Things do keep getting better here @ The eMail Guide! We’ve been seeing phenomenal growth with more visitors, more Tweeple following us and more bloggers joining our team! Jeff and I want to thank you all for your fantastic support!

The eMail Guide is a giveback project and it’s very rewarding to know that our efforts are making a positive difference for so many!

On Tuesday August 10th at 1 PM EST + 5 GMT, we will launch one of our most ambitious projects to date: eMail Radio!

eMail Radio will be a live weekly call in show tackling all aspects of marketing. You can get more details here!

Have you signed up for The eMail Guide newsletter yet? Sign up here!

Enjoy this week’s top takeaways of email marketing wisdom!

Takeaway: Here are 9 hot takeaways from OMS Dallas!

Takeaway: The landing page is there to take the order and that should be its primary purpose.

Takeaway: Keep it simple. Have a business plan. Plan the work and work the plan.

Takeaway: Consumers are using communities, social networks and micro blogs to start and carry on conversations with organizations, and brands need to be prepared to manage these conversations.

Takeaway: Co-registration can help build your list, but if you don’t do it exactly right you could do major damage to your brand and sender reputation.

Takeaway: The daily email marketing buzz is a collection of the best email marketing posts every day. Each post in the buzz has a takeaway, making this a buffet of brilliance all on it’s own.

Get more top takeaways here!

A tip of the hat today to our friends @ ClickZ! You’ve seen us feature them here in the buzz often and today they launched their new site! They’ve also done a nice job with adding more interactivity to the site. Get the skinny on the new Clickz website design here!

On a completely different note, we continue to see more and more bloggers and ESPs sign up for EMAPP to take a stand against email list selling! We are blown away by the response and thank everyone for their rabid support of this initiative! It’s free to join here!

Enjoy the buzz!

HubSpot

Study: Two-thirds of marketers integrate social media and email marketing
Just because social media may be a new addition to your marketing mix doesn’t mean email marketing should be eliminated.  In fact, social media can help to enhance your email marketing efforts.

Takeaway: When you incorporate social media into your emails, you’re essentially expanding the potential reach of your email campaigns beyond that list.  By adding social media, you’re enabling email recipients to share and spread your content to people who aren’t on your email list.  How great is that?

TechCrunch

Groupon launches deal personalization, opens door to (More) explosive growth
Before now, Groupon has always offered one or two deals per city per day to its users. That’s still going to be true, but with a twist: the site will be sending different deals to users based on criteria like their gender, buying history, and their interests. The change may sound fairly minor, but it will likely have a big impact on Groupon’s bottom line.

Takeaway: And all of this has one other nice side effect: the deals landing in your inbox should be more relevant to what you’re actually interested in.

eMarketer

Using email marketing to boost social presence
A majority of email marketers are now making efforts to integrate social media into their campaigns. An April 2010 survey by interactive and email marketing agency eROI found that two-thirds of US marketers were doing so, and June 2010 research from StrongMail, a provider of email and social media marketing solutions, put the number who had integrated social and email, or planned to this year, at 71% worldwide.

Takeaway: More than nine in 10 marketers who combined social and email used Facebook in their campaigns; nearly as many used Twitter. Fewer than half of marketers integrated LinkedIn with their email programs.

EmailInsider

Your email program: Time for a tune-up — or a blow-up?
You never know where inspiration is going to strike and make you change the way you do things. For me, it was this quote, tweeted (and retweeted extensively) by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: “As you grow older, you’ll find that the only things you regret are the things you didn’t do.”

Catch more of the Daily Buzz here!

The buzz is brought to you by our Ninja sponsor:

Old unca Jimmy has been a bit lax in welcoming all the new bloggers to The eMail Guide team! We’ve had a bunch of new blogging stars join up and I just simply let it slip. I’d like to apologize for this to all the great bloggers who I haven’t yet welcomed. Today, I’m starting to catch up by welcoming one of my favourite Tweeple: Amy Garland from Blue Sky Factory!

