Citigroup Inc. has partnered with Amazon.com Inc. to add select Amazon merchandise and services to its loyalty offerings.

Members of Citi’s ThankYou Rewards Network can use points accrued through the loyalty program to purchase products offered on and fulfilled through Amazon.com. Rewards redemption takes place on Citi’s recently-renovated online interface, ThankYou.com — which allows searching and browsing by point range and category.

“We’re really focused on providing value to our members, especially ones that are highly engaged, and we want to nurture our relationship with them to build long lasting relationships,” said Nancy Gordon, EVP of ThankYou Network. “We felt that partnering with Amazon, one of the largest online retailers, would provide a better customer experience.”

The range of products offered on Amazon.com should help make ThankYou more appealing and relevant to a wide cross-section of Citi customers. With Amazon, ThankYou Network should be better able to differentiate itself from the glut of loyalty programs bombarding today’s consumers, Gordon added.

“Customers want choice, and they want the immediacy of being able to redeem for rewards,” she said. “Amazon helps provide a huge assortment of rewards at lower point options like books and DVDs and allows people to actually redeem for rewards quicker. They also provide for fast shipping, which means customers can get rewards quicker.”

Citi is promoting the new offering on its Web site and is gearing up for a more elaborate marketing campaign that may include e-mail, print and transpromo.

The ThankYou Network’s 13 million members earn points through using Citi cards, booking travel on Expedia and using Smith Barney debit cards.

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This is the second post in a series; you may want to read the first post on why email marketing calendars matter before reading this one.

Do you feel like you’re constantly working at the last minute to get an email out to your subscribers?

Many publishers just like you often fall behind on their email marketing campaigns. You’re focused on getting a new product ready to go to market, or improving an existing one, or working on any one of a mountain of other important areas of your business.

Your sending frequency falters, and when the realization sets in that you haven’t emailed your list in a while, you rush to get an email newsletter out to it.

Playing Catch-Up Is Exhausting

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that… but yet you’re here reading, so maybe you’re not as on top of your email marketing campaigns as you’d like to be.

Maybe you’re looking for a way to relieve some of the burden of trying to publish a newsletter at the last minute.

Now, one of the topics we discuss in our email newsletter seminar is where to quickly find content that you can copy and paste into a future newsletter — places like your sent folder, your blog/forum/FAQ, and article sites like EzineArticles.com.

However, if you’re waiting until the last minute to go and find/create your email content, those content sources can only relieve so much pressure.

To stay in touch with your subscribers consistently, and not feel like you’re rushing at the last minute, it’s best to space out your writing/publishing duties over time. This is where an email marketing calendar can do you a world of good.

But before we can go plugging schedules and send dates into our calendar, we need to take a few minutes to think about how we’re going to improve our campaigns using that calendar.

We need a plan.

Planning, Step 1: What Do Your Readers Want to Know About?

This might seem like a pointless exercise — after all, isn’t it obvious what they want to know about? Just look at your business, your site and your signup form; what do they offer?

I think this is worth doing because you might find that what you actually send to your readers doesn’t necessarily match what they want to know about.

A couple common causes of this:

You’ve adapted your campaigns after getting feedback from readers.You’re now talking to them about different topics than you did originally, or with a different focus, but you never updated your site or signup form to reflect the changes.

Now new subscribers, who didn’t see those changes as they took place, aren’t getting exactly what they bargained for when signing up.

You’ve changed your signup page/s or form/s, testing new headlines and incentives to get people to subscribe.Like the last example, there’s now a difference between what subscribers expect to get, and what they actually get.

In your haste to “get something out” to your list, you’ve sent emails that didn’t deliver exactly what your readers came to you to get.Go back and scan a few months’ worth of email campaigns — if you find you’ve rushed content out like this a lot, you may find that what you think you’re writing about, and what your readers are actually getting, are quite different.

To plan your email marketing campaigns, and put together a calendar, you first have to decide what exactly you’re going to write about — and what type of content, stuff you may have sent in the past just because “it was time to send,” you’re not going to send anymore.

Look at your site and signup forms. What are your subscribers are signing up to your campaigns to get?Now, based on that, write down what you’re going to email them to meet those expectations — what topics are you going to focus on? What not quite on-topic content are you going to stop sending them?

Once you’ve decided what to send (and what not to), you’re ready to start brainstorming content, and spreading it over the upcoming weeks and months.

Planning, Step 2: How Often Do You Plan to Email Them?

If you immediately said “daily” or “weekly” or “monthly,” hold on a second.

It’s good that you’re that confident and decisive about your campaigns. That instinct (hopefully) comes from the experience you’ve gained in past email marketing efforts. You know approximately what your audience feels is the right frequency to hear from you.

But remember, we just spent time deciding what we are and are not going to send out. And the #1 thing that can blow all that planning we just did sky-high is our choice of email frequency.

