A few weeks ago I talked about starting with the basics as it
relates to email marketing. The most basic of which is
building and growing your email list. A great message or
product doesn't do any good if you have no one to send it to.
To help you even further, ExactTarget recently announce our
Email List Growth
Advisor. This is a great way to get started - answering a
few baseline questions about your business, your email
marketing program and your current methods of gathering email
addresses. In just five simple steps, we
provide high-level guidance on some immediate
changes/improvements...Read More »
Small Business. Big Results.
After all my talk about homework, I have to give myself an "F" for failing to blog last week. We all know that it can be really easy to let things and time get ahead of us. Everyday we have the best intentions...whether it's to get the laundry done, the bills organized or to clean out the garage. Planning for an email marketing program can also have the best intentions. You wake up saying to yourself "today I am going to test my email content and my subject lines"! Before you know it, you are lucky if you remembered to hit the send button at all. So let's make today a new day with a...
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Back to School brings back many wonderful memories...crisp
autumn air, new clothes, and football. It also brings back
memories of homework. Homework methodology varies from
student to student. There are the procrastinators that wait
until the very last second to
complete their homework. Many live by the
"all-nighter" rule whether prepping for exams or writing a
thesis on "Great Expectations". Then there are those that are
completely organized. They have their #2 pencil and pink
pearl eraser ready to tackle each and every assignment in precise
order - starting at the top of the list
of...Read More »
One of my goals for
this blog was to share email marketing success stories from some of
our small-to-medium size business customers. In keeping with
last week's "Back to School" theme, I especially love stories where
success was derived from getting back to basics. A recent story comes from Mike's Express Carwash which boosted their online sales 60% through email. They did a very nice job of leveraging a quick survey to help grow their list, and then a triggered email that included a unique coupon for a free carwash. The really cool thing about this program is that although this...Read More »
It's
that time of year in Indiana - time when kids are going back to
school. I just love this time of year. I look
for reasons to visit office supply stores - all the while wishing I
had a reason to buy new pens and notebooks. While sitting in
a training class last week, I started to think that it's
time for the rest of us to go back to school and spend some
time in refresher courses on email marketing best
practices. A recent story on some rather "spammy" emails from
the
White House is one recent example - there is
still a lot to learn when it comes to email
communication. For clients of...Read More »
Last
week I talked about
surviving the digital communications storm and starting with
the basics. When it comes to list growth essentials, it is
truly amazing to see business after business without the most basic
need for an email marketing program - an email sign-up
form on their website's home page. We work with one company that was definitely planning ahead when it comes to email marketing. In fact, they signed with ExactTarget a full-year before they opened their doors for business. Their focus during that time? Buildling their email list! This small Midwestern winery wanted to...Read More »
Yesterday
proved a rough day in Indiana - severe storms racing across
the state leaving floods and damage in its wake. I sort of
feel the same way right now about digital one-to-one
communications. We are in the middle of a storm of
information:
email marketing,
social networking,
landing pages,
text marketing, blogging, and
voice messaging. Whew! For many, it's just too much to
deal with. As a marketer, we're supposed to be able to
navigate through this perfect storm - resulting in a rainbow of
one-to-one communications that ends in an
ROI pot-of-gold. The truth is we really just...Read More »
In any economic time, finding the resources for industry
events can often times be challenging. Money set aside to
attend conferences are often times the first budget items to
be cut when times are lean. Knowing that, I want to
encourage everyone to register for Connections
09 within the next week. This truly is one of the premier
email marketing events to attend. I can not stress enough
that you will come away from this event with a wealth of
information to help drive your email marketing program to the
next level - not to mention the fun that we have planned with the
evening events. Click...
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Do you think that dynamic content for email marketing is only for
companies with piles of data on their subscribers?
Dynamic Content is for any company with any amount of data - and I
mean any. If you have name, email address and state or
gender- you can leverage dynamic content for your email
marketing messages. In fact, having content dynamically
change within an email is so easy that we have created a "10-Minute
Takeways" video. Take 10 minutes to
watch it now and learn how you can create personal
emails that drive relevancy and ROI.Read More »
Today was the first day back to work after 3.5 days spent at ExactTarget's annual Global Sales Meeting. It's time each year to pause from the day-to-day - meet up with peers that you haven't seen for a while, learn about new features/functionality, and share success stories - both from the sales team and from our clients. Personally, hearing how our clients use our application and drive ROI is the best part. As always, I have gathered tons of ideas that I can't wait to implement now that I am back in the office. When it comes down to it, getting back to basics with email marketing is often...
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We're excited
about our new team dedicated to our small business
customers. Our mission is to build strong relationships
with our customers through resources, education and enablement that
will help them see increased ROI through email
marketing and one-to-one digital communications. My
goal with this blog is to share success stories and best
practices from our small business customers, and we have some
great stories to share. Just last week, we featured a press
release on Taco John's and how they have integrated
Social Media and Email Marketing to reward their most loyal
customers. To...
