I say automation, you think robotic, right?

No wonder. Experienced marketers and consumers alike receive corporate-heavy copy in their messages nowadays. Dry, humorless, stiff, computerized. Or the pendulum swings the other way with over-the-top witticisms and personality that tries too hard. Canned humor gets nowhere.

To strike a balance between robotic and over-friendly in your drip marketing campaigns is difficult, especially trying to let your usual brand voice have a weigh in, too. It isn’t impossible, though.

There are a few strategies that will help you craft conversational, concise copy that doesn’t sound like it came from a machine.

In a past Only Influencers article Automated Marketing: Drip vs. Nurture, the author argues that there are drip campaigns and there are nurture campaigns.

I wouldn’t necessarily argue that point, but I would take a different perspective.

There are a lot of opinions flying around about drip marketing campaigns. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people don’t know how to use it well.

If you’re like most e-commerce and other online merchants, you depend on regular (and often frequent) promotional campaigns to drive sales. These campaigns are loaded with offers, incentives, and immediate calls to action. But is the prospect really ready to buy? Do you have a relationship? Does your prospect trust you enough to buy from you? Drip email campaigns (also called nurturing campaigns) are the tool every online marketer needs to develop that relationship and trust with prospects that will ultimately result in more sales conversions and greater client loyalty over time.

DRIP campaigns have been shown to improve open, click-through and conversion rates, as well as deliver higher revenue per sale than business-as usual campaigns. They are also somewhat ‘set it and forget it’ – meaning you set them up once and they require minimal maintenance and time from your team to keep them running.

It’s August here and the Bay Area is going through one of its rare heat waves. Over the weekend, temps reached over 100 at our house, which normally never sees anything warmer than 80. Despite the summer heat, and the calendar, and the complaints of Christmas coming earlier every year, it really is time for us to start talking about holiday email delivery. 

As consumers, we cringe at the inexorable tidal wave of holiday ads headed our way. As marketers, we contribute to it. For email marketers, there’s an opportunity to elevate beyond sending five copies of the same catalogue to the guy who bought one item from your store four years ago. There’s a reason that email consistently drives the highest ROI of all direct marketing channels.

If yours is a retail or e-tail business revving up your holiday email marketing engines, this advice is not for you (but good luck and Godspeed!)

If on the other hand you’re in the same camp as non-retailers, your email running the risk of being stampeded by the crushing annual blow of “buy now” retail promotional messages to consumer inboxes from September through December, read on.

Well, it’s past that time of year again. Yes, past. Many companies start planning for the holiday season back in March, so if you’re just starting now…..hurry. Even if you’ve started, begin thinking now about what you can do to juice things up, and survive the holiday rush. Because let’s all admit it, volume will go up and consumers will go crazy. How do you be a hero, try something new and survive the hectic holiday period? Let’s take a look at the things you can do to save yourself and your team.

If you haven’t started your U.S. holiday campaign planning, it’s time to get cracking. To help you move things along, I’ve outlined the major online selling opportunities and created a handy calendar to help you get organized for the busy season. There are 14 important dates to build campaigns around.

Anyone have current figures on email reading on their PC vs. tablet vs. mobile?  I realize this is a basic question, so if there's some standing public research you can point me to, that'd be awesome, too.

Everything You Every Wanted to Know about Mobile Email: A Compendium of the World's Best Free Resources for Learning about Mobile Email Marketing

Article by Tracey Gordon, VP Client Services, and Paul Gordon, co-founder, Bubblebox.

The elusive millennial demographic has been hot on every digital marketer’s lips for years now. Heck, we even wrote an article about how to engage this so-called “highly influential” cohort. It seemed as if every brand worth their salt had joined the great race to target, capture and retain their piece of the “the selfie generation,” while swiftly pushing the parent demographic—the boomers— under the rug. I thought it might be interesting to write something to counter all of this millennial fervor—a think piece on how to engage the oft-ignored “boomer consumer.” But the more I read about demographic marketing, the more conflicting the findings seemed to be, and the more I realized that there really isn’t a consensus definition of any generation in our modern times. So I got to thinking: is demographic marketing dead?

If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You're probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails for engagement. Even if you think they have a point, that's not your decision to make. Your job is to move the needle on sales while still sending out the constant hail of promotions.

"You probably know by now that segmentation improves email marketing performance significantly, so if you’re still operating primarily in “batch and blast” mode it’s time to start slicing and dicing your subscriber file. Marketers that practice list segmentation see better open and click-through rates, fewer unsubscribes and better deliverability."

With almost 122,500,453,020 emails sent every hour in India, email is alive and here to stay for long. While marketers across the globe are embracing advanced personalization in email, India is leaving no stone unturned to win the email game.

Batch and Blast – the process of sending out email with little to no segmentation – has become the Tom Cruise of the email industry. Once white-hot popular, yet now almost comically reviled. You can’t pick up an entertainment magazine without a little Cruise-hate. You can’t pick up a marketing publication that doesn’t attempt to eviscerate BB and basically tell you that you’re a moron if you use it.

Last week, organic grocery giant Whole Foods announced its plans to open a low-cost grocery chain targeted at the millennial market. The concept, according to CEO Walter Robb, will be “unlike anything that currently exists in the marketplace,” boasting “a modern, streamlined design, innovative technology and a curated section.” In the same week, McDonald’s—in an attempt to boost its falling popularity with the twenty-something set, revived its Hamburglar mascot complete with a head-to-toe hipster makeover. With two major players joining the race to capture (and retain) their share of the millennial market, media outlets and marketing professionals alike have called into question the efficacy of their tactics. Why the skepticism? All too often companies miss the mark when it comes to millennial marketing, due in large part to the mass confusion surrounding how to engage this elusive yet highly influential group.

58% of people said they abandon because shipping costs increased the price too much. 57% said they wanted to get an idea of the price including shipping. 55% said they weren’t ready to purchase and wanted to save the basket for later! 50% said their order didn’t qualify for free shipping and 37% complained shipping costs were shown too late in the process.

Despite all the talk over here about the EU Data Protection Reform, with its unknown content and unknown timescales, we’ve been relatively calm and relaxed about the whole thing. After all, who has time to worry about something “12-24” months away when you have things which matter now?