Kath Pay: Transition to 'Helpful Marketing' This Holiday Season

kathpay

Everybody talks about being "customer-centric" in their marketing plans. "Putting the customer first" is a popular session at email conferences. "Aligning marketing with the customer journey," "improving the customer experience through email" and "adding value for our customers" are three goals people say they're trying to achieve with their marketing. Given...

Continue reading
  6550 Hits

Getting Email Marketing Credit Where Due: Attribution Ideas for Every Business

jessica

A few months back, I wrote about using data to determine the timing, content, and impact of your email marketing campaigns (See: 6 Steps to Putting Data to Work in Email). In the last few months, the element I find myself discussing most with colleagues and clients is the latter: What data can we use to attribute the impact of our hard working email marketing campaigns?

When it comes to challenges in attribution, I’ve heard it all:

Continue reading
  5649 Hits

Is it time for a Marketing Automation Tune-Up?

jenniferlazarus

It never fails that a few months before a brand marketer is due to renew their marketing automation contract, they reach out to tell me that they are secretly looking to switch to a new platform and want my opinion. After we have spent a little time talking about their current state, what they want out of their future state and the business goals they are looking to accomplish, we usually determine that their current platform meets their needs. However, one thing always stands out, they typically need what I refer to as a “Marketing Automation Tune-Up,” which, simply put, is just recalibration and adjustment to what they are currently doing.

Continue reading
  4504 Hits

Three Steps to Person-First Personalization

3steps300

Person-first personalization is a hot topic at the moment. Forrester Research, The Relevancy Group, and other thought leaders are writing extensively on the subject. Why? Because consumers have raised their expectations. When consumers have personalized experiences with Spotify, Netflix or any other similar brand, they subsequently expect all other brands to deliver the same 'surprise and delight’ experience.

Continue reading
  3704 Hits

Boost Your Results: Refresh Your Email Marketing Strategy

gretchen

It’s so easy to get caught up in the details, the big and little decisions that need to be made every day and then tracked and managed and… well, you know. At the same time, as marketers we all want to focus on strategy, on the vision of what we are trying to achieve and who our audience really is and all the great thought leadership that goes along with that. It’s hard to find the balance when you’re stuck in the trenches. That’s why a guide can be helpful.

Continue reading
  4157 Hits

Dela Quist: When it comes to subject lines does length matter?

dela_quist

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning - Terry Tempest Williams

Background

As some of you may already know, Alchemy Worx the agency I founded in 2001 was recently acquired by SellUp an email marketing agency with offices in NYC and Manila, founded by Allan Levy – whom I have known for many years and respect a great deal. One of the primary reasons for doing so was to free up the time I was spending running the agency full time to spin off the software division of Alchemy Worx into a separate company. The new company, Touchstone Intelligent Marketing exists to help plug 2 significant gaps in the marketing clouds - testing and subscriber level reporting. The 1st of these Touchstone Tests a testing tool that allows you to try out any number of subject lines quickly and without burning out your customer database, is the source of the data I am about to share.

Continue reading
  9649 Hits

Email Insights: The Blueprint for Better Performance Testing for New Products and Services

JeanneJenning

In “The Blueprint for Better Performance Testing” I walked you through how I look at an existing email campaign to come up with hypotheses for testing.

But what do you do when you don’t have an existing campaign to look at – what do you do when you’re developing a performance testing plan for a brand-new product or service?

Continue reading
  5018 Hits

Money on the Table: Lessons Learned From the Leading Subscription Retailers

Money on the Table: Lessons Learned From the Leading Subscription Retailers

By Ryan Brelje, Content Marketing Manager at Iterable

More than 10,000 ambitious companies fiercely compete inside the expanding subscription retail space—with the industry more than validated by the successes of pioneers like Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club, brick and mortar mega stores like Sephora and Walmart have entered the arena and vie for rival market share. In a high-stakes game where customer churn is only one click away, how are these companies keeping their customers engaged while they await their deliveries?

Continue reading
  4155 Hits

Not all Email Best Practices are Equal…nor are all of them best practices

Not all Email Best Practices are Equal…nor are all of them best practices

Because email marketers are under resourced, busy people – and often new to the profession or have nobody to show them the ropes – they look to "best practices" as silver bullets that will fix their problems or keep them on the right side the law

Coupled with our history of being associated with spam, it's easy to see why marketers are so focused on following best practices. They use it as a solution to a common problem. The solution becomes a trend, and before you know it, it's promoted to a best practice.

However, I see too many marketers rushing to implement best practices without questioning whether something is truly a best practice, a trend or a bad habit that has evolved into a rule.

