Clothing retailers are some of the worst offenders of “missing the mark”. Over the last couple years that I have been on Banana Republic, Nordstrom, and J. Crew email lists, I have yet to receive an email that is about men’s clothing. While I don
Chad White over at RetailEmail.BlogSpot.com put together a phenomenal study on the top 101 retail emailers and the entire process of subscribing to their email communications. This is worth a read for sure. Not only is this study great, but he also comments on the campaigns that come in daily and weekly from these subscriptions.
He also wraps up a his daily posts with the Subsjectivity Scanner. Which hightlight the subject lines daily.
Here is an example:
SUBJECTIVITY SCANNER:
Staples, 8/22, 4 pm
We have worked with a number of companies and organizations that want to do a multi-part email campaign that is automated based off a customer response (such as a purchase). One thing that most companies want to do is mold everyone into a campaign that is generic and timing is set the same for everyone. Now, the point of these campaigns is to provide value to each customer.
Adding flexibility in your schedule and content is key in this area. Ask them questions down the road that readjust their campaigns, adjust content based off of items of interest (base this on behavior, not just what they say), stop sending emails that are not helping the cause – which if you forgot is to create an advocate out of your customer, that nirvana a customer reaches when they would spar with Roy Jones Jr just to tell people about your company.
Lynn Russo from Mediapost breaks down a good article this past week that is worth your time. It hit home with me as with ALL the full service campaigns we produce, we ALWAYS integrate email on the front, back or integrated in real time with the other campaign outreach devices we plan to use. It IS the Mix and not just a part to consider. If you are just now “Considering” using email as “part” or a campaign you are putting together, you are at least half awake. Get on board and see why so many campaigns are suceeding and EXCEEDING goals when all media avenues are used in the right mix.
E-mail should be integrated within multimedia campaigns
When you hear about a good case study on an e-mail campaign, all too often it’s just that an e-mail campaign. But asiloed marketing program is not competitive enough in today’s market. With savvy customers using multiple media simultaneously, and given that multichannel customers have been proven to be more profitable than single-channel customers, marketers need to support their e-mail campaigns with a complete multimedia strategy. Those that don’t will lose out on incremental opportunities and miss the chance to reach customers at times when they’re ready to buy.
Home and work users have different preferences.
For e-mail marketers looking to make the biggest impact, it makes sense to pay attention to whether users are receiving their e-mail at home or at work.
According to a Q2 2006 study of e-mail marketing preferences by eROI Inc., 79% of people who subscribe to business-to-business e-mail marketing messages receive them at a business e-mail address. Just 19% of people who receive consumer-oriented e-mail marketing messages subscribe with their business e-mail address.
Those who receive consumer-oriented messages were also much more likely to use an e-mail address created specifically for e-mail marketing: 24% did, vs. 6% of those who received B2B messages.
Are you receiving someone else’s email?
Gmail doesn’t recognize dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations. messages sent to your.username@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are delivered to the same inbox, since the characters in the username are the same.
Keep in mind that hyphens (-) and underscores (_) can’t be used in a Gmail address. Also, usernames are case insensitive, so it doesn’t matter if you enter upper case or lower case letters.
If you created your account with a dot in your username and you wish you hadn’t, you can change your ‘Reply-to address.’ To change your reply-to address:
Click ‘Settings’ at the top of any Gmail page.
Enter your username@gmail.com without a dot in the ‘Reply-to address’ field.
Click ‘Save Changes.’
When you log in to Gmail
, you need to enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.
After 12 months of surveying customers, rewriting millions of lines of code and testing a new user interface we are happy to announce our latest version of emailROI is going to be released to ALL emailROI customers currenlty using the email marketing platform.
The new system will was built as an upgrade to the already amazing functionality of the emailROI platform and will allow customers and agencies even greater control over the system. New XML API and CSS abilities will permit clients to create a system that is perfect for their needs.
Also introduced is a new RSS to Email system, as we had email to RSS in Dec 04. This new system allows you to set up automatic email campaigns using the RSS feeds you have produced from your site, blog or other source. It automatically wraps the RSS feed (and segments number of articles, day, time and frequency as you choose) into your brand template and sends it out through the emailROI platform. It was orginally built in mind for news and publishing clients, but has uses in consumer (think product feeds) as well as B to B product, events and news updates on a daily, weekly, monthly or date of the month based format.
The greatest of all new functions (IMHO) is the ability to completely rewrap the entire UI for agencies or companies to allow them to have a completely customized email marketing platform that allows them to level the playing feild against all other ESP and agency competion.
The possibilities are enough to make a marketer’s mouth water.
The ubiquity of e-mail, among marketers and Internet users, has created a take-it-for-granted attitude that detracts from its actual power. But with 90% of Internet users
Good Article on email targeting and what can be done from MediaPost.
Beyond Batch And Blast: Direct Marketers Start To Get BT
by Phil Leggiere, Friday, August 4, 2006
THE PROMISE OF E-MAIL AS an advertising medium has been to bring brands and consumers together more directly than ever before. Reality, unfortunately, has proven more complicated. For consumers, finding the needle (the offer they really want) in the haystack of info-glut has become more and more frustrating, For advertisers, it’s meant their “signal” has been increasingly lost amidst the noise. One way of moving beyond these limitations is for direct marketers to adopt and adapt behavioral methodologies still mostly associated with their brethren in the online advertising world, as Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy of Atlanta-based interactive marketing firm Silverpop, explains below.
Behavioral Insider: Why has e-mail advertising remained largely siloed in relation to other Web advertising?
O’Gorman: The advantage of e-mail is that you have a more precise idea of who the customers are on your list than you would of just who’s browsing your Web site. But it’s a different mindset to do e-mail marketing from the one advertisers bring. E-mail marketing has been the province of direct marketers. And, frankly, most direct marketers don’t do a good job of executing e-mail campaigns. They haven’t changed the way they work. Most direct marketers are stuck in an old-school mentality where you do mass mailings based on very broad and rigid targeting criteria, the broader the better. Messaging and creative were set far in advance and once set were not seen as variable.
Wendy Roth from iMediaConnection writes:
If you have a website, chances are you have a form asking visitors to subscribe to your email list. Those subscribers are interested in your company and want to know more about what you have to offer.
It
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