Amy Garland is the marketing manager at Blue Sky Factory, a Baltimore-based email service provider. With 6+ years experience in the marketing industry, Amy’s favorite part of her job is writing, whether it’s for emails, blogs, or any and everything else having to do with online marketing. Be alert! She tries to fit a pop culture or music reference into almost every post!

Amy has an easy reading style and her bright and sunny personality shines through in every post! We are extremely pleased to have yet another member of the email and social marketing brain trust @ Blue Sky Factory, on our team!

A belated, but very enthusiastic welcome Amy!

Check out this great article from Amy!

Great email today from the good folks over at LinkedIn.

How to fight SPAM with these new features.

Take control on the assault of junk email in your inbox.

Click here to go to your LinkedIn Group now to adjust your setting

Click on the image to read the email.

What is Co-registration?
Co-registration is the process of subscribing to two or more email newsletters at once that are offered to you, usually in a promotion/contest or e-commerce setting.  In some cases the Co-Reg option is pre-checked which is a practice I find to be sleazy at best.

Co-registration takes place when two websites partner to build their respective email lists. For example, when a visitor to your website registers for your newsletter, you can offer him/her a chance to sign up for newsletters from the partnering website.

I don’t believe in co-registration
I’ve never believed in the benefits of co-Reg.  For me, the bad far out ways the good.  Especially now when people have less time and their memory of “opting-in” to some additional newsletter during a purchase or promotion just doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

With Co-Reg lists, unsubscribes tend to be very high and they also generate a large percentage of spam complaints.  Open-rates are usually dismal as well.  This is especially true when the subscriber uses AOL, Hotmail or other “free” email accounts.  The mark as spam button becomes their only measurable action.

Here are a few quotes about Co-Reg from some other email minds:
“In all seriousness, Co-Reg can be a dangerous practice in regards to reputation & deliverability. Tread very carefully indeed.” – @AndrewBonar, Email Deliverability Consultant

If Omaha Steaks did a Co-Reg subscription contest to win an iPad, vegans would subscribe. Each vegan that didn’t win would report the “winner announcement” email as spam. – @JaCaldwell, Red Pill Email Blog
(Okay before the vegans start hating on John, the same would happen if meat-eaters subscribed to win an iPad at Tofu.com.  I’m just sayin’)

And I would be remiss if I didn’t include something from the Pro Co-Reg side.  Here’s a good article from Morgan Stewart at ExactTarget that covers some of the benefits when Co-Reg is done right.

The days of the shotgun approach are over.  You should build your list from people who are interested in your company, products and/or services.  They subscribe because they perceive value. Not because of a contest Co-Reg deal with another website.

If you are looking for ideas to build your email list, there are much better options to consider.  Take a look at this post: “15 innovative ways to get more subscribers“.  Some really good ideas and examples to help you build your subscriber list.

Wait, there’s more!
As a late addition to this post I went to subscribe to the Ben & Jerry’s newsletter when I saw this at the bottom of the subscribe form. “By providing this information, you acknowledge that Ben & Jerry’s may send you information, samples or special offers we feel may be of interest to you about Ben & Jerry’s, or other carefully-selected companies. If you would like more information, please read our Privacy Policy.”

Other carefully-selected companies? REALLY! How can they possibly know what other companies I would be interested in without even asking what my interests are?  Maybe that is their problem with their email marketing.

Please take a moment to leave your comments about Co-Reg.  These are my views and while I know I’m not alone, I understand many out there have a much different view on the subject.

Cheers, Chris

Takeaway: Co-registration can help build your list, but if you don’t do it exactly right you could do major damage to your brand and sender reputation.

Other great posts by Chris!

About the Author:

Christopher Donald is currently a Partner and VP of Sales and Marketing at Inbox Group, LLC based in Dallas, where he oversees U.S. and International sales of the Inbox Group email marketing service (SaaS). Chris has worked on the front lines of internet sales and marketing since 1995 and directly in email marketing since 2000.

