E-mail

The advent of e-mail as a marketing medium has provided catalogers and online marketers with the ability to reach their customers with personalized, highly relevant messages that drive them to purchase again and again. In fact, 39.6 percent of respondents to The Direct Marketing Association’s “2005 Postal and E-mail Marketing Report” used e-mail personalization to increase response rates last year; 93.2 percent of those marketers said the tactic was successful. But before you can start slapping your customers’ names and other personal details on all of your outbound e-mails, there are five things you’ll need, according to a recent white paper from catalog management

Editor’s note: This will be Jim’s final Contributions to Profit column. In October, CatalogSuccess.com launched his blog, Profitable Cataloging. He posts a new entry every Tuesday, and based on reader comments, responds throughout the week. Visit CatalogSuccess.com/blogs/JimGilbert.bsp, and post your questions or comments about catalog marketing. In addition to being my final print column, this also is the third in a three-part series on the hierarchy of customer status. A quick review: I’ve defined the behavioral groupings of prospects and customers as suspects, prospects, triers, buyers and advocates. Then I discussed strategies to turn prospects into single buyers (triers). Now, onto the next step: conversion. 1.

The Web is an essential channel for catalogers. Customers expect catalog companies to have effective, well-designed e-commerce sites. The Internet is undergoing a period of rapid innovation, often labeled “Web 2.0.” It includes tagging, visual search, wikis and Ajax. Web 2.0 technologies will transform online retail over the next two years. Catalogers will need to upgrade their sites to remain competitive. I suggest you read this month’s column with a computer close by — as I’ll tour some Online Retail 2.0 ideas that will transform e-commerce. The first stop is del.icio.us, the social tagging site. (Go to del.icio.us/catalogsuccess, and you’ll find a

I’ll keep this column brief (I know you want this week to end. I can’t wait for the advanced stages of tryptophan sleepiness to set in after the turkey is done). Want to add some revenue before the end of the year? Try the following:

1. Add an extra mailing in before the end of the year. Try it this way: After your last mailing is complete, mail one more catalog just to your hotline buyers, those who just responded from your last mailings of the year. If it’s too late to get your printer involved, grab some of your bounce back and office copy

Looking for tips from the top? Three chief executives from online and multichannel merchants fired out ways to increase profitability by creating a unique multichannel experience through personalization, at last week’s Mid Market eTail conference in San Francisco. On hand were: Hannes Blum, CEO of online bookseller Abebooks.com; Josef Mandelbaum, president/CEO of greeting card marketer AG Interactive; and Mike Stamn, CEO of multichannel auto supplies merchant The Eastwood Co. Following are their recommendations: 1. Organize customer information to provide better personalization. Eastwood produces multiple catalogs, sends different messages and provides separate offers depending on whether the targeted customer is a consumer, a small business or

When developing an e-mail contact strategy, define the purpose of e-mailing your customers, advises Chris Topping, chief executive officer for silk flower and accessories catalog Petals, in a recent whitepaper. While catalogs continue to be the primary driver of online sales for Petals, e-mails provide a more narrowly defined target strategy for the promotion of online sales While Petals mails print catalogs every three to four weeks, it sends e-mails slightly more often, about every two to three weeks depending on seasonality, Topping says. While the e-mails are sent in support of the catalog mailing, they usually incentivize customers in a way that the

During a session at last week’s Lenser & Associates client summit in San Rafael, Calif., Lenser partner Michelle Farabaugh offered several Web and e-mail marketing tips to the firm’s client base, which included more than 100 mid-size catalog marketers. Following are some that are worth keeping in front of you. * Increase your advertising effectiveness by improving headlines, copy and destination landing pages. Include a value proposition, promotions, deferred billing and a buy now button. * In e-mail, separately test segmentation, frequency, time of day/day of week, subject line, “From” address, format, offers, deadlines, length, landing pages and hold out panels in order to see true

Small changes to the creative elements of e-mail messages can boost customer response by 50 percent or more, according to a study recently released by e-mail solutions provider Silverpop. For instance, business-to-business e-mails with the company or brand name in the subject line experienced an average open rate of 32 percent, compared to just 20 percent for messages without branded subject lines. Following are other data Silverpop found it its analysis of 612 e-mails sent by 430 companies. * Business-to-consumer e-mails with the brand or company name in the subject line received open rates of 29 percent on average; * B-to-C e-mails without the

Among the myriad e-mail creative tips Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered during a session at the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, he brought out several key copywriting pointers for marketers. Here are several of them. * Tell your message recipient what to do. “Don’t just say what a wonderful company and offer you have; tell them what to do,” Gordon Lewis pointed out. People respond to a command. * “Don’t get diarrhea of the fingertips,” he advised in regard to overly complex e-mail copy containing long, technical words. “We tend to show off our gigantic vocabularies.” * Specifics out-pull generalizations, he said,

In a series of workshop sessions during the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, creative and copywriting guru Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered numerous tips about design and marketing in e-mail messages. Below are some of the most noteworthy pointers. * Look for a rationale that matches what you’re saying and to whom you’re saying it. Sometimes sticking in graphics when your recipients’ computers won’t accept those graphics is a problem, Gordon Lewis said. * Test this oddity: Move “click here” up in your text, he suggests. You’ll usually increase response. “That’s due to an ancient rule of salesmanship: When your prospect