After all, if you decide to send weekly, but you don’t have enough of the right content one week, what do you do? Many publishers fall back into the habit of sending content that’s not in line with readers’ objectives and expectations.

A few things to consider when determining your email frequency:

How long will it take you to write an email of the quality your subscribers expect?

How many email messages do you intend to send in a week/month/year? Multiply this by how long you estimate it takes you to have a campaign ready to send to find out how much time you need to budget per week/month/year for composing emails.

Consider: If You Send 2 Emails per Week, That’s 104 Emails per Year (or About 9 per Month)

And that’s per campaign. What if you have multiple campaigns and you’re sending to each one twice per week?

I’m not trying to scare you away from sending that often. My point is this:

If it takes you just an hour to create an email (going from nothing in front of you, to written, tested and ready to send), and you always wait until the last minute to create your campaigns, that’s 104 hours each year that you’re unnecessarily stressing yourself out by not planning and using an email marketing calendar.

I sure don’t want to be stressed out unnecessarily, and certainly not for 100+ hours a year.

Wouldn’t it be easier to spend a little time each day planning your future campaigns, instead of the odd panicked hour here and there on the days you send?

Planning, Step 3: How Far In Advance Will You Create Your Content?

For many email newsletter publishers, this can be the hardest part of planning. They think:

I’ve promised my subscribers the latest news in my industry, so how can I possibly write my emails in advance? They wouldn’t contain the latest news!

Please don’t take this line of thinking. It’s a productivity-killer.

Consider the following:

News that is “old” to you typically isn’t old to your readers. You’re much more aware of the latest news in your industry than they are (after all, they’re waiting to hear it from you!)

Even major weekly news magazines like Time and The Economist contain news that’s a week old.

Not all readers are going to open/read your email the very day you send it… so even if you did wait until the last minute to get the latest news, by the time they read it, it’s a day or more old anyway.

So it pays to put our campaigns together in advance. But how far in advance?

For me, this depends on the frequency you choose for your messages, the amount of content you intend to put in them, and whether or not you’re sending a series of closely-related messages on a certain topic.

Frequency

The more often you intend to email your subscribers, the further in advance it pays to plan — if you think it’s bad trying to put one email together at the last minute, try doing it for two or three at the same time.

Amount of Content

The more you intend to put into your individual messages, the further out you should plan — instead of creating the email all at once the day you want to send it, try doing it in thirds, starting 2 weeks (or as far as you can) ahead.

By breaking up the amount of time you need to dedicate to that email, and giving yourself plenty of “buffer” in between when you create the email, and when it has to be sent, you take a lot of stress out of your email marketing.

Closely-Related Email Series

Think of these as mini-campaigns within your larger email marketing efforts, where you have so much to say on a topic that it can’t fit into one or two “normal-sized” (for you) messages.

You’ll want to plan these out furthest of all, to make sure that:

Content flows well from one message to the next

The size of each message in the series is appropriate and consistent with what your subscribers expect

The messages are spaced out at appropriate intervals

These “features” or mini-campaigns require a little more planning than your typical messaging not only because you have so much going into them, but also because your subscribers are going to realize that these are special (after all, you’re going to market it to them, aren’t you?) and may notice if the planning isn’t there.

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In recent years, advertising has become a major revenue source for many websites. Not too long ago, online ads were often met with disapproval from visitors, and advertisers were unsure about their value or effectiveness. Today, most visitors have come to expect ads on commercial websites, and advertisers have recognized the potential of various online ad opportunities. Ads have long been a part of print publications, such as magazines and newspapers, and now they essentially have the same role in online periodicals and publications.

Although advertising is a concern for website owners and those pushing products or services, it is also has an impact on Web designers, because they have to be able to design and develop websites that can produce ad revenue and still meet the needs of visitors. Clients with websites that depend on ad revenue need a design that provides the necessary screen space and a proper layout for selling ads, and advertisers need placement that will get them the exposure they seek.

While advertisements are hardly the primary concern of Web designers in general, not accounting for them will result in a very awkward layout that can either detract from the flow of the website or put the ads in a spot where they will not receive enough attention from visitors. In order to maximize ad revenue for the client, with minimal interference in the appearance and usability of the website, the designer must take advertising needs into consideration throughout the design process.

Ads on The Raw Story seem to be squeezed in wherever possible, to the detriment of the content.

Starting with the Basics

Of course, not all websites sell advertising space, but a growing number of them do. As the popularity of blogs continues to rise and designers get more requests for custom blog themes, this issue will only become more common. An adequate discussion of the subject requires starting with some basic issues.

Why do advertisers pay for ads?

Obviously, advertisers buy ads to gain exposure and improve their bottom line. The goals vary from one campaign to the next. Some may be primarily concerned with brand recognition and general exposure, while others are only concerned with sales of products. Online advertisers may be looking for click-through visitors from their ads, but ultimately all advertisers look for a strengthened business as a result of their campaigns.