Website: http://www.inboxgroup.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/inboxgroup
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/inboxgroup

Guest post by Ryan Deutsch, VP Emerging Channels, ThreadMarketing, a StrongMail Company

These are exciting times in interactive marketing and in particular; for email marketers.  From the social web to group buying (Groupon) to flash sales (Hautelook and Rue LA LA) online businesses are engaging the consumer in new and compelling ways.  In response to these and other trends, StrongMail has announced the acquisition of two New York-based interactive agencies, which we are combining with our existing strategic services arm to form a new email marketing and Social CRM agency called ThreadMarketing.   Why is this significant to our customers and the industry as a whole?  Here are a few key points:

It’s about conversations not messages. ..

Like it or not, the social web has changed the game.  There are now more ways for consumers to engage with a brand (and each other) than ever before.  While email sits at the center of the social web, it is not alone.  Consumers are using communities, social networks and micro blogs to start and carry on conversations with organizations, and brands need to be prepared to manage these conversations.  ThreadMarketing is not just an email agency, with deep expertise in email, social marketing, website development, community management, it will help break down silos between these channels and streamline the customer experience.

It’s about data, old and new…

StrongMail has a long history of integrating email marketing solutions with customer databases and systems.  The social web is making new data and customer insight available at a rapid pace and many of our customers have requested support in integrating this insight into the communication strategy and making it actionable.  ThreadMarketing will leverage StrongMail’s unique database integration capabilities and make social insights actionable, a key objective for interactive marketers today.

It’s about a broader communication framework…

While the traditional approach to email communication strategy has not changed, the opportunities to understand our subscribers and engage them have.  Today consumers have more than one “subscription” option.  Not only can they subscribe to email communications, but they can “Like” a brand, “Follow” a brand, “join” a community and so on and so on.  This means that a new framework is required to support relevant conversations with consumers.  ThreadMarketing has developed  such a framework: Listen, Learn, Engage and Influence.  This is not a social or email framework, it’s a framework required to drive meaningful conversations across channels.  While many companies “listen” and “learn” few leverage the data they capture to “engage” and “influence.”  ThreadMarketing will help bridge that gap.

Takeaway: Consumers are using communities, social networks and micro blogs to start and carry on conversations with organizations, and brands need to be prepared to manage these conversations.

Questions, feel free to post comments and we will respond as soon as possible.

About the Author:

Ryan Deutsch
Vice President of Emerging Media, ThreadMarketing, a StrongMail Company

An online marketing veteran and industry thought leader, Deutsch has more than 12 years of direct marketing experience across the catalog, retail and publishing industries. An addition to a bi-weekly MediaPost column, Deutsch is a regular contributor to multiple industry publications, including DM News, BtoB Magazine, and Chief Marketer.  Deutsch has been and remains a frequent speaker at industry events, including the DMA Annual, eTail, ad:tech and the MediaPost Email Insider Summit.

For a little more info on what StrongMail is all about, check out this video from Kristen Hersant, Director of Marketing for StrongMail.

Mark this in your calendar!
Tuesday August 10th @ 1 PM

Here @ The eMail Guide we are always looking for new ways to help marketers do marketing right! After a lot of thinking and planning we are now ready to launch our latest channel for The eMail Guide: eMail Radio!

What is eMail Radio?
eMail radio is about email marketing and where it intersects social, mobile, online and offline. It will cover all the mediums that touch us and we will always try to help you close the loop to build a stronger relationship with your subscribers.

Each week we’ll welcome one or more experts in email marketing to talk about the industry and take your questions live!

Email Radio debut
eMail Radio goes live on the air starting Tuesday August 10, 2010 @ 1 PM EST!
Then catch the live show every Tuesday @ 1 PM EST after that!

Each hour long show of eMail Radio features:
- Online marketing news & trends
- Online marketing expert guests
- Your calls live!

