Email marketing is simple

As marketers, we spend too much time trying to measure click through rates and evaluating effective calls to action. We spend too much time creating new content we hope our audience will find compelling. We’re over-complicating one of the most basic marketing opportunities: the power of subscribe.

Owning Two Minutes
Every Friday at 7:58am, a company called Say Media owns two minutes of my time. I’ve come to expect the emails every week. I look forward to them. When they arrive in my inbox, I immediately dive in. Why? Because every Friday is Venn day.

This Week in Venn
Ever...

Using video is nothing new. YouTube reports that they have 72 hours of content uploaded every minute, demonstrating just how crowded and noisy the video content area is. 

When you start creating videos, you’ve got to understand that once your video is out there, you don’t have full control over it any more. Sometimes a spoof of a video can take off and can really positively aid brand awareness. Then there are the other occasions where it can do enormous damage – is all publicity really good publicity? (Let’s leave that for another day!)

If your content is good, then it’s more than likely someone...

This is one in a series of columns exploring the examples and trends highlighted in The Best of the Email Swipe File.

Jetsetter

Type: Preference eenter

“Jetsetter’s preference center collects subscriber preferences for ‘Destinations’, ‘Activities’, and ‘Scenes’, all of which are vital to creating highly targeted travel offers. Their preference center also addresses three of the most common reasons that subscribers opt out—too many emails, irrelevant emails, and change of address.”
—Submitter: Andrea Smith, Design Lead, Content Marketing & Research

View this Jetsetter preference center on...

There’s nothing quite like a classic combo. Dinner and a movie. Burgers and fries. Opt-ins and SMS? Yes, please.

Many consumers have long associated the act of opting-in as something to be done by email, for email. But today’s cross-channel world doesn’t just include email. Companies and organizations could find big success in acquiring new customers by adding a mobile component with SMS (short message service). There are two great approaches to this strategy:

1. Email opt-in via SMS
This one is a quick addition to reinforce the presence of your email campaigns, as well as how easy you’ve made it...

It’s a common misconception that SEO, social media, email, and other content distribution channels should reside in silos. There are numerous synergies to be had by launching campaigns that affect multiple channels of distribution. Strategic earned media is just one way to influence these channels simultaneously. When executed properly the social sphere lights up with buzz, landing page conversions increase and search engines take notice.

What a Strategic Earned Media Campaign Looks Like
Earning media has been a public relations (PR) goal for many decades – targeting newspapers, magazines and...

Like many social media marketers, you're probably focused on strengthening your content marketing strategy--which means you need a solid policy for outbound publishing and approval of social media messages. And you know that can get complex in a hurry!

Effective content marketing means not only defining who can publish what and where, but also managing the communication stream of creating, editing and approving final content. As your team starts to grow, this whole process can often become a massive tangle of roundabout email exchanges and lengthy Excel spreadsheets.

SocialEngage approvals...

The Gmail Team announced impending changes to their user interface today that will have an effect on users of their desktop and mobile platforms. The changes deal with how mail in the inbox is sorted for review by the recipient. These changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks for everyone, or you can opt-in to test things out now by selecting "Configure Inbox" after clicking on the gear icon.

Currently, default users of Gmail see mail which is sorted into "Important and unread" and "Everything else." In the future, though, the desktop will look like this (taken from the...

What's the biggest challenge facing your email marketing?

If it's the quality of your email database, you're not alone. According to a new study by Econsultancy, 50% of surveyed marketers cited database quality as the biggest troublemaker in their email marketing strategies. Even more compelling, database quality has held that position three years running. So why is database quality such a big problem? 

Much like gourmet chefs working with spoiled ingredients, marketers working with outdated or unqualified databases have their chances at success handicapped from the start. If your database...

My colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy reference? Well, your wish is our command.

Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...

Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail accepted. But we know things are changing. As...

As we head into the busy summer travel season, travel brands will be looking for ways to connect with consumers. Of course, brands are constantly chided to avoid over-communicating with their opted-in subscribers. Even after consumers have subscribed to your brand's email or chosen to "like' you on Facebook, your brand's connection with them remains tenuous, because they can break off the relationship at any time.

A major temptation for some brands is to over-communicate with customers, inundating them with offers, deals, product news, and just about anything else that marketers believe could...

As many people do today, I subscribe to a multitude of different emails--from my favorite clothing store, magazine, daily deal site, etc.