Web designers can have some impact on this issue by their placement of ads. Of course, designers cannot completely sell products or services for advertisers, but ad placement is key to click-through rates and so has a sizeable impact on the success of an ad campaign.

What are advertisers paying for?

Are advertisers paying for clicks by visitors? Are they paying for sales conversions? Are they paying simply for the screen space? Each of these is a possibility and depends on the situation. AdSense ads, for example, pay publishers per click. Affiliate ads pay per sale or per action. Direct ads, such as most banner sales, are generally sold at a set price for the screen space and location.

Keeping the desires of advertisers in mind throughout the design process is critical if the website is going to be selling ads directly to other businesses. AdSense and affiliate ads can be placed just about anywhere on a website, although the results will vary, but direct ad revenue will depend on what advertisers feel they are getting for their money. If they are paying for prime on-screen real estate, that’s what they’ll expect.

Why do websites or businesses publish ads?

Advertising can be very lucrative for websites with a large volume of traffic. Although there are other ways to monetize a website, ads are one of the few ways in which a website owner can quickly capitalize on existing traffic without any additional work, such as developing products or providing services.

Bloggers publish ads because the revenue allows them to earn income and essentially pay themselves for the time it takes to write content and maintain the blog. News websites sell ads because they typically have large audiences and because their offline business models, such as for printed newspapers, aren’t able to produce as much ad revenue as they have in past years. As a growing number of consumers turn to online publications rather than the daily paper for their news, ad revenue will shift from print publications to online options.

In most cases, ad revenue is critical to the success of the business. For this reason, it must be a priority during the design process. For a service-based business that uses a website to sell its services to visitors, the designer’s job includes creating a website that effectively promotes those services to visitors. The same thing can be said of websites and businesses that rely on ad income.

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Hell hath no fury like an angry, baby-carrying mom armed with a blog, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.

Yesterday, Johnson & Johnson posted a Motrin ad on its Web site and on YouTube all about alleviating the pain of “baby wearing,” or toting around your baby in a sling. It was part of a broader ad campaign about the different pains Motrin can alleviate. In particular with this ad, JNJ tried to use humor to unite moms in some Oprah-like virtual high-five over the rigors of carrying around babies.

The controversial ad
Motrin united moms alright—only they united against J&J. What began over the weekend is continuing today as thousands of Tweets (as individual microblogging posts are called) are still flying about the scandal. Many moms said they felt patronized, disrespected and insulted with language that implied carrying a baby was a fashion accessory. “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience,” and referring to carrying babies in slings as “these things.” (You can see the ad here)

What’s at the heart of this controversy? Authenticity on the web. The stakes are high in the realm of social media. The right ad—like Obama’s “Yes We Can” —can hit the right populist chord, and outperform even the most glitzy, expensive media buy. But a wrong ad can become not just an embarrassment but make your brand the object of an angry digital mob.

Motrin pulls the ad
Of course, if Motrin was hoping for a viral campaign, they got it. The outrage in the Twitter-verse guaranteed…

Popularity: 6%

If you follow online marketing circles, you’ve likely seen (and participated in) a lot of discussions about social media and using it to grow your business.While social media isn’t a replacement for email marketing, it can complement it by helping you connect a larger audience to your site and campaigns.

One social media tool that a lot of you seem to be using (and that we also use here at AWeber) is Twitter.

Today, we’re happy to announce that you can now use your Twitter and AWeber accounts together to expand the reach of your email newsletters.

Publish Your Email Newsletters to Twitter

Now, whenever you create a broadcast message in AWeber, you have the option to automatically “tweet” that email too!

Here are a couple examples taken from real AWeber users on Twitter:

How It Works

To use this feature:

1. Go to the Broadcast page of your account.
2. Create a broadcast.
3. Before saving your broadcast, mark the “Syndicate” checkbox.

1. Mark the “Twitter” box and enter your login/password

When you send your broadcast, we’ll automatically update your Twitter status with the subject line of your email and a short link to an online version of your email.

Twitter Email Newsletters FAQ

A couple quick questions and answers:

• Can I choose which broadcasts get tweeted?Once you enter your Twitter login and password once, we’ll assume you want to tweet all of your broadcasts.

  If there’s a broadcast you don’t want to tweet, just unmark the checkbox while editing it.

• How many Twitter IDs can I link to my account?You can link one Twitter ID to your account at any one time. You can change which ID is linked to your account by entering the login/password for it in step 4 above (this will replace your previously selected Twitter ID).

Have any other questions? Ask them below or get in touch with us.

Using Twitter? So Are We.

You can find several of us on Twitter:

AWeber on Twitter

Tom

Sean

Justin

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