By: Clickz

With the first few weeks in 2012 in the history book, some of us may have already fallen back into bad habits or the email hamster routine that allows for little else other than tactical management of the next email campaign (and there is always, the next email campaign). Others may have big strategic initiatives and a laundry list of plans to evaluate for 2012. Getting them done is hard. Ignoring them is easy.

My recommendation: Have a list for big picture initiatives and blocking-and-tackling measures. Then figure out the best way and resources to accomplish both them and establish a reasonable timeline. Oh, and make sure you avoid some traps that strangle progress and end any chance for positive momentum. My list of things to avoid in 2012 is below. Avoid these and continue to navigate the path to success. Overlook them and it could be an uphill battle.

1. Little to no exposure to the C-suite.
2. Talking about your program exclusively in opens and clicks.
3. Working with a partner or platform that has not elevated your email program at all.
4. A welcome message or series that was created by IT six years ago and hasn’t been updated since.
5. No new acquisition tactics to grow your list and minimize subscriber churn.
6. Lack of focus or coordinated efforts on how the social program can help email, not just the other way around.
7. Not dealing with deliverability and list hygiene issues, assuming that problem will just work itself out.
8. Knowing that your typical email campaign looks subpar on a smartphone and tablet but not understanding why or doing anything to address this.
9. Refusing to revisit campaign processes and the parts of the campaign development that take away valuable time and resources.
10. Improving your subscriber sign up experience at all touch points (website, retail, mobile, social, landing page, etc. ).

By: Promotion World

Achieving email marketing success starts with building an opt in list that will allow you to maintain ‘contact’ with them! Now this approach is one of the best internet marketing strategies you can use and a great way to increase your business efficiency online! On the other hand do NOT expect to get results quickly by constantly sending out promotions because this will result in many unsubscribing from your list!

Here are 3 things every list owner MUST do to maximize the results they get when contacting members of their opt in list!

Offer Useful Information

When you first begin making contact with your opt in list you want to avoid ‘bull rushing’ them with a blizzard of promotional materials! Instead offer information that will be of use and interest to subscribers and since you already know some of their interests, this should be easy to do! Remember that the fact of the matter is this, you are just ‘meeting’ these people for the first time so be nice, courteous and helpful whenever you can! You only have one chance to make a good ‘first’ impression!

Build Relationships

Establishing trust and credibility is crucial to your marketing effectiveness! Once these are established subscribers have a deeper sense of loyalty towards you thereby making them more receptive to your promotional efforts! The content you are offering your opt in list is what helps you gain their trust while building your credibility! Freely offering anything of value or interest is a great way to gain the trust of others and when what you offer is of good quality this tends to boost your credibility as well! A trusting relationship with people who view you as credible is a great foundation upon which to build your business! This is also why using email in this way is considered one of the best internet marketing strategies in use today!

George Bilbrey of Return Path wrote a thought-provoking piece for MediaPost on how marketing objectives interact with deliverability objectives. The article takes on the question of whether deliverability tactics are at odds with marketing best practices.

The response, to paraphrase, was that improved deliverability increases revenue, reduces the chances of damage to sender reputation, and improves engagement rates.

In essence, Bilbrey says that to build lasting success in email, marketers should be bold and follow the hard data, rather than worrying about going against their gut or short-term gains.

I would challenge email marketers this year to bring that bold mindset to acquisition email and to focus on doing things right.

Be Bold . . .

The digital marketing industry is undergoing a sea change in its attitude toward acquisition email. As new technologies on the market make complex targeting feasible, the bold among the industry are blazing the trail from retention email to the acquisition email market.

Acquisition email can bring a number of benefits to a marketing program. Three significant benefits to consider are:

1. ROI – Email has a high ROI, and bringing that ROI to a customer acquisition channel can bring down overall acquisition costs.
2. Data – Email is highly trackable. After a successful campaign you can use your reporting data to scale out that success (both to other email campaigns and to other channels entirely).
3. Skill Transfer – This is the most important thing you can take away from this post. It is possible to bring the knowledge and skills you have amassed in retention email to acquisition email campaigns. Upholding the same rigorous standards for permission, targeting, and content will reward marketers in acquisition email as well.

Just as with any industry change, the first to adapt will see the greatest benefits, both in terms of ROI and in terms of knowledge gained. So be bold in 2012 and test out this new customer acquisition channel.