While I was expecting my first child last year, I decided to opt-in for a number of different emails containing information, tips, and coupons related to pregnancy and parenting. With those types of emails, timing is everything. The information you send an expectant mother at 12 weeks of pregnancy is very different from the content you would send to a woman who is 32 weeks pregnant or a mother with a six-month-old at home. 

Just the other day I received an...

Are you a digital marketer? Do you work for a travel brand? If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you!

ExactTarget recently released Reaching Today’s Digital Traveler, a compilation of tips and tactics that are critical for digital marketers in the travel and hospitality industry. Here’s the list of tactics, plus the questions you should ask yourself to keep your digital communication strategy on track.

1. Grow Your Subscriber list

To determine why your brand might be missing out on conversations with interested and ready-to-purchase travelers, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you...

Retailers spend most of their budget and energy on the in-store experience. It only makes sense: upwards of 95% of revenue is generated inside the bricks and mortar. However, retailers should also consider the following:

The path to purchase often begins online. 73%-83% of US consumers research online before buying in-store, per a Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey.  

Shoppers leave stores to buy online.  Per a Harris Interactive Poll, 43% of adults report that they’ve visited a brick and mortar store to examine a product before purchasing it elsewhere.

Customer expectations of online/in-store...

There’s no doubt that today’s consumers are mobile. They’re constantly on-the-go, sending and receiving communications of all types, and they’ve come to expect that information be (literally) in-hand at all times. Consumers in the UK and around the globe are no longer sitting at their computers searching for information—instead, they expect information to be available all around them. At the same time, they expect that information to be relevant to their lives.

The hyper-connected consumer expects brands of all sizes and industries to start meeting them where they are. It also provides new...

In my last post, "Are You Narrowing Your Shopping Experience to a Single Channel?", I explained how interacting with shoppers in the same way regardless of channel could produce a bad user experience, and that retailer may be missing out on an opportunity to personalize the user experience for the “next best offer” for a particular channel.

In this post, we'll look at how non-targeted or blast emails could be causing increased opt-outs, more un-engaged subscribers, and a poor user experience.

#3 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Sending Non-Targeted or Blast Emails

Sending the...

This past week I happened to notice a blog post by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. In it, Mr. Goldberg explains a decision that Fab recently made to send out a re-engagement email to people who had not opened an email in the previous 18 months. People who did not click through from this campaign to opt back into Fab's emails were unsubscribed from further emails.

The subject line was compelling: "Stop. Getting. So. Many. Emails. Smile, you’re designed to." Then, inside the email, they explained the purpose of the email and said that if the recipient wanted to continue to receive email that they needed...

The Marketing Sherpa Email Summit is heavily focused on providing attendees with takeaways to apply in your marketing as soon as you get back to the office--or even before.

The conference provided best practices and real-life examples for the lifecycle of your email campaigns, starting with list acquisition. Matt Byrd of WeddingWire used his presentation to highlight a topic that is extremely helpful, but also stressful for marketers: removing unengaged subscribers from your lists. This topic was recently highlighted by Al Iverson but I wanted to share Matt's experiences as he took on this...

As part of our reserach for the recent SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS report, Marketers from Mars, we asked consumers to share their thoughts on how marketers could improve their cross-channel communcations.

We're happy to share a few of their repsponses here:

How do you improve email marketing performance?

“Make your site stand out from others on the net. Offer a site that is simple to navigate. Offer a 24-hour customer helpline service and also reply to all emails received within the hour. Don’t inundate your users with emails—one per week will do. Make your subject line eye-catching so the...

ExactTarget provides our customers the ability to market through email, mobile, social, and sites—but why is that combination so powerful? The answer is the data and connectivity—which provides marketers the ability to communicate in a consistent, targeted, and branded manner across channels, while honoring consumer preferences.

There are many companies out there who specialize in Landing Page marketing—but ExactTarget Landing Pages are different because they are integrated with the same data and technology customers use to power the rest of the interactive marketing campaigns.

Consider taking...

The difference between doing email appends right and doing them wrong involves changing one significant step… the outbound message.  Instead of the outbound message containing a link to opt-out, the outbound email marketing message should have registration as the primary call to action. This approach to email appends is called "opt-in" email append.

ExactTarget was one of the early proponents of this approach and we have now real life experience with this approach under our belts.  Opt-in email appends have been very successful in delivering highly responsive subscribers without the headaches...