E-mail

In a session I presented at the DMA08 annual conference and exhibition last week in Las Vegas, I provided several tips to help marketers better prepare their e-mail communication strategies. In particular, I focused on a couple of areas: the building blocks needed to get an e-mail campaign up and running, and how to make your e-mails more relevant to your customers. Here’s a rundown of what I went over. 1. Learn from tests conducted by major marketers. If you include an offer in your e-mail, for example, is it more powerful to present that offer as dollars off or a percentage discount? Changing

In one of the final sessions from last month’s NEMOA conference in Burlington, Vt., e-mail marketing consultant Jeanne Jennings touched on myriad topics related to her stock-in-trade. Here are four of her most notable and implementable takeaway points from that session. 1. On e-mail registrations: * spark people with engaging e-mail descriptions; * don’t make registrations too long — keep them to five to seven items; * ask for postal addresses, though she added that asking for them could turn off some prospects, so “don’t force it; tread lightly”; and * get help from your IT pros. 2. Key deliverability factors: * confirm your

A recent whitepaper from the e-mail marketing firm StrongMail, called Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability, provides tips to multichannel marketers looking to improve the effectiveness of their e-mail campaigns. Among others, the whitepaper lays out best practices to improve sender reputation to protect against e-mails being filtered or blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs), preventing them from reaching consumers’ inboxes. Here’s a look at the whitepaper’s seven strategies. 1. Maintain a clean list. Sending to bad addresses not only skews response rates, it’s a core metric ISPs use to determine sender reputation, the whitepaper notes. To maintain a clean list,

E-mail’s potential and complexities are seemingly endless, according to Morgan Stewart, director of strategic services for the e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget. In a presentation he gave at last week’s eTail East 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., Stewart offered a number of pointers on how to make e-mail work in real time as a marketing tool. Here are the seven most noteworthy takeaway tips. 1. Use e-mail to turn a potentially negative out-of-stock experience into a positive. Include a callout when you’re out of stock for a particular product to have customers notified via e-mail when the item is back in stock. This helps accomplish

Holiday Growth Tactics 2008 A successful holiday season starts now, particularly in this tough economy! This informative report by Lauren Freedman of the e-tailing group and MarketLive explores proven tactics for growing holiday sales in key areas: Gifting, Promotions, eMail, Customer Service, and more.

It may be hot outside, but savvy merchants are already contemplating sleighs and snowflakes. With the holiday season comprising fully a third of all online sales, according to Forrester Research, now’s the time to begin building the strategies that will propel year-end success. But we’re not only talking holiday season here. Half of all online buying is for other people at any time of the year, according to Forrester. So multichannel merchants should adapt successful holiday gifting tactics for year-round use during seasonal peaks and special events. To be successful, your gifting strategy must be carefully planned and woven into the fabric of

A quick note: Our June issue was already at the printer while the 25th Annual Conference for Catalog and Multichannel Merchants (ACCM) was taking place on May 19-22 in Kissimmee, Fla. So belatedly, here’s my postconference recap. This was my 22nd consecutive tour of duty at what was once known as the National Catalog Conference, and the Annual Catalog Conference after that. But rest assured, I’m not going to give you one of these old-fogey reflections on how “it ain’t like it used to be.” Instead, let’s track back just a few years to Boston, June 2001. That was probably the most apprehensive

Catalog marketers are a pragmatic group. They stick with tried-and-true methods. New techniques must demonstrate practicality before implementation. Customer reviews and blogs are Web 2.0 techniques, and they’ve demonstrated the ability to build community and stimulate sales. Web 2.0 is focused on interactivity, collaboration and social networking. Marketing becomes more dynamic as customers and prospects are empowered with tools that encourage engagement. Here’s how to harness that crowd-sourced power to provide consumer-generated content that will be influential in the purchasing process. Customer Reviews Some catalogers experiment with letting customers post product reviews on their sites. Typically they’ll use a form with a

A new survey from the Email Experience Council, the e-mail marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association, provides a measure of caution to multichannel marketers: Think twice before launching that e-mail campaign full of images. If not, risk having your images suppressed and your message rendered useless. The Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study, which polled 576 online retailers and marketers, found that 23 percent of retailers send e-mails that are completely unintelligible when images are blocked. Of the 77 percent whose e-mails were intelligible, there were significant variations in clarity based on their use of HTML text and alt tags. Here are some

Subject lines carry a lot of weight. They drive open rates and results. After e-mail recipients look at your “from” line and recognize your company or service, the next thing they do is look at the subject line to see what might interest them. Let’s examine some of the latest techniques for getting customers past the e-mail client and into your site. Free to Use ‘Free’ In the past, marketers were warned not to use the word “free” in a subject line. The concern was that it triggered spam filters and reduced chances of delivery. Since “free” is the most powerful four-letter