Call or Skype in with your questions and be a part of the show!
You can call in with your questions or comments and join in the conversation! We’ll have a toll free number for you to dial in on in North America and world wide access for callers via Skype for free!

Listen live or catch up with the show anytime!
The eMail Radio show archives will allow you to listen to shows at your convenience! Every live show will be available for download in the archive here @ The eMail Guide as an MP3!

More details coming!
Next week we’ll be announcing more details about the show!

Want to be on eMail Radio or have a suggestion for a topic? Leave a comment below!

In the latest installment of our video coverage from the Canadian Marketing Associations National Convention, Chief eMail Officer, Jeff Ginsberg talks with Aldo Cundari about the state and the future of marketing.

Watch more videos from the Canadian Marketing Association National Convention here.

Aldo Cundari is Chairman and CEO of  the Cundari Group Ltd. and Chair, National Advertising Benevolent Society. In this interview with The eMail Guide’s Chief eMail Officer, Jeff Ginsberg, Aldo first answers the question: How many marketers does it take to change a light bulb? Mr. Cundari has an interesting answer for that question. According to Mr. Cundari the answer depends on whether you are talking about agency side marketers or client side. He also responds to one of our favourite sayings: You don’t know what you don’t know.

What is the future of marketing? Right now, no one really knows because it’s changing so dramatically and so quickly. If we don’t step in quickly and make the right changes, some agencies will die. What are the changes to make? What kind of training do we need to give our people? How do we move them forward to understand that?

The changes we are seeing today are completely different from the past. It’s not the same game as ten or twenty years ago. According to Mr. Cundari, analytics are a good example of how much marketing has changed. Analytics today are real time and immediate. You have to be on it constantly and have staff who live it and breath it. Just getting staff trained on the new technology is a huge effort for agencies.

Dramatic changes have occurred and will continue at a dramatic pace. Those agencies which cannot adapt quickly will die.

Takeaway: Keep it simple. Have a business plan. Plan the work and work the plan.

Once upon another time in a world before Graphic User Interface (GUI) I used to sell things.  I won’t bore you with my progress from nightclub DJ to retail high-end home HiFi, to car stereos (sold enough to buy a house), to outside sales, but let’s just say that for all intents and purposes, sales is sales….

One of the key things that separates a good sales person from a not-so-good sales person is that the good sales person is never afraid to ask for the order – and the money!

So what does that have to do with email marketing?  I’m glad you asked….

First we need to get on the same page on a couple of things.

1. Marketing is everything that you do to that brings qualified customers to your door
2. Sales is collecting the money in exchange for a product or service

Next we need to understand some basic functions of an email marketing message.

1. After sender recognition, the Subject Line causes a message to be opened (Note: sender recognition alone is not enough to cause a message to be opened)
2. A Value Proposition gives the recipient a reason to want to purchase
3. The Call To Action drives clicks
4. Conversions happen at the landing page

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on….

One of the more common situations that I hear is, “We get great open rates and lots of clicks, but not very many conversions…. Why?”

It’s gotten to the point that I hardly have to look anymore to diagnose the problem - they’re still selling on the landing page!

Selling at the landing page works for things like search or ad placements, but for email it’s different.  Why?  Because you’ve already “sold” in the email message.  The landing page is there to take the order and that should be its primary purpose.

This is email marketing, people, not Direct Response TV with “But wait, there’s more!“  Asking for the order is Sales 101!

You’ve given the recipient a reason to open your message with your subject line.  You’ve captured their attention and explained what’s in it for them with your value proposition.  They’ve got their credit card in their hand while clicking on your call to action, and you want to keep selling them something that they’re already ready to buy?  And you wonder why people don’t convert….

