, when it comes to design basics, the most important thing to remember is that many email clients are archaic in how they handle HTML. As such, you may want to remind your web designer (who you’ve probably tapped to design your emails) to design like it’s 1999. There are resources all over the web for best practices, but Dennis Deacon at Smatterings offers a few concise tips:

Layout with Tables

After several years after migrating to using <divs> and CSS to layout web pages, it was awkward, but necessary to revert back to using tables for layout. This to ensure the greatest compatibility with the many email clients used. You should first use a “body” table at 100% width, especially if you plan to use a background color or image for email. This should be followed by a “container” table that will hold the content of your message. The width should be limited to around 600 pixels. You should think of your email message in terms of sections, with each section hosted within a table, with each table stacked on top of each other. A note on nested tables: you should limit the number of nested tables as much as possible. Some email clients have difficulties in rendering multiple levels of nested tables. In the example below, the green stacked tables are nested 2 levels down.

Use CSS Sparingly

Though some email clients can understand CSS instructions, you should limit CSS to simple text formatting. Also, CSS should be implemented in-line, not embedded (within the <head> tag) or from an external style sheet. In fact, at least one email system formats text using the <font> tag, and places in-line CSS as an attribute within the <font> tag. Example:

<font color=”#000000” face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sansserif” size=”4” style=”FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;FONT-SIZE: 14pt;COLOR: #000000;”>

Use Tables for Backgrounds Colors & Images

If your design includes background colors or images, consider using tables to implement. The <body> tag is frequently stripped on attributes by email clients. Also, make sure your design does not require (is only enhanced by) a background image. Many email clients do not support background images.

Place Your Key Message Prominently

Many people scan their inbox for messages to read or delete. Each email client handles HTML emails differently, even dependent on the platform. Email applications, such as Outlook, provide a preview pane that can be sized and laid out as the user sees fit. This can produce unwanted results, as the main message of your email is more than 200 pixels down the screen and not seen. To improve on this, place a textual statement that presents the key message of the email at the very top of the page. Example:

Using this method also benefits users of email services such as GMail, that display the first few textual characters of each email next to the subject:

Use Alt Text in Images to Repeat Your Message

Most designed think graphically. Therefore, many designers may be horrified when they discover that most email applications and systems have images turned off by default. You can still get your message out, but you’ll have to leverage the image’s “alt” attribute to repeat the message. This way, the message is isplayed in text and not lost. Example (compare with the screenshot above):

These are just a few tips to get you started.  But implementing these simple tactics should help you see big improvements in conversion.  Have any other tips you’d like to share?  

Update on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 12:19PM by Dan Obregon

Unfortunately, it appears as if there’s no end in sight to this maddness, and email marketers will have to continue to design like it’s 1999 well into the next decade. Microsoft’s next version of Outlook 2010 looks like it will not support email stanards and could be even worse email marketers.

According to the Email Standards Project, “This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.”

Join the movement to Fix Outlook.

In the meantime, follow the tips above to make sure your messages get noticed.

During an email exchange about social media the other day, a client asked me a seemingly simple question, “I now have the Facebook Fan page, we have a Twitter account, we have the old Facebook Group, we have two Linked In Groups (one grad, one undergrad), we have RSS and we have the electronic newsletter campaigns, SO HOW DO I KNOW WHAT TO SEND WHERE?”

My general thinking here is that content trumps channel. In other words, regardless of the social network, you want to make sure the content you’re sending out is relevant to your specific audience. Some content may be more relevant to alumni, other content may be more relevant to current students and prospects.

Social networking tools let you get very segmented populations since members can self-select when, where and how they want to interact with your institution. However, with content that’s relevant to all of your constituents…why not broadcast that across all of your web properties? 

This question also prompted us to further explore the notion of social media as a channel. It’s no doubt that a ton of attention is being given to social media these days as a marketing channel (we obviously believe it its power to help develop relationships with constituents). But does this mean that you should abandon your traditional channels as this Mashable article suggests some brands are doing? Not yet.

The reality is that we’re still living in a multi-channel world. Many consumers now view social media simply as additional channels of communication, and they opt-in (or out) of receiving information on their preferred channels much like they do with email.

The key is finding the right balance to make sure your social media presence complements your other marketing channels without cannibalizing them.

The first key is to build a solid foundation: Ron Bronson examined this topic a few months ago where he wrote, “The institutional web site has fully arrived as a ‘marketing tool/ on many campuses and the uneasy balance between trying to reach the students of the future, while connecting to their parents, alumni and pretty much anyone else with a rooting interest in the school can be a difficult task at times, especially for smaller schools and community colleges.” According to Bronson, the institution’s website should serve as the hub for the online brand while social media tools serve to extend that brand.

The second key is figuring out goals for each of your channels: Brad J. Ward took this concept a step further by suggesting a social media recruitment funnel.

He cautions that his funnel is not meant to be all inclusive (and others have commented that some of these social media tools can be used outside of the categories Brad assigned), but the general concept is pretty straight forward: Seek. Engage. Retain.

It’s a great illustration that really helps to make sense of the social media landscape. But at its core, the message that Brad is trying convey is not all that different than what you’d expect from ANY marketing initiative. Here I’ve broken it down into 3 stages. You begin with lead generation and qualification (stage 1), continue with lead nurturing (stage 2) and move to analysis (stage 3) to hopefully improve stage 1 and 2 the next time around.

Now, what matters here is not necessarily the channel but the action. Can you figure out ways to leverage social media to help you at each of these stages? If so, great. If you’re looking for inspiratoin on how to use social media to supplement your other marketing efforts, here are six tips published recently by DMNews.

If not, you better make sure your other channels are working for you.

Ultimately, you want to focus on finding the right channels to address these stages and help students move through another funnel that we’re all familiar with already.

Time is running out!  This Saturday, May 16th, is the deadline to submit your speaking proposal for this year’s Personify Education, the Intelliworks Users’ Conference.  We’re proud to announce a great line up of speakers this year, including media and higher education marketing experts like:

• Joseph Turow, Ph.D., Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at The University of Pennsylvania
• Brenda Harms, Consultant, Stamats 

Plus, presentations from colleges and universities like yours!  

We’ve already received a number of proposals this year ranging from one of the nation’s fastest growing for-profit university systems to the continuing education department of a small, liberal arts college in California.  However, there’s still time for you to submit your ideas and be a part of this year’s conference.