Let's face it: Email has gotten sloppy. In a fight to stand out from unsolicited spam, you would think marketers would be using all the latest technologies and taking an optimized approach to converting emails to sales. But, as you can see from your own inbox, many marketers are either on auto-pilot and use one voice for all people, or are confused about the length, frequency and voice so they just end up missing the mark on all three.» 0 Comments
We recently released "The Best of the Email Swipe File," which identifies five trends affecting email design and highlights 20 examples that best exemplify those trends.» 1 Comments
"The relationship era" has become the label for our time, integral to the digital marketer's new identity. As digital marketing has evolved alongside technology, marketers have long seen ourselves as customer-centric, but the relationship era pushes us to move even further, from our focus on individual marketing campaigns to a bigger-picture look at how our content adds value to customers' lives. Email remains an excellent channel for engagement in the relationship era.» 1 Comments
I've recently seen a few marketers introduce gaming into their email programs. You can use this technique to effectively drive engagement and motivate subscribers to seek out ways to tap the value of your messages. And, since you are awarding points for behaviors you already track, like opens, clicks, and conversions, the concept can be very straightforward to employ.» 1 Comments
Is email marketing an out-of-the-box marketing activity? Has it become so cookie-cutter that it's hard to distinguish the great program from the baseline? Are you using the same tactics across the board? Some might say, "That's marketing" -- you take what you know and rinse-repeat and iterate.» 1 Comments
Email marketers have a trusty handful of metrics they track regularly. Most marketers will track opens, clicks and conversions on a program-by-program basis. Some more sophisticated marketers will use holdout tests to provide a better view of the revenue that can be attributed to the email channel. These are great metrics. We're used to them and they work. However, we've found that when our clients are asked to set targets for the next year or quarter, the approach taken is typical and less-than-optimal.» 1 Comments
One of email's greatest roles is in targeting and nurturing prospects into becoming customers, encouraging customers to become repeat customers and turning repeat customers into loyal customers. Customer loyalty takes many forms, but I want to focus on customers who have joined or been assigned to a defined loyalty or membership program, such as frequent-purchase reward programs. These programs tend to create customers who spend more because they are designed to encourage repeat purchases. Examples include:» 0 Comments
Email drives sales. We know this already. How much sales it drives, however, is very often measured with a last-touch attribution model that has outlived its usefulness. If you're relying on a last-touch model to measure your email's effectiveness, you may be overstating its role in transactions. Equally as important, you may be understating the impact that some more aggressive email practices have on suppressing transactions, despite their high last-touch ROI.» 3 Comments
Gone are the days when customer interaction was limited to the retail store or call center. The number of channels available for consumers to interact with brands is getting bigger every year (remember marketing before Pinterest?), so it's all the more important that we are able to consider the entire consumer experience across all potential touch points. That means marketers need to stop viewing the customer experience by channel or line-of-business, which creates silo-ed customer data and engagement views. What are the consequences of not having this integrated cross-channel view of the customer? Here are five engagement killers that thrive ...» 0 Comments
In 2008 and 2010, I double-dog dared marketers to experiment with some little-used, out-of-the-box, perhaps even weird tactics. Some of those tactics are not so uncommon anymore, while others are just as rare as they ever were. Since it's been more than three years and email marketing is all about experimentation, I think we need some fresh dares. So here we go. I dare you - no, I double-dog dare you! - to:» 0 Comments