. . . But Do It Right

While email marketers can transfer much of their knowledge from retention campaigns to acquisition campaigns, there are critical differences in how you should approach this new market. One of the most important elements to get right is respecting subscribers.

Absolute musts – We say this a lot, but permission is especially key in acquisition email. This means working with third-party opt-in records only. You should also make it easy to opt-out of future mailings by making unsubscribe links visible and simple to use.

Honesty is another non-negotiable element. It should be clear to subscribers who you are, who owns the list you are mailing to, and what you are offering. You can (and should) make this clear before subscribers even open the email by using straightforward sender information and a clear, concise, and truthful subject line.

Raise the bar – IBM recently predicted that in the next five years, spam will become a thing of the past because email will be so targeted and relevant. Work to achieve that kind of relevancy by segmenting your mailing through demographic targeting (using information from the publisher) or behavioral targeting (using an email ad exchange platform, like ividence).

What are your goals for your email program this year? And what bold action will you take to achieve them?

The Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (formerly known as The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy) is dedicated to providing analysis, information, and consulting on industry issues relating to public policies and processes regarding spam, email, email deliverability, and the Internet. ISIPP also provides a widely-used email senders accreditation service, SuretyMail, and organizes and sponsors industry forums such as email management roundtables, email deliverability summits, and Internet law conferences.

ISIPP’s customer service team prides itself on providing fast and effective customer service, helping our email accreditation customers to not only ensure that their email gets to the inbox, but also working with our customers when they have problems with email delivery, to quickly get to the bottom of what is causing the problem, and helping our customers to correct the problem and get back into the inbox. Our customer service reponse time is a particular point of pride, and distinguishes us in the industry as among the best at any price.

While we have many more individuals who work with ISIPP in varying capacities, the below are our core team, and those with whom you are most likely to be working when you become an ISIPP Suretymail customer.

By: DMA

I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

By: Bronto

You’ve worked hard to get people onto your email marketing list, but that’s only part of the battle. What are the things you need to do to make sure people not only stay ON the list, but stay engaged and interact with your messages? Here are 8 key ways to keep subscribers engaged through their lifecycle:

1. Set Expectations from the Start

You want people to be excited to join your list in order to receive certain communications from you.  In the case of Kaleidoscope Yarns – that’s knitting tips and tricks, free patterns, special offers, and more. Subscribers also understand that they are going to get one email a week.

By making it clear WHAT they are signing up for and, roughly, how often they can expect to hear from you, you’ll start your relationship off on the right foot with everyone on the same page.

Setting proper expectations is key to a good email relationship. It helps establish trust.

2. Keep it Relevant – Segment & Target

Another key to creating great relationships with subscribers and maintaining engagement is keeping content RELEVANT. We do this by leveraging data we have on our subscribers.

We can take advantage of the following types of behavioral data:

• Email behavior: What are they opening and click on? That is a demonstration of interest you can pursue.
• Web site behavior: What categories of product are they browsing? According to recent studies, we know that messages that leverage clickstream data, like abandoned cart and browsing recommendation messages, produce 9 times the revenue and 32 times the net profit of standard broadcast messages.
• Purchase behavior:  What have customers purchased from you? How much money do they spend? How many times have they purchased from you? When did they last purchase from you? You can do some really smart marketing if you have this data flowing into your email platform regularly.

We can also leverage demographic information gathered via:

• Sign-up: What are you asking for up-front? Highly consider name, location, birthday and interest areas for future segmentation.
• Manage preference center: You can run an ”Update Your Information” campaign to get data from existing customers and motivate response using a drawing or sweepstakes.

By: iMedia Connection

As marketers, we all know how important it is to make sure that our email and other direct marketing efforts are relevant to our customers. We also understand that customers are taking more control of their relationships with us and are demanding that we engage with them in ways that work. Doing this effectively requires a marketing strategy that integrates efforts across channels, while allowing for us to continuously “listen” to our customers and adjust tactics based on what we “hear” from them.

As we enter 2012, here are a few of the main themes that our analysis shows will be on every email subscriber’s wish list, as well as ways to engage with them and give them what they really want.

To belong

Everyone wants to feel like they are part of something. Utilizing “welcome” programs to initiate a sense of belonging — letting subscribers know more about your brand and your email, social, and mobile programs and their benefits — is a great way to make them feel part of your community.

