5 Priorities For Email Marketing In 2015
While you've been focusing on segmentation, have other parts of your email program been on auto-pilot? Columnist Cara Olson has suggestions to get you moving.
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Cara Olson's latest articles
10 Data Feeds To Integrate With Your ESP
Cara Olson details the essential data feeds that let you send relevant emails to your customers based on quality data.
How To Handle Email Marketing For Franchise Brands
More and more, franchise brands are embracing email marketing to help them on a number of fronts. Often, franchisers deal with a number of different types of franchisees — single location, multi-location, multi-state, small corporations, partnerships, solely owned, highly sophisticated, unsophisticated, etc. Fragmentation is more the rule than the exception, so clear and consistent messaging, […]
The Disconnect Between Transactional & Promotional Emails
Many major retailers do not send their transactional emails from the same email service provider (ESP) as their promotional emails. In fact, transactional emails are often delivered via an in-house solution or via the company’s ecommerce platform. Brands cite a variety of reasons for this, including: Transactional and promotional emails typically originate from two distinct systems […]
How Email Marketers Can Make Birthdays Come More Than Once A Year
As you evaluate your 2013 email programs and work on your 2014 initiatives, be sure to take a hard look at how much of your revenue from email is attributed to triggered programs, as compared with promotional emails. From my experience, 20% is a good, general target for the amount of overall revenue that should […]
10 Ways To Cure The Post-Holiday Email Blues
Now that we’re beyond the volume increase around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, are you suffering from the post-holiday email blues? After having sent so much volume to drive holiday sales, you may need to get back on track with relevancy in your email campaigns. Try these strategies for engaging your holiday subscribers in […]
My Prediction For Email Open Rates In 2014
With Google’s recent Gmail update significantly changing the way it handles cached images, they have also updated the desktop interface to display images by default. This is the most fundamental change in the default view of an email since Outlook and ISPs began blocking images by default more than five years ago. The primary reason […]
Four Ways to Segment Email Subscribers for the Holidays
The last two months of the year bring an increase in email frequency as retailers try to drive revenue during the busiest shopping season of the year. To help you make the most of your opportunities, here are four ways to segment your email subscribers, optimize your email content, and avoid subscriber fatigue. 1. Your […]
Why Responsive Email? Making A Case Internally
Even though industry statistics indicate that more than 50% of email opens occur on a mobile device, a brand’s desire to provide an optimal customer experience isn’t always strong enough to convince it to move to a responsive email design. According to BlueHornet, 70% of consumers immediately delete emails that don’t render well on a […]
Budgeting For Email Marketing: How To Invest In The “Killer App”
Last week at the ExactTarget Connections Conference, I had that the opportunity to meet Forrester analyst Shar vanBoskirk. Like most in our industry, I was interested in her point of view on a question I often ponder, so I approached after her presentation and asked for it: “If email consistently has the highest conversion rate […]
10 Holiday Gift Guide Ideas For Email
Planning your holiday email campaigns? You should be. There are any number of tried and true approaches to engaging your subscribers over the holiday season. Gift guides, in particular, tend to be high performers. In fact, I strongly recommend that, rather than running just one gift guide campaign, you consider the following ideas to extend […]
Oops! Email Mistakes Happen
Let’s face it: humans aren’t perfect. And there is definitely a human element to email marketing. From the designer who creates the graphics, to the front-line associate that clicks “Send,” there is a risk of something going wrong. So, on occasion, an email makes it to the inbox that isn’t 100% right. Unfortunately, it can […]
How To Convert Email Subscribers To Customers
Email is a great vehicle for reducing the time between key milestones for a subscriber. After all, subscribers are great, but customers are even better. Take advantage of email’s automation capabilities with these triggers at various subscriber milestones to create additional purchases. Subscribers That Have Never Purchased The first of these key milestones is reducing […]
Evolving Your Email Marketing From Crawl To Walk To Run To PR
Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication. The Evolution Of An Email Marketing Program Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are? […]
The ABCs Of A/B Testing
