Oct
20
By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
There are so many elements to a successful email program, that often when asked for our "secrets to success" we pause in a quick effort to prioritize the various factors. Thus, it was great to lead a panel at Shop.org last month of extraordinary retailers who are doing smart, creative things with email in order to drive higher return.
During our prep, we had long, rambling conversations about what works, what doesn't and what seems to still resist taming. We had various perspectives from these pros, which certainly helped the conversation. Anne Ashbey, Director, eCommerce, Harry & David has a customer experience viewpoint finely tuned to the seasonal gift products she sells. Angela Caltagirone, Director, Email and eMarketing & Customer Acquisition, Williams-Sonoma, Inc. manages multiple brands with limited customer crossover. Rob Gallagher, Email Marketing Manager, Overstock.com has a highly segmented file and still sends more than 140 million messages a month. And Doug Williams, Director of Marketing, Lane Bryant Catalog, Charming Shoppes, Inc. is managing the launch of new online brands and expanding the email channel.
The panel debated a number of causes and effects of various strategies and agreed on seven ways to increase email ROI ...
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Oct
15
By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing
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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Less is more. It's a cliché that we preach a lot here at Return Path, but marketers have a hard time believing it. It's too easy to fall into the "more is more" trap. Well MarketingProfs has embraced the message with...
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Oct
09
By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services
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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Oct
08
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
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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Sep
30
By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
The news these days from Wall Street and the Halls of Congress could not be worse for marketers already worried about the recession and consumer and business spending in Q4.
Can email help? I think so. In fact, I think now's the time to prime your email program into a powerful revenue channel, before the news gets worse. Come on, we were the "killer app" of Web 1.0. It's well past time we proved our worth in the Web 2.0 marketing mix
Here are three ideas to test now - and use the data to build your program success for Q4 and into 2009. If email doesn't contribute more now, then we can't expect to remain at the center of the marketing mix, or budget.
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Sep
25
By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
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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Sep
17
First-time visitors to Barack Obama's website see a simple homepage optimized for email capture. It includes a photo of the candidate and his family with the words "Join the movement" and a form field for...
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Sep
08
What: Optimized Unsubscribe Confirmation Message
Who: Herrington
Why we love it: Most companies that send an email to confirm an opt-out send a plain text email with one or two boring lines like "You have been unsubscribed." While that is certainly fine - it gets the job done, after all - it seems to us there is a way to make this touchpoint a bit more meaningful. Well, it appears that Herrington agrees with us. Their message is an excellent example of how a great unsubscribe experience can be a brand-building exercise. Their message confirms ...
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Sep
04
By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
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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