This ain’t rocket science.  I know this because my step-father is a rocket scientist and he tells me that if he has his money in his hand and is ready to buy he’s done being sold.  He doesn’t need any more speeches, pitches, or convincing.  If he did he wouldn’t have pulled his money out, and if the sales person would rather keep pitching the sale rather than taking the order, he’ll leave.  Plain and simple; and I’d bet many of you would do the same.

Take a look at your landing pages.

Is the landing page a copy of your email message with an order form?

Is it lit up like the Vegas strip on a Saturday night having more distractions than a teenage boy at an all girls school?

Are you giving a bevy of options that lead away from the desired action – like giving you money?

Are you more concerned with making your landing page SEO/SEM friendly than you are taking the order?

Seriously, what is the core purpose of your landing pages?

So here’s my challenge to those of you that have good open and click rates, but fall down on conversions using the types of landing pages I’ve just described:  Strip out all of the crap and focus on taking the order and see what happens.

If your conversions increase, let me know.  And if they don’t, well, I’ll give you your money back….

Takeaway: The landing page is there to take the order and that should be its primary purpose.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this! Leave a comment and let’s talk!

Related articles:

About the Author

Active in the industry since 1996, John Caldwell is an innovative marketing executive experienced in integrated and tactical email marketing and operations. As an independent consultant John has brought his utilization of best practices, including customer segmentation and profiling, and operational analysis, to a number of major clients including Teleflora, eHarmony, Experian Consumer Direct (FreeCreditReport.com), and more. While at Experian, prior to becoming a consultant, John created and implemented the company’s strategic email marketing plans. He designed the company’s guidelines and developed comprehensive reporting matrices to measure the operational statistics of programs and campaigns providing actionable intelligence to Business. John has spoken at Industry events on deliverability and other topics, and is a Member of the Email Experience Council of the Direct marketing Association, where he is actively involved on the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable as 2009 & 2010 Co-Chair.

Website: http://redpillemail.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jacaldwell
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jacaldwell

I attended and spoke at the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in Dallas. Aaron Kahlow and his team put on a multi-city tour every summer spending a day educating marketers about email marketing, SEO, social media, website optimization, and other hot topics in the world of online marketing.

Here are 9 hot takeaways from OMS Dallas!

Many folks are still struggling to understand how social media is different for B2B vs. B2C.

Dela Quist on the left

While there are certainly nuances of speaking with consumers vs. other business, the methods are the same for both. Social media is about being there before the sale, building credibility, and earning trust. I use this slide on the right of my colleague Dela Quist when explaining the difference (Note: I snapped this picture of a slide in Dela’s presentation during the Marketing Sherpa Summit in 2010).

Website secret #1: Communicate your message in less than 5 seconds. Jeffrey Eisenberg, Parnter at Eisenberg Brothers & Associates, provided 21 “secrets” for website optimization. (As it turns out, they were somewhat secret as Mr. Eisenberg informed us he would not be sharing his slides!) This was one of them.

This one, while maybe somewhat obvious, seems to be missed by many organizations. Take a look at a few websites, including your own. Literally, physically step back a few feet from your monitor. Can you tell what that company does? What action do they want you to take?

Jeffrey Eisenberg of Eisenberg Brothers & Associates

Website secret #2: Execute rapidly. Another one of the 21 secrets Jeffrey Eisenberg shared with attendees was to execute rapidly.

Part of any good website or blog (often one in the same) is the ability to be flexible. Information is flowing at a faster rate then ever before. Companies who can add/change content on their site quickly win. If you have a process that requires 17 steps to get new content approved and posted, you’re likely going to be too late.

Create a “Link to Us” Page: Make it easy for fans to link to you and be sure the code you provide is optimized for search. This tip was provided by Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Director of SEO at BusinessOnline.

One of the keys to SEO is inbound links. One of the challenges, however, is ensuring that when folks link to you they are using the keywords that you want. One way to helpyour own cause is to provide easy-to-use widgets and code snippets on your site. Ask folks who are linking to you to use them.