This year, consider taking your welcome emails a step further and deploy a welcome series. Strategically crafted creative elements, calls to action, and messaging in each treatment of the series can enable continuous subscriber engagement and optimize results with double the open and click rates and three times the transaction rates of promotional mailings.

Integrating your digital programs can also create a sense of belonging and increase engagement. For example, leveraging Facebook to optimize email performance and acquisition by including email sign-up on your Facebook page can bring your digital programs together and make your subscribers feel connected.

By: HubSpot

Whether you’re just starting out with email marketing or you already have some experience sending marketing emails, you’ve probably wondered about the types of email communication you can send to your database.

Should you nurture your subscribers with weekly newsletters? Are dedicated sends better at optimizing your sales and marketing funnel? What about email digests? These are all valid questions that marketing professionals should consider when selecting the right format to meet their email marketing goals.

So which types of emails should you be sending? In this blog post, we’ll discuss the different types of email marketing communication and their respective advantages and disadvantages. This information should help you make both an educated decision when choosing the most appropriate email format to meet your specific goals.

1. Email Newsletter

When deciding whether you should use email newsletters in your marketing strategy, you first need to determine your goal. What is it that you want your email newsletter to achieve? You might want to nurture your existing contacts and become the first brand they think of when they need a product or service in your industry. Or your goal might be to increase social sharing so you attract new people to your list. As you define your goal, think about what metrics you can use to track your progress.

Email newsletters are characterized by three key advantages. First, they can spread your brand awareness. By building habitual communication with your email subscribers, you enable them to recognize your brand and associate it with a positive sentiment. Second, email newsletters can leverage existing content. Many companies do quick summaries of their most popular blog posts and link to the articles from their newsletter. Third, email newsletters give you the freedom to include different types of content that might be important to your organization. For instance, the same newsletter can contain a popular blog post, a new offer, an announcement of an upcoming event, information about a discount, and a link to a survey.

Email newsletters are also characterized by some important disadvantages. First, they dilute the main call-to-action. If you include a series of blurbs or article summaries, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across these tidbits of information as opposed to staying focused on a certain element. Second, the design of a newsletter becomes a much more complicated task than other emails like dedicated sends. You’ll have to spend some time deciding on the right placement of images and text, alignment, and prioritization of information.

By: Litmus

Ever get so frustrated with coding HTML email that you start seeing red? In the past couple weeks we’ve heard from a handful of red-eyed users reporting Gmail tests that are seeing black by showing up in inboxes with a black background (when that wasn’t your intended result!)

After digging into some testing, I realized that this issue isn’t limited to Gmail—in fact it affects a number of different clients depending on how you apply background colors in your code. As with anything HTML email related, this can be super frustrating since standard web code won’t always work the way you anticipate when sent to an email client.

Read on to get the scoop and find the one fail safe way to code background colors for consistent results across the board.

HOW TO CODE A BACKGROUND COLOR? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

Usually, background colors are applied to a few common HTML elements:<body> <table> <td> <div> and <a>. Depending on your experience and coding style, you might use one of six (yes, six) different ways to apply background colors to elements in your email:

• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with a 3-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with a 6-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with an RGB color value
• Using the background-color CSS property with a 3-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the background-color CSS property with a 6-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the background-color CSS property with an RGB color value

Between smart phones and desk jobs, people are checking their email at enormous rates. As a business, this can be an important way to reach customers. Yet, with an ever growing amount of spam and sales junk, people are learning to skim through their inbox, eyeing the most important emails and deleting or ignoring the rest. You don’t want to be one of those emails.

Still, ATYM Market Research found that 27% of people prefer company updates in the form of emails. Thus, there must be companies that have successful email tactics. The question is: what are they?

2012 is the year of the customer. With so many tools at their fingertips: Facebook, Twitter, etc, they are in the driver’s seat.  To get your emails up to speed, you should take advantage of exactly that.

Ask For Feedback

It is safe to assume you already have some sort of email newsletter right now. This will be a good start to deciphering what your customer wants. Through a simple feedback form, you can get instant information. Before you can hope to get any information, though, you need to get their attention. To do this, you should consider your subject line.

• People will react to numbers. Because you should be giving your customer a reward for their participation, use your subject to tell them what they’ll get. “60 points toward…” “30% off…”

Take to Social Media

Valuable tools you already have are your social media accounts. Whether you have a blog, Twitter account, or Facebook page, there are a variety of ways you can employ them for your benefit.