Continue reading
  9208 Hits

The Evolving Marketing Landscape

The Evolving Marketing Landscape

The concepts of Retention and Predictive Marketing have been around for quite some time; however, at its inception, only the largest stores could afford to invest in this type of data warehouse and management. Over the past few years, solutions have evolved to help retailers gain access to their data and enable retention and predictive marketing, but adoption has been mostly exhibited by innovators and early adopters. Over the past three years, we’ve conducted the Retention and Predictive Marketing survey to better understand trends in the marketplace, adoption of retention and predictive marketing, and barriers and successes retailers, who’ve invested in this technology, are experiencing. This year’s survey was completed by hundreds of retailers, spanning industries and revenue levels. Here’s a breakdown of the results from the 2017 Retention & Predictive Marketing Report.

Continue reading
  3551 Hits

Jessica Best: Email List Growth 2.0: Why You Should Be-Friend the Media Team

Jessica Best: Email List Growth 2.0: Why You Should Be-Friend the Media Team

We know that email is a money-printing machine. (Flash to the hundreds of articles that quote the outrageous and unbeatable Return on Marketing Investment.) As I often say with clients and at conferences, “Why wouldn’t you stand in front of the email marketing machine and just put in all your money?”...

Continue reading
  7751 Hits

Horvath: To Suppress or Not? Segment!

Horvath: To Suppress or Not? Segment!

List size is a metric that is ridiculous on its own. As every Email Marketer knows, it’s not about the size of the list, but the quality.

The battle over when to suppress users is age old, commonly fought between those who are focused on the size of the list, and those on the email side who understand that inactives hurt deliverability.

Continue reading
  5393 Hits

Kath Pay: 5 Ecommerce Customer Segments to Automate and Engage with Email

Kath Pay: 5 Ecommerce Customer Segments to Automate and Engage with Email

Your customer data is a goldmine of information just waiting to be discovered. You know that emails which reflect a customer's data are more relevant and likely to be acted on, but too many marketers stop at basics like name, gender or location.  

Continue reading
  7521 Hits

Jennings: The Blueprint for Better Email Performance Testing

Jennings: The Blueprint for Better Email Performance Testing

“The most important work in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.”

David Ogilvy
Founder, Ogilvy and Mather
Considered the Father of Advertising

Sending an email marketing message is easy. But boosting bottom line performance from send-to-send -- that’s a little more difficult. The key to success here is testing.

If you’re not doing any performance testing, now’s the time to start. If you are already doing regular testing, commit to upping your game. Either way, here’s a quick walk through the process my team and I follow to help guide you.

Continue reading
  9860 Hits

Why Are Top E-Retailers Still Struggling With Email?

Why Are Top E-Retailers Still Struggling With Email?

Shown to be 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined, email remains a top priority for marketers across industries. Engaging users with relevant, personalized messaging is more important than ever when it comes to this essential channel. However, recent research shows that even the top online...

Continue reading
  4206 Hits

Exclusive Poll Results: Email Opt-in Practices Following an Online Purchase

Exclusive Poll Results: Email Opt-in Practices Following an Online Purchase

The following are the results of a recent poll by Marketing Democracy and Only Influencers: what are marketers opt-in practices following an Online Purchase: 

Continue reading
  5248 Hits

Richelo Killian: 10 Tips For Delivering Your Messages To The Inbox

Richelo Killian: 10 Tips For Delivering Your Messages To The Inbox

When I first started writing this post, it was going to be a comprehensive guide to everything you need to do to get your marketing email messages to the inbox. The modest post quickly turned into a full-length book, and not just any book, but, a highly technical book talking about...

Continue reading
  6002 Hits

Matt Williamson: Busting the ROI Myth

Matt Williamson: Busting the ROI Myth

In this day and age, digital marketers have the ability to be pickier than ever when it comes to new software. For every marketing problem, there are at least a handful of solutions to choose from; however, they all come with a price attached. One of the most painstaking jobs that...

Continue reading
  6947 Hits

Jessica Best: 6 Steps to Putting Data to Work in Email

Jessica Best: 6 Steps to Putting Data to Work in Email

It’s now 2017. We marketers have been chanting for “More data!” for years… and I think we can agree: we got it. Marketers use between 3 and 15 (!) data sources in their marketing, and the problem more often than not is that it doesn’t all live somewhere we can get to it or make sense of it.

Continue reading
  8490 Hits

First-Person Marketing: Why It's Here and Why You Should Embrace It

First-Person Marketing: Why It's Here and Why You Should Embrace It

From time to time, the discussion on the Only Influencers' Email list turns to whether we as marketers need to be complex or not. Some email marketers say "Blast away!" Others say, "Let's be smarter than the average bear."

Let's get one thing straight right away: if you see yourself as a button-pusher, and if your email strategy is just to blast out campaign after campaign, this article is not for you. Unless you hunger for more. In which case, stick around.

Continue reading
  13175 Hits