Before doing any work in digital marketing I never understood the frustrations of the 140 character limit on Twitter. On a personal account Twitter is mainly used as a news feed, to share articles or links to other sites or quick quips or other musings. Yes it could be frustrating to shorten your thoughts but you could always send your thoughts out in multiple tweets or if it was a longer more personal thought you would just use Facebook. However, after doing the content creation for brands’ digital marketing the character limit was a source of daily frustration.  For most branding tweets we’re including a link to the product and this link adds 23 characters limiting the space you have in a tweet to actually convey a message. Especially now that research has shown that tweets with photos get 313% more engagement you’re more likely to add a photo to your post which takes up another 24 characters. After including a photo and link to product you’re only left with 93 characters. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time attempting to shorten my tweets so they still make sense but are shortened enough to meet the limit. It also creates an additional pain point in that when scheduling your companies’ social media posts for the week you can’t just enter the information and post to Facebook and Twitter, you have to create separate posts for each platform due to the restrictive limits on Twitter. It also limits the ability to provide customer service on Twitter, it’s hard to respond to a customer’s complaint or question in 140 characters.

I’m trying not to be too optimistic in case Twitter doesn’t end up lifting the character restriction but since they did lift the character restriction for direct messages last summer it’s possible they are realizing the limits they’re creating for users with the character restriction.

It has recently come out that Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than 140 characters. There have also been discussions that if Twitter does not do this they will at least remove things like links, user handles and photos from being included in the character count. Apparently the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is supportive of the change. He has expressed a need for Twitter to reach more mainstream audiences and lifting or altering the character count would do so. It makes sense for Twitter to do so when newer platforms like Instagram are growing and having much greater engagement between brands and their customers. In order not to lose to Instagram with the rise in visual marketing Twitter is going to have to improve their photo sharing abilities and make it easier on marketers to use Twitter for their brands and increasing the character count is one way to do this.

At least in my world Twitter is the most difficult platform to use due to the character count. It really limits what you can do with the platform and forces you to create separate text content for a Twitter post, which is often of inferior quality due to the abbreviations required and stunted thoughts, making it an inferior platform when compared to Facebook and Twitter. Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.

In this post I review the article Email is the Best Way to Reach Millennials by Kristin Naragon, Director of Email Solutions at Adobe.

There are endless articles on the web about why companies should target millennials, and how much time millennials spend on their smartphone and checking email but in this article Kristin Naragon actually recommends how a company should go about email marketing to this target audience. While many would assume social media is the best way to target this age group the author uses a study conducted by Adobe to show that email is the most effective way to target millennials.

Naragon’s four main pieces of advice for email marketing to millennials are: (1) mobile optimization is key, (2) timing is everything, (3) optimize emails for images and use graphics, and (4) understand your customer to send less but better targeted emails. According to Adobe’s study 88% of millennials are regularly using their smartphones to check email so it is incredibly important for a company to optimize their email campaigns for mobile. It can be frustrating to receive an email that doesn’t load properly because the company has not prioritized mobile. Many other studies show that millennials now prefer to use mobile over desktop (source: BetaNews) for everything from Google searches (Google has stated that more searches now come from smartphones and tablets than laptops and desktops, source: AdWeek) to mobile shopping (source: Shopify)

This emphasizes the importance of mobile in general for all companies. Not only must your company’s email campaigns be optimized for mobile but your website should also work seamlessly on a mobile phone. Without getting too far into all areas of mobile strategy lets just say that mobile must be a priority for any company with respect to its website, app and marketing campaigns. When releasing any piece of content a company should ask, will my customer be seeing this on a laptop/desktop or on a phone/tablet, and will it be effective on both?

With respect to timing, Nagano references Adobe’s study which shows that of millennials are more likely than any other age group to check email in bed so it would be worth experimenting with sending emails early in the morning and late at night to see if greater ROI is obtained during these times. This is a great insight into how to best use email marketing. Obtain as much insight as you can about the routines of your target audience and see when and where they’re checking email and when they’re most likely to actually convert (make a purchase, sign up etc.).

One of the most crucial pieces of advice in this article, that I hope more email marketers will listen to, is to send fewer but better targeted emails. Adobe’s study showed that many millennials want to see fewer and less repetitive emails from brands. While Adobe’s study does not have the most convincing statistics in this respect, other studies not mentioned in this article show that when asked how marketers could improve their emails the #1 answer was less frequent emails (source: Campaign Monitor) and the most common effect of frequent emails is disengagement (open and click-through rates drop). As you can see from the image below, read rates drastically drop with an increase in email frequency and complaints from recipients increase.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Marketers should really focus on creating quality content to their audience and if they are currently sending out a large number of emails, test whether conversions increase with a decrease in email frequency.

While I agree with the methods Naragon recommends in this article to improve your email marketing, unfortunately, the study used to support her claims is not the most convincing. The study, which was conducted by Adobe, only surveyed approximately 400 U.S. based white-collar workers over the age of 18 about their use of email (source: Adobe). Only a portion of these respondents are in the millennial age group so the statistics she references  to support her claims are not entirely convincing on their own. However, I found a number of other studies also supporting the claim that email is the most effective form of marketing to millennials, as well as studies referenced throughout this post that back up her recommendations. Research from Principal Financial Group found that email is the preferred way millennials want to keep in touch with companies (source: PFG).

Source: Why Brands Should Care About Millennials

And not only do millennials much prefer to be contacted by email over social media and other forms of contact but email also has the best ROI for marketers (source: Millennials love of email).

Source: Campaign Monitor

Despite the rise in social media, Kristin Naragon’s article and the additional studies I have referenced show just how important email marketing still is, especially when directed at millennials. With a higher ROI and being the preferred method of contact by millennials from brands companies may want to reconsider pouring more money into social media and optimize their email marketing strategy instead.

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