links for 2009-10-29
- Alex Williams provides answers to the following questions: How can email marketers learn from the 2008 holiday season to help improve the success of their campaigns this season? When should email marketers begin their holiday efforts? How should email marketers ramp up their holiday campaigns from their normal sending schedule? When someone's inbox has four pages of emails, what does that person look for that can help an email marketer stand out during the holidays?
- Here's how to make a strong case for a preference center — in terms that management understands.
- Here are some really great and proven-to-work subject lines that you can test out for your email marketing campaigns.
- E-mail marketing firm Responsys has agreed to acquire digital marketing consultancy Smith-Harmon in a part-cash, part-stock deal. Financial terms of the agreement, which is expected to close next month, were not disclosed. For the near future, Smith-Harmon will continue to operate as an independent brand, known as “Smith-Harmon, a Responsys company.”
- Content can be a particularly pivotal tool for cross-channel retailers or retailers with products/services that have a longer purchase cycle. In these scenarios, it will be the variety of content and not just the relevance that will help to guide your customers through the sale and hopefully, retain their loyalty for future purchases. Here are some tips for connecting with your customer through every phase of the buying cycle:
- Kevin Hillstrom says it is time for e-mail marketers to finally prove that e-mail marketing generates long-term profit. "E-Mail marketers, once you have the data to defend your channel, defend it!!! It's not going to be good enough to say that e-mail is a relationship builder, or is the glue that holds marketing together, or is the tactic that feeds social media activities. Prove the value of your channel, demonstrating the value via long-term sales and profit. Show what happens to a business if e-mail marketing doesn't exist."
- This animated email from Dressed Up!, generated a 26% increase in click-throughs than the non-animated version in A/B tests.
- How ISPs manage incoming e-mail is definitely facing a shift. That shift is placing greater importance on reputation. Senders are being held more accountable for delivering engaging content to subscribers.
- ContactLab presents the results of the latest research on the use of e-mail among Internet users. The study, in its European edition, describes and compares e-mail and newsletters habits and behaviour in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, highlighting similarities and differences between the different markets.
- Here are a few key elements to consider while designing email messages in Outlook 2007 to ensure it looks sharp.
- There are more than 200 blacklists out there in the world, and probably fewer than a dozen of them are actively used as spam filters at any large ISP or webmail provider. If you plug your IP address into a web form and go a reply that said "OH NOES! YOU'RE ON A BLACKLIST!" that does NOT mean you have a deliverability issue.
- No matter what your email marketing goals, a solid testing strategy can help you accomplish them, and keep your email program moving forward. Need some testing ideas? Check out eROI's new Email Testing Guide for 32 different tests you can do right now to improve every single metric of your email program.
- The major email providers are already using, or plan to use, a broad set of engagement metrics to determine inbox placement, not just clicks and opens as has been widely reported, to determine the level of user engagement for different senders. Here's a list…
- If you're looking for the right way to do transactional messaging, this Williams-Sonoma Order Confirmation message is a bastion of best practices:
- the reputation of the sender is a very important criterion determining whether that email should go to the inbox.
- The good news is you probably don't have to understand it. But your email marketing service or IT technicians should know how it works because your emails and/or email system need to support the authentication process. Here's why…
