E-mail

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,

Successful e-mail customer retention efforts depend on delivering relevance through a sophisticated segmentation and targeting strategy, writes Dave Chaffey in his new book, “Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing Your Results From Integrated E-marketing,” (Butterworth-Heinemann). Chaffey identifies five such segmentation strategies that can be layered on top of one another to achieve effective targeting. * Customer lifecycle groups: Customers on your site naturally pass through multiple stages as their relationship with you evolves, and each stage can require a different type of communication, Chaffey writes. First time visitors to your site, for instance, might benefit from messages thanking them for stopping by, while customers who’ve purchased

When it comes to integrating creative between the three primary marketing channels – catalog, Web and retail – much has been said about presenting a consistent image across all channels. But doing so isn’t always so easy. As Carol Worthington-Levy, partner and director at San Rafael, Calif.-based consultancy LENSER, pointed during a session at the recent New England Mail Order Association conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., multichannel marketers should enroll their creative people in “taking a role in the actual selling process.” She offered the following points and tips to marketers looking for ways to achieve multichannel consistency: Leverage your branding across all media that sells

In the rapidly evolving world of multichannel marketing, the print catalog’s role isn’t only changing on the consumer side. Consider how business postcard printer Modern Postcard, which for years provided its postcards to many business-to-business (B-to-B) marketers, has evolved into a cataloger: In mid-September, the Carlsbad, Calif.-based Modern Postcard rolled out a 24-page, 10.375-inch-by-8-inch B-to-B catalog that mailed to about 200,000 prospects (80 percent) and existing customers (20 percent). “We felt that our product and service offerings were amenable to the catalog channel, and we saw the creation of a catalog as a unique means for us to differentiate ourselves, elevate our brand and continue

An average of 19.2 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes between January 2006 and June 2006. But that’s down from 21 percent blocked during the same time last year, according to a report from e-mail solutions company Return Path. Looking at past e-mail delivery numbers, the trend appears to be reversing itself: * 20.7 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes in all of 2005; * 22 percent was blocked in 2004; * 18.7 percent was blocked in 2003; and * 15 percent was blocked in 2002; Other data revealed by the report: * In the first half

Over the years, I’ve made plenty of catalog purchases, but rarely simply because I was a catalog business editor. I only turned to catalogs when I needed something unusual or came across a killer sale. Otherwise, I bought my mainstream goods off the rack. Today, that’s changed. And the two vehicles that have impacted me the most have been the coming of age of e-mail and the remarkable ease of search engines. I find e-mail’s impact on me surprising, because less than five years ago, I’d delete any personal e-mail from just about any address I didn’t recognize. But now, I find myself looking

While e-mail marketing is nothing new, many catalogers still aren’t using it to its fullest potential, said consultant Reggie Brady, president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions in a session at the recent List Vision conference in New York. Following are a few areas Brady feels that catalogers should improve upon. * Send triggered messages. If customers try to put items in their carts that are out of stock, first tell them the products aren’t available; then e-mail them when the products are back in stock, Brady advised. E-mails sent a few days after an abandoned shopping cart also are important because customers tend to comparison

Ask Amy Africa--the Web usability surveyor and president of Eight By Eight, which consults for such B-to-B catalogers as VWR, S&S Worldwide and Hello Direct--and she’ll tell you there are really only a handful of things that matter when it comes to online marketing. During her keynote address at the recent MeritDirect Business Mailer’s Co-op Conference in White Plains, N.Y., she outlined the following pieces of online marketing that matter. Landing/entry page: Armed with her own survey findings, Africa said that 80 percent to 90 percent of people leave landing pages (upon coming from search engine sites) within five pages of the landing pages. “Landing

Seventy percent of marketing decision makers report that their organizations currently practice integrated marketing, a marketing plan that coordinates online and offline marketing efforts, according to the “B-to-B eMarketing Survey” released last month by marketing services provider Epsilon. The survey of 175 U.S.-based marketing executives also revealed the following: * 70 percent of companies report that the same person controls both traditional and interactive marketing budgets. * 46 percent allocate marketing budgets by channel using rough estimates based on past experience. * 23 percent allocate marketing budgets by channel using modeling and planning techniques. * 19 percent give each channel a fixed allocation. *

Seventy percent of marketing decision makers report that their organizations currently practice integrated marketing, a marketing plan that coordinates online and offline marketing efforts, according to the “B-to-B eMarketing Survey” released last month by marketing services provider Epsilon. The survey of 175 U.S.-based marketing executives also revealed the following: * 70 percent of companies report […]