Email Marketing Is All About Trust
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I love email marketing. My professional bio includes the fact that I "eat, sleep, breathe and sometimes dream email marketing." There are times when my passion for email marketing drives my wife crazy. I study how she processes and engages with her inbox. I inquire about why she opened one email, yet deleted the next; why she clicked through or purchased something from one company, yet not the next.
The answer nearly always comes back to trust.
Social Media: It's Time To Drive The ROI
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Today, through social media, it is possible for businesses to connect with hundreds of millions of customers and prospects around the world. Many businesses have already launched Facebook sites and Twitter accounts, and are actively engaging with their fans and followers. However, the majority of online marketers have no idea what impact these activities have on their brand or sales.
Sentiment Analysis: Believe Hype, Not Myths
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From focus groups to phone polls to man-on-the-street surveys, companies and organizations have been trying to understand consumer opinions for decades. And with social media producing a steady stream of updates and opinions from the masses every second, businesses have discovered yet another way to attain this valuable data. But distilling actionable information from social media often requires a deeper analysis, and this is where sentiment analysis comes in.
Facebook, Apple's 'Walled Gardens' Make Analytics That Much Harder for Brands
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Tracking the effectiveness of advertising on the web was hard enough. Tracking it in the era of "walled gardens" could become that much tougher.
The rapid shift of web audiences and marketer attention toward closely controlled properties such as Facebook or Apple's iAd platform is presenting a growing challenge for web analytics. Nearly a quarter of online time at the PC is now spent with social media, the lion's share of that on Facebook, according to Nielsen Co.
Cross-Channel Audience Analysis and Re-Marketing
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Most email and database marketers do some level of audience analysis on their email lists to find patterns and propensity to convert. Some of them join these databases with the richer demographic datasets provided by companies like BlueKai or eXelate to further improve their models. But the majority still overlook some very important items to consider, including:
It's Not About the Send
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Truthfully, it's not about the send.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a big believer in having a send schedule for your email marketing efforts and making deadlines. But too often I see email marketers that are so focused on getting the email out "on time" that they don't stop to really think about what they're sending.
They forget the big picture, the only thing that really matters: Will the email be effective? Will it engage people enough to get them to open it and take the action we want them to take?
The Need to Move Beyond Simple Metrics in Email Marketing
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In the early days of the Internet, measuring the impact of your online activities was very simple. Those who owned a website were already satisfied if they could monitor how much traffic was being generated, how many pages visitors viewed, and which ones. Back then, email marketers monitored how much emails were being sent and coming in, how many people opened them, and how many times a link was clicked upon.
Relevant and Customer-Centric Email Marketing: Recipient Engagement Requires Data
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When we talk about email marketing and social media, we often think of sharing tools, redirecting to peer reviews, viral marketing through email, email as a conversation, etc.
But there is a lot more to it than just technology, integration, and viral spread. One of the core elements of social media marketing is engagement: the engaging and involving of the “other” in the story of your brand and your company.
That’s exactly where one of the most important challenges lies for email marketers.
Understanding Delivery Problems: A Diagnostic Checklist
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In my last article for this column, I provided a daily checklist for deliverability. By following this checklist, you may find that you've run into a deliverability problem. In today's column I'm going to help you determine why you have a delivery problem. Next month I'll show you what to do about it.
Let's put on our lab coats and stethoscopes and dive in.
Step One: Gather Data
The 6 Stages of Email Engagement
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We all know that mass mailings are a thing of the past. To be a successful email marketer, you must engage your audience in relevant and timely conversations. But what does that mean? There is a lot of hype surrounding email engagement, and everyone has a different opinion on what engagement really means. We have identified the six levels of engagement to help you cut through the hype so you can optimize your email strategies and interact with your subscribers in a meaningful, individualized way.
Stage 1: Delivered
A Primer for Marketers Who Are Scared of Analytics
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Web analytics is the cornerstone of any brand's digital presence. Without it, you can't possibly know whether your online marketing activity is hitting the right people. Its use dates back to the internet boom of the mid-1990s, and as more companies established an online presence to reach customers and sell product, the need for robust data to optimize the online channel grew.
Do Declining Open Rates Matter? Yes…and No.
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So I return from vacation to find the latest MailerMailer report citing average open rates for H2 2009 of 11.2%.
This number has declined every half-year since H1 2004, when it was 26.66%.
Then Litmus reveals that of 4 million opens recorded by their tools, an average 51.1%…”spend less than 2 seconds looking at your email.”
Less than two seconds!
How Do I Combine Activity Data with Preference Data for Even More-Relevant Email Campaigns?
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The data you collect on your customers and prospects from your preference center is a great place to start to make your cross-channel communications more relevant, but you can do even better. By enhancing preference center data with behavioral data—information you can gather about your customers based on actions they take (or don't) on your website or within email communications—your programs will be even more successful.
Marketers Finally Turn Toward Metrics
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One-third of U.S. companies plan to maintain or increase marketing budgets in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and a higher percentage will set up guidelines and metrics to prove accountability, according to a study released Wednesday.
Google Adds Mobile Tracking for PPC Services
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Companies who use Google’s pay per click (PPC) platform now have a new way to track the performance of their PPC marketing campaigns.
In a post on the Inside AdWords blog, crew member Miles Johnson explains that a new option has been added to the ValueTrack parameter.
This allows advertisers to determine the source type for clicks that arrive via their PPC marketing campaigns.