Testing should be at the core of your email marketing program. Not only does it help you understand the impact you’re making, but it gives you a much fuller understanding about your customers’ behavior and preferences. It not only tells you where you’ve been, but where you should (and shouldn’t) go with your campaigns. A/B testing is the […]
Merchandising For Email Marketing — Selecting Products and Promotions
How do you decide what products to feature in your emails or which offers to promote in your emails? If you don’t have a process in place that answers these questions, you should. Merchandising for email should be a collaborative process for optimal results. Setting The Promotional Calendar The promotional calendar should be developed with […]
When Subscribers Stop Opening Emails
As you continue to send marketing emails over time, your list continues to grow, and your engagement metrics continue to drop. Over time, the number of long-time subscribers on your list increases. These subscribers have a higher chance of becoming uninterested in your email messages, which they express by failing to open or click. This […]
Four Ways Facebook Can Increase Email Sales
A successful retail email campaign involves much more than just an email. Because it creates customer engagement and results in revenue, a successful email campaign aligns closely with social and ecommerce, resulting in a “trifecta” across all three channels. But, integrating social is more than just asking your subscribers to fan you on Facebook or […]
Email Marketing Equals Dollar Signs
Open and click-through rates are common metrics used to evaluate the success of email campaigns. But we all know that for retailers, revenue is what really matters. Like every other department in an organization, as the new year begins (or when your fiscal year ends) marketers are requesting and competing for budget. As you prepare, […]
Ensuring The Email Is Right Before Hitting Send
That moment before you click send on an email to millions of subscribers can really make you sweat, no matter how many times you’ve done it before. Once you hit send, it’s gone to the inbox, and the last thing you want to hear is “did that email go to everyone?” Confirming an email is […]
Why Sending Receipts Via Email Is A Good Idea
I recently read an article about advances in the technology associated with printed receipts, their benefit as a transactional record, and the relative limits of moving to a hand-held transactional device. What that piece missed, however, was the huge value to retailers of emailing a receipt to customers who have made an in-store purchase. There […]
5 Keys To A Successful Holiday Email Strategy
You may not want to start counting the days until your in-laws arrive, but email marketers know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. After all, Christmas is just over three months away! Following are five keys to a successful holiday email strategy for you to focus on — it’ll distract […]
Explicit And Implicit Email Preferences
Email is seemingly tailor-made for collecting customer information. In a perfect program, collection begins at the point of sign up. Yet marketers know the fewer the questions asked, the more likely the customer is to opt-in. It’s a balancing act, though, because marketers also know that the more demographic data they can collect at that […]
Tracking Offline Email Conversions
Email is a unique channel. Because it is sent digitally, and click-throughs drive traffic online, retail email marketing is traditionally thought of as only driving ecommerce orders. It is often thought of in the same vein as something like search engine marketing, which directly drives traffic and conversions exclusively online in much the same way […]
Taking Triggered Email To The Next Level
For an average sender, triggered campaigns make up a low percentage of overall email volume, typically less than 5%. But don’t let the low percentage throw you. In a well-conceived and well-managed program, that 5% can be responsible for 20% or more of your email marketing revenue. In most organizations, these “low-volume, high ROI” triggers […]
Staffing Your Email Team — 8 Key Roles
Well-run email marketing programs account for as much as 20 percent of a retailer’s online revenue. While some might view that as an aggressive number, I am of the opinion that a fully-developed program, complete with lifecycle messaging, triggered programs, segmentation strategies, abandoned shopping cart series, etc., will drive even more than that. Whatever the […]
Adding Email Engagement To RFM Scoring
Spring has finally arrived, and for most retailers that means something of a lull in holiday frequency (once Mother’s Day has passed), making it an ideal time to get a fresh perspective on email reporting. RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scoring has long been the go-to method of ranking the value of customers on file. Historically, […]
The Email Metric You Should Be Tracking, But Aren’t
Most marketers rely on a few standard metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their company’s email campaigns: deliverability, open rate, click-through, conversion, and unsubscribe are the favorite few. But there is one key metric that many are overlooking, one that many Email Service Providers don’t even display: Click-to-open rate, often abbreviated CTOR. CTOR measures the […]