Ray Catfish Comstock of BusinessOnline

Use link building to show ROI in Social Media: While not all that straightforward to measure,  Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Director of SEO at BusinessOnline, suggested that your social media efforts (Tweet, Facebook post, LinkedIn Answer, etc) can ultimately lead to link juice. In other words, someone reads something you post to your social network. It gets picked up by another person who ultimately writes a complimentary blog post about your and/or your organization and links back to your site.

As mentioned above, this one is a bit tricky to measure, yet an important one. While somewhat of a manual process, I believe it’s important to tie back a positive, link-filled blog post to your social media efforts.

Engage customers at an intuitive, emotional level: Patrick Bultema, CEO of CodeBaby, was the lunch keynote who provided this tip.

Patrick Bultema of CodeBaby

Many buying decisions are made on emotion. This is especially true for lower cost, impulsive purchases; however, I’d argue that some folks drop big money based on emotion as well. If you believe that this is true, think about ways to appeal to consumers at the personal, emotional level.

Most successful marketers serve vs. sell: Joel Book of ExactTarget talked about how email marketing tied into social media, mobile, offline, and other channels.

Joel Book of ExactTarget

This is something that we preach often at Blue Sky Factory – “Be there before the sale.” The basic idea is that before you try and sell your product or service (your “stuff”) to a prospect, engage in a conversation – provide advice, coaching, insights, etc. The sale will come once a relationship forms and trust is earned.

Content production is a culture: Sean Jackson, CEO of Ecordia, was on the closing panel and talked a lot about content creation. His view was that all of these social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, email marketing, etc – will not serve you well if your organization does not have a culture of content production. Social media is just the vehicle to communicate this content.

Sean Jackson of Ecordia

Not sure I could have said it better!

Look to the adult entertainment industry if you want to learn how to do online marketing correctly.

This statement by Sean Jackson, CEO of Ecordia, certainly woke folks up at the end of the day.

Do you have a question for DJ or would you like to add a takeaway?
Drop a comment!

Other great posts from DJ Waldow:

About the Author:

DJ Waldow is the Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory, an ESP based in Baltimore. With over 4 years of experience in email marketing, DJ is active in the twittersphere (@djwaldow), on blogs (blog.blueskyfactory.com), and in the social media space. He’s an administrator and regular contributor to the Email Marketers Club and other eMail-related social networks. DJ resides in Salt Lake City, Utah where he can be found thinking, eating, and breathing eMail.

Website: http://www.blueskyfactory.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/djwaldow
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/djwaldow

*Originally posted: Jul 19, 2010 @ 14:03

I scream! You scream! We all scream for clarity!

One email, a blog post from HubSpot and hundreds and hundreds of tweets later and it seems few people bothered to actually ask Ben & Jerry’s what their actual plan regarding email marketing was…until now.

What an amazing concept, drop the PR people @ Ben & Jerry’s an email and ask them! Isn’t email just the most amazing information tool ever?

Here’s the reply from their PR Director, Sean Greenwood, which should clear up the massive confusion which has arisen since HubSpot first posted about this whole thing:

“In general, I think it’s a bit of a misunderstanding.  The announcement came from our UK team, who was basically sharing that they planned to reach out to their fans via social media moving forward.  I think they wanted to alleviate any fears from fans who previously received a newsletter style email to think that they had somehow fallen off the list.  I believe they’re still keeping email as a venue for special events/opportunities as they mentioned they might still reach out via email.

Again, this was a note from our UK team.  I believe the rest of the Ben & Jerry’s folks around the globe (including us here at the HQ in Vermont who support the U.S. and the globe) are planning to continue to use: email, social media, text messaging, augmented reality, snail mail, vanilla guerrilla marketing, grassroots Social Mission endeavors, sky writers, deep-sea divers and of course… scoop trucks on the road.”