• An astounding 42% of people have mentioned a brand in their Twitter. Social media users want to be heard, all you have to do is listen. Here they air grievances, positive thoughts and questions, which are all hints into what they want to hear more of.
• Facebook is considered a more interactive network, and it’s here that you can post questions in your status updates.  A Constant Contact survey found that 77% of consumers interact with their favorite brands on Facebook via posts and updates. Posting questions here presents a valuable opportunity to get the information you need.
• Reading through the comment section in your blog is another easy way to find what your customers are looking for. This is a place for them to discuss what they think is missing within the post, what they like and what they question. Take this into consideration as well.

Sign up for competitor email newsletters

Apparently there are companies that currently have an email campaign that has been successful. Because every business and their cousin are offering an e-newsletter, sign up for a few. What do you like? What don’t you like? You aren’t taking ideas, simply contrasting current and potential ideas.

Focus Group

A focus group would be ideal. With an unbiased collection of people, who have been exposed to a variety of corporate emails, newsletters, etc, you can get invaluable information. Within this group you want to ask the right questions, and be very specific.

• What do you look for in emails from companies?
• What are the most appealing subject lines?
• What causes you to open an email?

Website Analytics

Social media marketing becomes more popular with each passing day, because of which there have been a variety of programs created to help businesses measure how effective they’re efforts are. While the software can be used for various information gathering, a program such as Google Analytics is able to give you important details to create a better email campaign. You can find out:

• What keywords brought them to your site? This is helpful in determining what your customer actually wants.
• What pages are they looking at? With this you can determine what products or information they are most interested in.

With all the tools you now have, it can be very easy to discover exactly what your customer wants. While it may take time to gather this information, and recreate your tactics, the tools are available and ready. When you figure out exactly how to use them, you’ll have no problem building the best customer emails.

We are not just another email marketing agency, ImpartialMail strives to empower businesses over email marketing service providers through impartial expert advice and services.

Email Marketing Specialist @ Tripadvisor

Why this role is Awesome: You will use email marketing knowledge to help expand communications.
We are looking for an energetic, detail-oriented marketing professional to serve as our Email Marketing Specialist. The Email Marketing Specialist will support a fast-paced, global team focused on driving customer engagement through email newsletters, trigger communications, lifecycle marketing and promotional campaigns.

To apply for this role send resumes to Jennifer Ramcharan at jramcharan@tripadivsor.com

What You’ll Do:

• Support email marketing managers in executing email communications to support new product launches, promotional offers, and lifecycle marketing.
• Coordinate development and delivery of TripAdvisor’s weekly and monthly email newsletters, each of which reaches millions of subscribers.
• Conduct and analyze regular testing of subject lines, content, layout, segmenting approaches, etc. to improve email performance.
• Perform weekly/monthly analysis to measure performance and identify opportunities to improve revenue and customer engagement.

Specific tasks include:

• Work with email marketing managers to develop programming calendars and project schedules.
• Build and rigorously test each email, verifying copy, layout, links, and dynamic content as well as assessing and addressing any spam risks
• Coordinate activities of design, content and engineering teams to meet multiple, interdependent deadlines.
• Coordinate with sales team to integrate sponsor advertising into TripAdvisor emails and report on results for each advertiser.
• Deploy emails and monitor any delivery issues.
• Analyze and report on results of each email, leveraging learnings to improve future performance.

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By: Direct Marketing News

I’m angry, and I’m not alone. Almost every time I wind up on some company’s database, I get punished for it — with email that insults my taste, shows no regard for my intelligence, and doesn’t value my time. Since we’re both in the email marketing business, let’s agree to stop pummeling each other in the name of selling. Instead, follow these six tactics.

• Be useful. Just because our shared agenda is to sell something, it doesn’t mean our email needs to act like a used-car salesman. Let’s tone down the rhetoric, and start to bring our customer useful helpful tips, ideas or how-tos. They’ll actually look forward to the next email you send.
• Design for skimming. Yes, some people will read reams of email copy. But most won’t. That doesn’t mean every email should squeeze all of its business above the fold, though. Long-form is fine, but keep each copy block brief and let subheads carry the story.
• Hold their hand and never let go. We’re not just asking people to read our little email. We’re asking them to take a journey. It falls on the copywriter to make every new step in that journey feel connected to the last — from the email’s line to its headline and call-to-action, then to the landing page headline and all the way through to a “thanks for your order” page. The entire journey should be written as a single narrative. That’s how it’ll be read.

By: AWeber

Your website and email marketing lists aren’t just business tools that help you connect with customers and prospects – in effect; they’re the digital manifestation of your presence and personality.

So while it’s tempting to think about these resources as simple text blocks and images, don’t underestimate the psychological impact these bits and bytes can have on your readers.

One of the best places to employ tactics that appeal to a reader’s emotions is in your email list, when it comes to managing your unsubscribe rates.

If you’ve been having trouble keeping these numbers down, check out the following psychological strategies on how to reduce your current unsubscribe rates:

Strategy #1 – Harness the Power of Words

There’s no doubt that many words are psychologically charged, but the two that you want to focus on here are “quit” and “give up.”

Whether or not we like to admit it, these words exert a powerful psychological force on readers. Quitting and giving up don’t simply mean “stopping” something – the strongest connotation with these words is actually “failure,” and nobody wants to admit that they’ve given up on or failed at something!

This is why we stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and it’s why we dread having to tell Great Aunt Sally that we’ve left bad working environments over the holiday dinner table. Heck, even the tobacco companies know that most smokers experience a psychological hurdle at the thought of quitting smoking (even if quitting is a good thing in this case!).

So how can you incorporate this technique into your email marketing lists? Well, imagine if – instead of being unsubscribed automatically – subscribers were shown the following options, as developed by Copyhackers:

Email Marketing Coordinator @ Horizontal Integration

The Email Marketing Coordinator will oversee the development and implementation of email marketing campaigns, including campaigns to clients and prospects. Working within a team environment where cross-department collaboration is critical for success, the Email Marketing Coordinator must demonstrate a drive for continuous improvement, a dedication to brand integrity, and a creative mind for new concepts, results and analytics.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead execution of email marketing campaigns and ensure error free deployment of our campaigns through our email service provider.
• Create and maintain a master email calendar.
• Provide reporting and analysis on campaigns and assist with ongoing reporting on the program and channel.
• Understands both best practices and functional requirements of channel and serve as resource on these topics to business partners.”

Who Do We Server?

eConnect offers fully managed accounts as well as do-it-yourself accounts. Our clients range from Fortune 500 companies to small local interest groups. Our guarantee assures you the best email marketing solution, at the most affordable price.

Why Choose Us?

Email has become a critical part of any firm’s communications and marketing plan. eConnect Email can help retain customers, keep members informed, increase sales, fill seats, raise brand visibility and help you grow your business.

As one of the industries most robust and powerful email marketing applications our system has every fancy tool you’ll want while keeping things simple with our intuitive interface. Our close relationship with our ISP’s will help ensure that your next campaign gets delivered and our on site designers can make sure they look beautiful, if you need help!

Private Label Program

Looking to offer an email marketing system to service your clients? eConnect Email offers a private label option to incorporate our state of the art email marketing application seamlessly with your brand.

It’s easy to focus exclusively on the content of your messages when it comes to creating engaging emails. But all too often, it’s the interactions at a more fundamental level that will make the most difference. If you’re not considering these four engagement opportunities, you could be missing out on the chance to earn or keep the attention of your subscribers.

The Sign-Up Process

Because it’s your initial point of interaction with future subscribers, the sign-up process gives you the chance to make memorable first impression. Prepare for a long and happy relationship with new subscribers by:

• Using Double Opt-Ins

Verify new subscriber requests by sending a confirmation e-mail that must be clicked for final activation. This ensures that the right person signed up using the right e-mail address and that they’ll be expecting your messages.

• Creating Expectations

Let the subscriber know how often to expect messages and what kind of content they can expect to see. No surprises.

The Welcome Letter

Don’t settle for boring or generic welcome letters. This is your chance to get the subscriber excited about the wonderful messages he’ll be receiving from you. Send the welcome letter promptly and start by thanking the subscriber and remind him or her of the current opt-in preferences. Personalize the message with the subscriber’s name so they are connected by being addresses directly. And offer your new members reasons to be immediately engaged with you or your company; provide valuable content such as a link to special promotions on your website, a link to a previous newsletter, or a new subscriber discount offer.

The Subject Line

The subject line is your chance to grab subscribers’ attention and tell them your email is worth opening. Don’t focus on gimmicks to avoid the spam folder; instead, show the subscriber that you respect their time by clearly relating what he can expect to see when he clicks.

The Unsubscribe Landing Page

Although often viewed as distasteful, the unsubscribe page can be a chance to create a positive impression even for dissatisfied subscribers. Make the unsubscribe link clear and easy to follow from your email; don’t try to hide it. On the unsubscribe landing page, remind the subscriber of the great benefits they’ll be missing out on  when they leaves and let them know you’ll miss them. Ask for feedback (but don’t require it), giving the subscriber a chance to share his feelings. And finally, when all is said and done, make the process easy, clear, and prompt.

Use eConnect Email’s list management feature, email creation templates, and autoresponders to ensure that you’re taking full advantage of every opportunity to engage with subscribers. Let them know you value their loyalty by treating them respectfully at every stage of the email campaign.

Sharing a good bottle of wine with friends is simply a much richer experience than consuming one alone. Additionally, a mutual appreciation for the same types of wines you and your friends consume creates a far more substantial sharing experience. In this two part series, I’ll explore why mutual associations with brands will dramatically increase open rates and drastically reduce spam complaints, paving the way for better deliverability metrics, engagement and brand reputation.

As marketers, we put too much pressure on our subscribers.  First, we insist they recognize the label on our wine bottle, (The From: Name) then we expect them to read our subject line, and subsequently we hope subscribers actually “taste” (open) the email and glance at what we’re peddling.  If we haven’t lost their attention by now, we continue to plague them by asking them to share the given email using a functionality called SWYN (share with your network).  If that isn’t enough, we still yearn for a conversion…..and it all gets to be too much, ultimately, perhaps, pushing the subscriber away.

Messaging of this nature is still outbound.

What lies ahead is a significant evolution in email marketing which will work in concert with social networks to “reverse engineer” the social characteristics of email and bring social directly to your inbox.

Email offers will drastically change in the near future.  Next-generation emails will benefit from a deeper level of peer transparency. This new level of transparency will be earmarked by advanced or universal preference centers and highly intuitive sign up processes. By selectively capturing social media credentials of your subscribers, several layers of data points will become immediately available to harvest.  These socially focused data points will change ordinary subject lines to engaging peer notifications from a given brand.

Consider this:  you are far more inclined to “friend” someone on Facebook if you have mutual friends, correct?  And, you are more inclined to become a fan of a Facebook page if other members and colleagues of your social network are fans of that same page.  So, why not apply this same concept to email?

Industry statistics from Bazaarvoice illustrate that 74% of online shoppers who receive advice from their friends on social networks allow that advice to influence their purchasing decisions. Also, this article by Shiv Singh supports that statistic with its discussion of when and why we trust our peers when determining types of online purchases. Furthermore, in a recent Purchaser Influence Survey by EXPO, featured in emarketer.com, over 90% US Moms trust peer reviews more than manufacturer information. (Special Thanks to Anthony Schneider of Mass Transmit and Jeffrey Rohrs of ExactTarget for that snippet.)  With that said, we must reverse-engineer the current dynamic of outbound marketing based emails and bring our social networks to the coveted inbox.  At its core, should be a socially focused “über-email” program which acts as your brand’s private reserve.

Shoppers of a given brand instinctively want to know what “a subset of their trusted friends” bought online.  Similarly, shoppers also want to know what their friends think about those same products before they decide to purchase them.  Our marketing based email messaging should produce unbiased, first-hand knowledge of how our social networks “feel” about a product, not a subjective marketing message from your brand with ordinary subject lines.  Moreover, user-generated content is comprised of written and/or video testimonials of a product or service.  But, these testimonials which are often placed in an email, or on a brand’s landing page come from random people we don’t necessarily know. These testimonials although sincere in nature, don’t reverberate.

Reverse engineering social email

Would you like to know if any of your friends subscribe to the same brands as you do?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see which of your friends reviewed that new trendy restaurant on Yelp? Would receiving immediate notifications from peer actions with the brand build trust, directly after that review?

Currently, dynamic content in email allows us to customize a message to a particular segment or to an individual on your list, based on attributes in their profile.  We’ve learned that FedEx has as many as 144 attributes for a given record, which allows for granular customization of each email communication for each given email stream.  With increased social media data points culled together through an evolved master preference center adds an increasingly richer dimension for email marketers.  With these richer dimensions comes pinpoint information about your friends’ recent actions associated with a given brand.

Savvy marketers will ameliorate the quality of such social media data points by dynamically inserting social attributes into a given email program. This concept completely reverses the current outbound system which is somewhat dysfunctional, because marketers still rely on subscribers outbound actions. The evolution of such a program will bring these messages to the inbox and will have far superior return on your email marketing investments, because this messaging adds increased value for the subscribers.  More value equals a more relevant email. With more relevant messaging comes drastically reduced spam complaints and dramatically increased open rates.

Let’s say you received an email from Barnes and Noble.  And, Barnes and Noble has been granted permission by you and many members of your social network, to publish information about actions your social network is undertaking with Barnes and Noble. Images of your friends may be dynamically and creatively populated in the creative, so when you open up your email, not only will you see friends’ images with links to their social media pages, you’ll also know which of them are subscribers, and which ones purchased that new Stephan King book Barnes and Noble is featuring.  What’s more is that the subject line will be highly engaging because it’s about your network “first” and not about the item being featured.

Part II of this series will discuss the challenges associated with this concept and why future marketing based subject lines will no longer matter.
Subject lines will become highly relevant notifications, and how these “relevant notifications” will increase open rates and dramatically reduce spam complaints.

Breeze is another sophisticated yet simple web product from Element Fusion. Since 1999, we’ve grown our company with a reputation for rising above the competition.

When you request an account on Breeze, one of our internet consultants will contact you to complete the process. When you need a design created, we’ll work with you every step of the way. And when you email support@feelbreeze.com, we’ll be there to answer your questions and help you resolve any issues.

Breeze is a part of our larger family of online products. In fact, the power of Breeze is even greater when it’s integrated with our other web products. To find out more about our products and our company, please visit our website.

Our main project is Templateria, an e-commerce for email marketing templates.

Our templates are beautifully designed and coded for webmails, desktop and mobile email clients.

In addition to Templateria, we also create customized email templates for companies who preffer an unique design.

Get in touch to know us better!

Here at GetResponse, we recently launched our segmentation feature, and we already have the use of personalization and dynamic content.

So we encourage you to gather as much data as you can on your clients, so you can have the ability to ‘Market to One’.

But is there such a thing as too much data?

Today I am going to talk briefly about some key points to remember when creating your web forms and the data you need to know.

Tools of the trade

First, lets talk what you need. This is of course specific to your industry, but email address and name are a given for any serious marketer. What next?

Fields that relate to location, age, or gender are normally acceptable, however the subscriber is going to be thinking, “Why do you want that data, and how are you going to use it?”

Don’t ask for gender, and then blast your entire list with offers for women’s clothing when there are men on your list. They trusted you with vital info, and you must repay that trust by making your newsletter relevant.

Plan ahead with your newsletters and autoresponders, and think where you want to make it specific. Once you have done this, you can then think about what information you will ask for.

Too many questions can result in subscribers bailing on you!

Here is a stat to show you what asking too much information can result in:

For every additional field of data you ask for, you lose 6% of sign ups. (courtesy of worldata.com presentation at DMA2010)

Test your web form

That doesn’t mean testing the technology, like if your sign up form is working. It means you need to test the ease of your webform, and the commitment it takes for a subscriber to sign up.

Do you make this easy, with only a few fields, or are you driving your customer away by asking for too much data?

How best to test your web forms

I recommend asking a 3^rd party to go over the form with you, and to ask them to answer honestly, giving you a real representative of how easy your form is to use.

Forms that take more than 45 seconds to fill out have a 48% fall out!

So with this in mind, if you’re close to 45 seconds after a completed form, look to make it easier somewhere. Maybe not losing a field, but change a text box for a drop down, or a tick box.

Data collection can be ongoing

My last point within this post is that you do not have to stop collecting data at the sign up form.

Once a person has committed to your campaign, you have the ability to gather more information as time goes by. Include a small survey in a newsletter, or even a questionnaire.

The key is to continue to engage your subscribers and ensure you communicate with them the information that they want.

Do you agree with this? Have you had success by removing a field from your forms like the Name field or drop-down menus and check boxes? Drop me a comment!

Until Next Time

Mick

Takeaway: Don’t ask for more information than you can use or which makes the sign up process too long.

Email Marketing Coordinator @ Barneys New York

The Email Marketing Coordinator will support the Senior Digital Marketing Manager in all email production and planning. This role will be responsible for the implementation, execution and reporting of all email marketing campaigns. We will also look to the Email Marketing Manager to keep us current on email marketing best practices with regard to content strategies, data capture and campaign analysis, deliverability and CAN-SPAM compliance. We are still in the process of developing and testing our email marketing strategy, so this role will offer an exciting opportunity to take part in the process design and contribute to the creation of our strategy.

Please note that in order to qualify for this job you need to have HTML writing and editing skills.

Responsibilities:

• Assist in providing vision, strategy and leadership for the email channel.
• Manage email production and coding for all campaigns.
• Maintain our email calendar with accurate dates and email content. This involves segmenting, building, quality testing, tagging and approving all email campaigns by checking for accurate email copy and imagery.
•  Coordinate, manage and align resources across business units and functional teams to produce engaging email campaigns.
• Maintain historical records of emails complete with a binder of printed email creatives and results summaries.
• Manager all customer segmentation to accurately target contacts for each email campaign.
• Continuously optimize and communicate critical email performance metrics such as open rate, CTR, conversion, $ per circulation, etc.
• Recommend new ideas and innovations to grow and improve the email channel
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders to dovetail online and offline initiatives, maximize the reach of internal business units and reinforce the brand design, presence and voice.

Online Marketing Specialist / Web Marketing @ Sylvane

We are seeking an analytical and highly motivated individual to join our growing Marketing team as an Online Marketing Specialist. As part of the Marketing team, you will have the opportunity to work on multiple aspects of our marketing and advertising program as well as learn more about online marketing and e-commerce. In the Online Marketing Specialist role, you will be responsible for driving new customers to our website through online advertising programs and increasing our return on investment for these programs. This is a full-time junior level position with full benefits. In-house training will be provided.

Area of Responsibility:
The Online Marketing Specialist will be responsible for driving new customer growth through the support, implementation, management, and optimization of marketing and advertising programs including paid search, comparison shopping engines, affiliate marketing, email marketing, promotions, and other digital media programs. The Online Marketing Specialist will be responsible for analyzing and refining these efforts to maximize profitability.

Key responsibilities include:
Manage paid search programs: Research, build, and refine keyword lists that reflect searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing for our products. Add new advertising campaigns and write ad copy to entice searchers to visit our website. Report on campaign performance, and analyze campaign data to identify new opportunities.

Manage comparison shopping engine programs: Enhance our listings on comparison shopping engines, such as PriceGrabber and Shopping.com, by adjusting data feed copy, content and filters, implementing bid strategies, and executing marketing programs offered.

Manager, Email Marketing @ AREA203

AREA203 is a digital marketing outfitter. We build lasting relationships with our clients that are geared toward growing their companies into industry leaders. We offer creative design and implementation, strategic services, performance optimization, measurement and analysis across all channels and platforms. Our work is underpinned by a mentorship approach, and we promise to keep our clients Number One – both within our walls and across the globe.

Position Summary:

AREA203 Digital is looking for an Email Marketing Manager to join our quickly expanding team. We are interested in hiring an email marketing professional who will drive strategy, execution, and analysis of email marketing programs. In addition, the individual will focus on long-term planning and continual testing to improve open, click-thru, retention and acquisition. This person will be a part of the Email Marketing Department and will answer directly to the Director, Digital Media.

Essential Functions:

• Provide leadership, strategic direction, and digital expertise to the Email Marketing team
• Manage external vendor solutions and relationships to execute and monitor email marketing campaigns and resulting site traffic and visitor behavior
• Analyze and continually drive email technology integrations and advancements using available platforms to deliver leading-edge personalization and revenue optimization
• Develop, maintain, and provide performance reports that track the efficiency and effectiveness of email campaigns
• Create and implement short and long-term goals
• Define, prioritize, and champion email projects
• Advocate email best practices
• Develop and analyze key metrics to ensure campaigns are meeting revenue targets
• Collaborate with other teams to ensure a cohesive marketing message across all channels
• Responsible for all facets of reporting, measuring, and segmenting-related traffic
• Ensuring all regulations are implemented and followed
• Evaluate, develop, and execute campaigns based on external list purchases
• Perform administrative and clerical duties as needed