 |
|
All contributions by Karen Talavera
Help! My Email Open Rates Are Falling and Can’t Get Up In my ongoing series of email marketing conundrums, I couldn’t possibly overlook this one: declining email marketing open rates. Although much has been written on the subject, my goal is to provide you with not just a diagnostic checklist for investigating why open rates are falling, nor to hand you a “best practices” list of what to... [Read more]
Should You Ask for Email Permission or Forgiveness? You’ve probably heard the familiar saying “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” All too often I hear from many marketers and business owners who find themselves in this unfortunate position when either just starting their email marketing programs or trying to build their lists. This month’s email marketing conundrum explores... [Read more]
Top Five Ways to Boost Email Marketing Results and Impact in 2013 There couldn’t be a better time to strategize final changes and improvements to your 2013 email marketing programs as you ready them for launch. In fact, while many of your New Year’s email plans may be firmly sketched out, it’s not too late to give them a final polish with these insights and tweaks. Knowing where to amplify,... [Read more]
Want Better Email Response? Consider the Emotional Pathway What exactly makes people respond to your email marketing offers? What is it precisely that makes them engage and buy from you? And how does knowing these things help you drive better email response? It’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question asked of all advertising and marketing. When it comes to email marketing it’s important to know... [Read more]
Driving Better Email Response: What Makes Subscribers Say “YES!”? What exactly makes people respond to your email marketing offers? What is it precisely that makes them engage and buy from you? And how does knowing these things help you drive better email response? It’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question asked of all advertising and marketing. While the fundamentals of what makes... [Read more]
Bringing Sexy Back to Email Marketing: 3 More Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Inbox Unless you overhear a conversation about porn spam, the words “email” and “sexy” don’t get used in the same sentence very often. Email, the loyal silent workhorse of social media, steadfast driver of e-commerce, overshadowed stepsister of search, is more often likened to Martha Stewart – reliable, conservative... [Read more]
Email Marketing Like It’s 2012, Not 1999 Given that all things Internet seem to move at the speed of light and come or go overnight, it’s fairly impressive to see commercial email marketing approaching its fifteenth birthday. I remember first becoming involved in email in 1999 and being impressed then with what was creatively and technically possible – even though dial-up Internet connections... [Read more]
Three Holiday Retail Email Marketing Lessons for Non-Retail Companies If yours is a services business, B-to-B firm or solo-entrepreneurship, this time of year it can certainly seem like all the marketing focus is on retailers. Yet just because retail eclipses other industries during the holidays doesn’t mean non-retailers can’t take a few lessons from retail marketers and employ similar strategies... [Read more]
It’s probably the number one rookie mistake in advertising and marketing copy writing. It can tank an otherwise exceptional sales offer to the exact right audience. It’s guaranteed to bore readers and listeners to death, and it’s a downright sin in direct response. What is this ill? It is writing or talking about – or to – ourselves rather than our potential and current customers. In... [Read more]
Three Tried and True Email Creative Tactics for Instant Visibility in a Crowded Inbox With email inboxes more crowded than ever before, simply arriving successfully is half the battle. Assuming you routinely have good deliverability, the second half of that battle is standing out in a crowd. The majority of email users (more than 70% by some estimates) view the lineup of email messages in their... [Read more]
The Number One Way to Connect Your Email and Social Media Marketing by Karen Talavera @SyncMarketing
The Number One Way to Connect Your Email and Social Media Marketing With so many ways to integrate email and social media we have almost unlimited options for leveraging connection between these two powerful conversation marketing channels. Still, for those at the beginning of the process it pays to know where to start. I’m often asked what the number one way to connect email and social media... [Read more]
In Part 1 of this series, I explained that marketing is not simply about hawking your wares. Certainly it’s about communicating what you have to offer, but how you do that is what makes the difference between feast and famine. Whether we know it and like it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small. Our brains are equipped... [Read more]
You might read that title and wonder what in the world emotional connections have to do with online marketing or any marketing for that matter. Isn’t marketing simply about telling people what you have to offer and letting them know how to buy or work with you? Certainly it’s that, but much more. Whether you realize it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion,... [Read more]
Social Media vs. Email Frequency: How Much is Too Much? This question was recently posed in a private online marketing group I belong to called Only Influencers: “If I can tweet five times a day, why can’t I email five times a day?” Keep in mind Only Influencers is an invitation-only group of highly experienced and savvy digital marketers (most of the industry’s “big... [Read more]
Using Social Media to Boost Your Email Marketing I’m often asked what I believe to be the number one way to connect email and social media marketing. Last month I tackled that question from the starting point of email. This month I’m addressing it from the perspective of social media. Both connecting email to social and using social to strengthen and grow email matter because linking email... [Read more]
Getting Them to Say Yes! One of my recent April 2011 posts made the case for opt-in over opt-out marketing. I realize that’s all well and good until it becomes time to convince people to say yes, right? So this month I want to share four insights into what psychologically motivates people to say yes when given the opportunity to take action: Invitation It’s universally human that we would... [Read more]
It’s easy to bore your customers to death with email: just send them the same type of message repeatedly and you’ll succeed. We’re often guilty of this when we send our e-newsletter and little (or nothing) else. And while a newsletter absolutely has a place as a staple in your email marketing program, it should be far from the only type of message you send your customers on a regular... [Read more]
Marketing to a Rapidly Diversifying Population The U.S. Census Bureau releases the results of its 2010 census this summer and marketers are advised to prepare for some major demographic shifts. In a recent interview I read of Peter Francese, consultant to advertising megalith Ogilvy & Mather and author of the research report 2010 America, I was surprised to learn: There is no more “Average... [Read more]
What You’ll Learn: – Why a thank-you process needs to be part of your email marketing message stream – How thanks and non-promotional greetings add a human dimension to your brand – The marketing value of a well-timed thank you Unless you were raised by wolves in the wild, at some point you’ve learned it is polite to say “Thank... [Read more]
2011: Year of Marketing Alignment by Karen Talavera A little over a year ago, I theorized that 2010 would be the Year of Conscious Marketing. And while I do think it has taken us more than a year to become conscious of how to use the increasingly fragmented and multiplying online marketing avenues available to us, 2010 certainly was a year in which the “what-how-which” and “why” finally... [Read more]