- Sean Greenwood, Ben & Jerry’s

So, according to Sean, the email that so many people seized on as proof that Ben & Jerry’s was dropping email marketing was actually a proactive move on their U.K. group’s part to reassure their subscribers (who obviously want to communicate with Ben & Jerry’s) that they hadn’t been removed from their subscriber list!

Here’s the original Ben & Jerry’s U.K. email which started the whole thing! (Thanks to Laura Dinneen!)

The discussion this past week via email, blogs and Twitter has been more political than practical. Fueled almost entirely by at best wishful thinking and even, personal agendas. Keep this in mind the next time you see some tweet or blog post predicting the imminent death of something. That way we can all avoid brain freeze.

Oh and don’t forget to sign up for the Ben & Jerry’s email newsletter here!

Just to show their love for email, Ben & Jerry’s is giving us some free pint coupons to give away! Just leave a comment about what flavour you like best and why and we’ll pick some of the best and send the author a fee pint coupon!

Bonus points to those commenting who also tweet this story using the auto-tweetme link!

Now that’s cool!

Takeaway: Don’t believe everything you read with out doing some homework.

Certainly this week was stimulating with the Ben & Jerry’s evolving story and our breaking it wide open with the first statement right from the cow’s mouth! No grass is growing beneath our feet here @ The eMail Guide!

We’d like to think we did our job and fulfilled our mission to be the source for email marketing solutions and information. However, we didn’t do it alone. Our community and dozens of Tweeple got involved to spread the word and that’s pretty darn cool. Thank you!

If you’ve got a breaking story or just see something some where that doesn’t quite add up and think the Ninjas here @ The eMail Guide should dig deeper on it, drop us a tweet or an email!

Have you signed up for The eMail Guide newsletter yet? Sign up here!

Enjoy this week’s top takeaways of email marketing wisdom!

Takeaway: Don’t believe everything you read with out doing some homework.

Takeaway: Push the testing envelope! Don’t just test what you have to; test what you can do.

Takeaway: There’s no end to the different ways you can grow your email marketing list. Just take a look at what others are doing both online and in the real-world to grow their followers!

Takeaway: Use landing pages instead of the one-size-fits-all pages of your standard website to take personalization from email all the way through to the web browser and lead forms.

Takeaway: A little love from your customers can make you top dog @ The eMail Guide!

Takeaway: The daily email marketing buzz is a collection of the best email marketing posts every day. Each post in the buzz has a takeaway, making this a buffet of brilliance all on it’s own.

Get more top takeaways here!

Not long ago we featured a post about offering 15 innovative ways to build your email marketing list. Here’s five more quick ideas from Janine Popick of VerticalResponse!

It can be hard to come up with fresh ideas on new ways to build your email marketing list each month, so here are 5 innovative ideas you can put to work for your business.

Customer testimonials and ratings are powerful marketing tools! I know when I shop online for a service or product, I pay close attention to the user reviews and ratings when making my purchases. Generally I’ve found these ratings and reviews to be quite accurate. People seem to value constructive and thoughtful reviews even if they are not entirely positive. Malicious and thoughtless comments are usually ignored by consumers as noise if the reviews are positive overall.

When we we set out to create a robust ratings & review system here @ The eMail Guide, we had some simple, but very important objectives:

1. Allow the service and solution providers listed in the guide to harness the power of client reviews
2. Create a rating system which accurately reflected and indicated client satisfaction or lack of same
3. Give the ratings real value by ensuring that those reviewing services or products owned their comments
4. Base the ratings on a simple yet effective formula:

Features / Innovation
Ease of Use
Customer Service
Reliability
Technical Support
Value / ROI

You may have noticed that ESP, Mail Dog has shot up to the top of our user reviews this week.

Why? Simple, because they asked some of their customers to take five minutes to rate them here @ The eMail Guide! Other solution providers such as Inbox Group, allWEBeMAIL and Sterizon have done the same, either emailing select clients or tweeting them and encouraging them to share their good vibes here.

