• Use Email To Drive Successful Loyalty/Rewards Programs
    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:
  • Is Your Email Attribution Model To Blame For Eroding User Experience?
    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.
  • Five Engagement Killers -- And How To Overcome Them
    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 …
  • Once Again, I Double-Dog Dare You!
    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:
  • The Inattentive Consumer: How To Break Through To Mobile Subscribers
    As marketers, we've put a lot of focus on building mobile programs over the past few years. We've learned that 80% of smartphone users won't leave home without their smartphones, creating an abundance of opportunity for us to reach subscribers anytime, anywhere. However, we also know that 86% of smartphone users are multitasking when they're on their phones (rather than giving their undivided attention to our carefully crafted marketing campaigns). People are inundated with information every day but can only process so much of it. They're consciously and unconsciously prioritizing the information coming at them. How does our brand fit …
  • Mother's Day Hangover
    Post-Mother's Day, and we made it through. While not quite the holiday retail rush that the last quarter of the year brings, it was still a ubiquitous time of gift-giving. As we build marketing programs and aspire to build customer engagements that promote repeated purchase habits, we have to continually question the way we do things.
  • Parenting Advice For Email Marketers
    As a parent, I recognized from day 1 that everyone has an opinion about how to care for my children (and discipline them, and dress them and cut their hair -- ugh). Thankfully, I also recognized that I can choose to internalize the advice (or not) and apply it, alter it accordingly or disregard it completely - based on my unique situation. And that's exactly the same frame of mind all email marketers should take with the advice they receive about their programs.
  • Phishers' Kryptonite: Big Data
    Over the last few years, spam has become a "largely solved" problem. The average consumer sees very little spam in the inbox (although there is *a lot* of spam at the gateway). Many of the criminals that had been focused on spam have moved on to phishing. Volumes of phishing attacks are up more than 150% year over year, according to RSA and the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Just as spam had a very negative impact on email marketers - inboxes crowed with spam drive lower response rates - phishing has a very negative impact on email effectiveness. According to surveys, …
  • Go Ahead -- Send More Emails
    In fact, send a lot more emails. There, I said it. I feel better now.
  • The Truths Your Email Metrics Don't Reveal
    When you read the latest email statistic as it comes through your news feed each day, it conjures up an image of the consumer behavior the data point depicts. For example, when you read that 70% of big brands' opens in March occurred on mobile devices, is it not inevitable that your mind creates an image of a person (dressed exactly the way you picture your ideal customer) peering intently at a mobile phone with the very expression that your last message was crafted to elicit? Also, he's standing. My imaginary mobile consumers are always standing.
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