Cool B2B Email Marketing Idea

At the DMA Annual event this month, I spoke with many B2B marketers about the particular challenges they face in these rough economic times. Basically, the economy is a mess, budgets are squeezing, our clients are all afraid to make investments.

The good news is that email marketing is a great tool for building relationships and adding value to your customer relationships. Instead of just sending more product announcements, send “Recession Buster” ideas to your clients and prospects every week (or, if appropriate, every day for a limited time). Create a simple design and …

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An Email Study Compendium

While the title sounds a bit like an existential crisis, Mark Brownlow’s “Why do email marketing” is a must-read post for anyone involved with email today. It is stuffed with stats from …

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A Lesson from The Onion

In a recent article featured on The Onion, Presidential candidate Barack Obama expressed his personal frustrations in receiving an onslaught of emails from the polictical association MoveOn.org. He subscribed to the organization’s email program 4 years ago, but continues to receive email after months of deleting it without reading a single message. He finds the content uninteresting and not valuable, and the frequency (3x a week) highly irritating. Of course it’s immediately obvious why this is so funny – MoveOn.org has gained a reputation as a very aggressive email marketer.

But, aside from being so funny, The Onion spoof offers a good object lesson for marketers. Because it’s all too easy to think, what’s the big deal if people delete your email daily without reading it? But this piece hits a nerve because it articulates …

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Building on Great Transactional Messages

A recent post by Tamara Gielen of OgilvyOne on the Be Relevant blog included a list of 10 helpful tips from Wendy Roth of Lyris Technologies about making the most of your transactional messages. Implementing these tips will go a long way towards ensuring that marketers are “celebrating” a customer’s recent action or purchase. In other words, an optimized transactional message reaffirms that the customer made a good choice by providing them with relevant and useful information that’s personalized, detailed and action-oriented.

This got me thinking about the email customer lifecycle and how marketers can build on great transactional messages. After subscribers have clicked, signed up or purchased (effectively moving from inactives to actives or non-buyers to buyers), what comes next? They’re clearly engaged with your brand, which means they’re primed to receive your follow-up messaging. So how can your next emails keep the momentum going and pave the way for continued engagement and retention?

There’s really a two-part answer to that question. First

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Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?

I have been thinking about the analogy between the email inbox and the postal mailbox we all have. It doesn’t work.

It is true that the inbox is a replacement for where we receive news about friends, since handwritten letters seem to have been all but replaced by email (and to a lesser degree, instant messages, and text messaging).

But the inbox isn’t your mailbox, it is your living room, a far more intimate and personal space. It is where your friends can drop by unannounced, and invited guests are welcome.

Now, when an invited guest comes into my home …

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Moving to Lifecycle Based Email Marketing – Take this Survey

In my ongoing effort to advocate for email marketing wherever I can, I serve as chair of the Email Marketing Council of the Online Marketing Summit, a group of online marketers (email, search, social, mobile, advertising) that aim to collaborate and share knowledge that moves the industry forward.

One of our many cool projects is to …

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Why The Rules Have to Be Flexible

We have clients ask us all the time – how much email should I be sending out to my subscribers? One a week? One a month? And usually, we give the same advice – it depends on what you are sending, and on what expectation you set with your subscribers when they sign up.

This week is a great example that proves the rule "it depends." I get the Wall Street Journal’s email alerts of major headlines. I think I’ve subscribed in two different categories, maybe three – I can’t remember, since I signed up about 10 years ago. In a typical week, across all the categories, I might get …

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Email ROI – How Good Results Today Can Mask Big Problems Tomorrow

Email works. In fact, email is the highest ROI channel by far. Email marketing returns $57.25 for every dollar spent, more than 150 percent greater than the ROI for non-e-mail online marketing (Source: DMA, 2007).

But perhaps email works too well for our own darn good. The revenue that we generate every time we send out a generic, non-segmented blast mailing masks a lot of missed opportunities. For too many marketers, email revenue per subscriber is not growing and more and more subscribers are simply ignoring our messages.

That is because most email marketing today is pretty terrible. It’s irrelevant, poorly timed, creatively uninteresting and completely generic. The vast majority of us still follow a batch and blast broadcast approach that will never make our email messages relevant to most of our subscribers most of the time. The opposite is true. …

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The Importance of Minor Body Parts

Having recently experienced some health issues that caused a variety of challenges in my daily life, I’ve come to abruptly realize the importance of minor body parts. For example, when your entire foot is numb, attempting to wear a shoe with a heel strap is more challenging than you would imagine. Since you cannot feel whether or not the strap is secure around your heel, you are left feeling terribly insecure and checking to be sure your shoe is still on your foot rather frequently. This unfortunate (although sometimes amusing) experience lead me to think of the important, often neglected, minor parts of an email. Naturally, we marketers focus on optimizing subject lines, headlines, creative design, and content – - these areas typically return the most for our investment. However, there are some rather “important minor body parts” that we should examine more regularly …

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It's Client Appreciation Week at Return Path!

We have something big to say…

THANK YOU CLIENTS!

This week is about you! All this week everyone at Return Path is making an extra effort to recognize our clients, who are valued members of the email community.

Thank you for your positive contributions to the email universe. Thank you for your efforts to provide effective, relevant email to your customers. Thank you most of all for your partnership and willingness to allow us to show you the “path” to inbox nirvana.

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