A few minutes to tweet or email your rabid fans will get you more eyeballs and more traffic via The eMail Guide — try it! You’re customers love you and will be more than happy to dole out some kudos to you here @ The eMail Guide, while helping others in our community make the right choice for their email marketing solutions and products!

This is only the start! If you really want to get some attention and drive some traffic, make sure you take advantage of our Ninja listing option! It’s a no-brainer!

Obviously a lot of you are really dog lovers! Show your puppy love as well as your dislike for email list selling and join EMAPP! Every time you buy and email list a puppy dies!

Takeaway: A little love from your customers can make you top dog @ The eMail Guide!

Personalized, targeted experiences. That’s what online marketing is all about these days and we’re getting smarter and faster at providing segmented and personalized web experiences. Email marketers are already savvy on the benefits of personalized marketing, so why not take that personalization beyond the first click?

Your website is beautiful and functional, but can it address your prospects and current customers by name or talk to them about their last purchase? (If so, feel free to skip to the next blog article. Most of our websites aren’t quite there with Big Brother yet.) Enter: Landing Pages. Our friends in search marketing already know some of the awesome benefits of landing pages. Depending on what search term was entered, which offer was served up in the Pay-Per-Click ad and more, search marketers can direct traffic to different versions of the same page, tailored to what they already know about the visitor.

With email marketing, we can take that even a step further. We already have a relationship – presumably – with our subscribers. We usually know at least their name, and often times, their company, their interests based on what they’ve clicked on in the past and in the best of cases, we have buying history. We can use that information to create special landing pages that address our subscribers by name, prefill a form for them and make educated guesses on what products or services to offer them.

You know that feeling you get when you call a customer service line, enter your account number by typing it in and then as soon as a real person answers the phone, they ask you for your account number? We can skip that with forms when we email our subscribers. Help them get a head start by filling out as much as we know and asking them to provide the rest.

Of course, there are ways to offer product suggestions and personalization on your full website. Amazon.com sets the bar for this and continues to find ways to intuitively guess what will engage a customer the most. In the case of most marketers, however, we don’t ask visitors or even customers to log in to the website for their personalized info page on email marketing, for example. In those cases, we can lean on landing pages to help us carry the personalization of email past the click.

Here’s the challenge I hear most often: depending on how much access you have to your website, you may not be able to jump in and create landing pages yourself. And if you do, the personalization only goes as far as the number of iterations you create.

This is a big reason why many email service providers are now offering landing page tools to help carry your email database info through to the web browser. This means, you can go from “Those who bought laundry soap also bought room freshener” to “Hi Jane, we noticed you bought patio furniture last month and were thinking that you may want to get a sun-brella for when Missouri gets so hot you can’t leisurely sit outside anymore!” Or for a B2B example, “David, we hope you enjoyed the conference in Vegas as much as we did and had a safe trip back to Kansas City. If part of your role at Acme as Marketing Manager is to create, track and measure email marketing campaigns, we’d love to help.”

Bonus: Adobe’s Flash products are made to take variable data into consideration and not just in text. Incorporate personalization into your graphic elements as well! If you have a few moments for a fun “FlashPURLs” example check out: http://flashpurls.emfluence.com/WhatAreFlashPURLs

Takeaway: Use landing pages instead of the one-size-fits-all pages of your standard website to take personalization from email all the way through to the web browser and lead forms.

Other great posts from Jessica:

Email marketing opt-out… A not-so-good example

“Oh you’re the people who send me spam…”

About the Author
Jessica Best is Parade Leader, aka Marketing Manager, at emfluence, a marketing platform and email service provider based in Kansas City, MO. Part massive email, social media and online marketing nerd and part permission-marketing evangelist, she’s not afraid to type (or speak) her opinion on the industry. New communication outlets, beware, she’ll come for you (Twitter, FourSquare). Spark a discussion on email marketing, social media or music (any genre) at jbest at emfluence dot com.

Website: http://www.emfluence.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bestofjess
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalbest