Search Results: 72
By: Clickz One of the most important questions you can ask yourself as a B2B email marketer is “What am I trying to accomplish?” To create effective emails, you have to be able to answer that question for your entire email program as well as each message you send out to your distribution list. This question becomes important when companies go into hardcore budgeting mode, where every... [Read more]
By: Clickz While technology surrounding the typical email subscriber may be quickly evolving (see my last column on the new inbox), the most important piece of the marketing equation will continue to be ensuring your messages get read. If they don’t, everything else is near worthless (outside of the branding implications that many hang their hat on). So how does a savvy digital marketer make... [Read more]
By: Clickz A regularly published B2B email newsletter is a staple of most B2B digital marketing strategies. They are a cost-effective, if inefficient, way to nurture prospects and help maintain a relationship over a client’s lifetime. Unlike a typical B2C email message with its strong, conversion-driven focus, the B2B newsletter usually serves multiple purposes, including: Attract prospective... [Read more]
By: Clickz Everybody makes mistakes, even email marketers. You can have any number of controls in place to prevent errors with your email programs, but as long as there is a human involved at some point (and there should be), there are going to be mistakes. Of course, technology isn’t completely off the hook either – Y2K anyone? So, it’s not a question of if you’re going... [Read more]
By: Clickz It’ll be 10 years next month since I went out on my own as an email marketing consultant. The anniversary has me thinking about how much has changed – and how much has stayed the same – during this period in the industry. I was looking back over the conference sessions I was giving back then – one of them, which I co-presented with my colleague (and copywriter extraordinaire)... [Read more]
By: Clickz Dick’s Sporting Goods and JC Penney are leveraging Facebook and Foursquare in goodwill back-to-school marketing campaigns. Dick’s has teamed up with neurocognitive assessment technology company Impact to offer middle and high school athletes a free concussions baseline evaluation. Up to 3,300 schools will participate, including around one million athletes, according to the Findlay,... [Read more]
By: Clickz Need to shake up your B2B email marketing program to get more activity from your readers? Perhaps it’s time to take another tip from your B2C colleagues and change your email schedule to one that better reflects your subscribers’ needs, wants, and situations. This idea expands the concepts I touched on in my last column (“3 B2C Marketing Tactics to Improve Your B2B Newsletter“).... [Read more]
By: Clickz A recent study by IBM’s Institute for Business Value finds marketers and consumers are polar opposites when it comes to connecting via social media. It’s fair to assume that this behavior applies to email as well, as email is the original social channel. The report, “From Social Media to Social CRM: What Customers Want“, found marketers thought customers gave much... [Read more]
By: Clickz Recently my firm conducted an executive survey looking at what marketers are doing to connect social and email marketing. The results indicated that marketers’ social and email tactics are rather rudimentary. For example, 52 percent stated they were using social sharing buttons in their email, but just 38 percent stated they are using social listening platforms to discern brand sentiment... [Read more]
By: Clickz While anyone in the digital space has likely had a fast and furious year to date, email marketers are feeling particularly smart and savvy, having hung around in the seemingly moribund industry during some dark days. Many marketers shifted to search and social (not to mention, real estate, banking, and other areas that were more appealing in the early 2000s) when email and digital were... [Read more]
By: Clickz Zappos is known for putting its customers first. Not only do Zappos’ customers get free overnight shipping on all purchases and returns, its call center is also staffed with passionate in-house representatives who are empowered to take as much time and whatever tactics necessary to make their customers happy. And this customer-centric approach also extends to its email marketing... [Read more]
By: Clickz Revenue per email (RPE) is one of the most valuable metrics (aside from ROI) that you can track, but few organizations, large or small, actually do. In this column, I’ll talk about the value of RPE, its strengths and weaknesses as a measure of success, how to calculate it, and how to use it effectively. I’m a big fan of return on investment (ROI); it lets you know precisely... [Read more]
By: Clickz Back in February, BtoB Magazine reported that more than half of the respondents to its “Email Marketing Benchmarks: Best Practices” survey said “Delivering highly relevant content” was on their “to do” lists for 2011. Although many marketers have the best of intentions, they don’t know where to start to deliver on email’s promise of relevancy. This... [Read more]
By: Clickz Is it possible to restore both consumer and marketer confidence in email and free the killer app from delivery afflictions? That was the topic last week at the Email Authentication Implementation Summit in New York City. It seems we’re making progress, albeit slowly. Last December, I highlighted a few items that were causing frustration, among them multiple identity standards, the... [Read more]
By: Clickz There’s been a lot of buzz lately about video in e-mail. The Email Experience Council (EEC) hosted a Webinar on the topic last week, and many in the industry are proclaiming 2009 the year of video in e-mail. As a result, I have clients clamoring to include video in their e-mail messages. It’s an exciting new way to use e-mail, but as with any technology you shouldn’t use... [Read more]
By: Clickz If you have been in this industry a short time, you’ve probably seen a lot of highly hyped technologies crash and burn in the marketplace. If you’ve been in this industry as long as I have, you’ve seen those same technologies crash and burn multiple times. Take Second Life, touted as the next greatest marketing vehicle. Over 10 years ago, I watched and participated in... [Read more]
By: Clickz B2B email marketers in the U.S. don’t have to ask permission to send an email message to a business contact as long as they allow that contact to unsubscribe. As a result, many marketers seem to bend over backwards rather than encourage someone to opt in to their email list. However, those B2B marketers with opt-in lists have less attrition, stronger sender reputations, and better... [Read more]
By: Clickz Testing your email campaigns isn’t easy. There’s a lot that goes on: determining which pieces of the campaign to test, selecting message to test, finding time to execute the test, and analyzing results. In fact, according to Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census 2011, only one in three responding companies (32 percent) carry out regular testing for email marketing; one... [Read more]
By: Clickz You have worked hard to develop your email creative so that it meets email design best practices, but now you must consider a new imperative: making your email easy to view on a mobile device. Mobile adoption among B2B and B2C users has exploded over the past few years, and it’s only going to continue to rise: ComScore reports that 69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones... [Read more]
By: Clickz Money and list sizes aren’t everything. OK, maybe money is everything and here’s hoping you get lots of it, but the size of one’s email target list size doesn’t indicate how successful you will be now or in the future. Last week, I had the pleasure again to speak at the famed Email Insider Summit; not on the topic of email best practices, but on the security of... [Read more]
