Previous month:
September 2009
Next month:
November 2009

15 entries from October 2009

links for 2009-10-30

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-29

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-27

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-19

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

How To Score With Your Email Campaign

Great post by Anton, over on his Email Ethics blog:

Let's think about it, sending an email and having the receiver to transform is a little bit like going out in a club to score.
Let me just call my email John.

John wants to score. He is in his apartment downtown and is dressing up. If he wants to score he probably has to dress as well as possible to be the more attractive possible. This is the creative.

Once ready he heads to the club, this is the broadcast.

If he arrives there without any incident (delivery) he gets in the line outside the club and wait for his turn.

Then he gets to go through the bouncer (the spam filter) who will let him go in if:

1 - he matches the dress code (Tidy HTML)
2 - he never went in a fight in the club or got thrown out (Reputation)
3 - He isn't drunk and talking crap (content scan)

When he gets in (inbox) he spots a good looking girl he likes if he already knows her, she's a client, else, she's a prospect.

He gets close to her and then throw his pick up line (subject line). There are several types of pick up lines:
1 - If you lie about yourself, it's a scam
2 - If you are too mysterious, you might loose her attention
3 - If yo are too long you might be boring.

In a few words, your subject line needs to be as good as your pick up lines: short, punchy and interesting.

If the girl gets in the discussion with John, then he got a click, but there's a lot more to do to score.

He has to try to keep the discussion live and interesting and to gather as much information about the girl so he knows what she likes, what she wants,... that's web analytics.

The interesting thing here is that even if he doesn't score right away with that girl, the more information he will get here, the more likely he is to score on a later night when they get to meet again.

As I see it, email marketing is like trying to score with hundreds, thousands of persons in one go.

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

2009 Holiday Marketer: Experian’s Benchmark & Trend Report

What do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

  • Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
    “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
  • Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
    “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”
  • Email and search still drive the most traffic to retail sites, but keep an eye on additional traffic from social networks.
    “Last December, search engines and email were the top referral sources for retailers, but social networking referred nearly five percent of traffic, a rate higher than portal front pages.”
  • The economy will continue to be a factor in online marketing strategies this holiday season.
    “In 2008, searches for the term ‘layaway’ jumped as consumer awareness increased. Layaway programs effectively drove early purchases with the peak for search-term variations that included ‘layaway’ taking place last year during the five weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.”

Have a closer look at these findings and many more by downloading the report in full from the Experian Marketing Services’ website.

Source: Email Responsibly

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-16

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-14

  • ecently, some Gmail users spotted a new feature in which small favicons were appearing next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons, which only appeared next to commercially sent emails such as those delivered by Netflix, seemed to be a way to highlight certain messages when doing a quick scan of a crowded inbox.
  • "If anything, email is re-inventing itself as the killer app in the emerging 3.0 world of multi-platform digital communications. There are at least three mega-trends occurring that indicate email is experiencing a Renaissance; not an apocalypse:"
    (tags: industry)
Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

links for 2009-10-06

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!

Running an International Email Marketing Program

Yesterday I spoke at a B2B email marketing event organized by the UK DMA – it was the best email event I attended in a long while. Great speakers and great content, so well done DMA! :-)

Here are the slides from my presentation. When I get approval from the other presenters, I’ll post their slides here as well.

Need help optimizing your email marketing results? Get in touch!