The emfluence Blog

Your email deliverability – whether or not you’re being delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes – is a huge factor in what return on investment you earn from your email campaigns. After all, if the subscriber doesn’t see your email, they can’t act on it.

Domain Level ReportingOne of the benefits of email marketing is that, like all digital marketing, it comes equipped with analytics and reporting that can talk to you about the status of your campaigns. One of the most important set of metrics to watch is your results by domain. Domain-level reporting allows you to see results not just of your email as a whole, but also across each receiving domain.

It’s probably on the top 5 most asked/most discussed questions in email marketing: “Who should our marketing emails be ‘from’?”

The best “from” varies based on a lot of factors: B2B vs. B2C, profit vs. nonprofit, Sales emails vs. Marketing emails vs. News and Information. Each email type or topic is likely to be sent from your Email Service Provider and you can decide who the email comes from.

So, who should your emails be from?

Whether you attended or if you didn’t get the chance, the notes will be worth gold. Take a peek at the top takeaways from the three keynote presentations at the 2011 emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference.

Helzberg Diamonds offered a deal last week that seemed too good to be true… and turned out it was. Their online system had a glitch and their advertised “surprise savings” were a surprise even to them! These are the moments that define a company’s reputation. There are a lot of lessons to be taken from how Helzberg handled the potential catastrophe.

What counts as oversharing information in a world where people tweet their breakfast? What is TMI (too much info) about a person or company you follow? Some might argue that it would depend on if it’s content from a personal account or on behalf of a brand (comma?) but I have a rule of thumb that I think you can apply to either situation: Act as if the online world were one big cocktail party.

Email frequency – how often should you send your subscribers email – is a hot topic among email marketers. Just about everyone has a different opinion and usually everyone fiercely believes they’re right. Some will answer “It depends.” In this case, try this on for size: Ask.

For most companies, one of the best open rates they get in their email marketing is on the welcome email. Your welcome email is your first chance to let a new subscriber know what you’re about. It’s an opportunity to catch them when they’re still at their desk or on their mobile device and they’re eager to receive email from you. So how can you get the most out of your welcome messages?

My first South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience definitely lived up to the affectionate moniker “geek spring break” From social media to widgets to guerrilla marketing, I had plenty to learn from. But as a marketer, my heart was captured by some of the best non-traditional promotions I’ve seen by an industry bursting with new ideas every day. Here’s my “Top 8” list of the best promos at SXSWi 2011 (and the brands behind them):

A scary fact: in 2010, only 33% of email users have images turned on by default in their email client, down even further from the 2006 number of just over 50% (Source: Marketing Sherpa, 2010). Yikes! When you’re designing beautiful emails, does your email still fly without images turned on? Check these 5 ways that you should design without images in mind.

A few notes about things in the search engine optimization (SEO) world that you may or may not have heard about, including changes to Google’s algorithm thanks to JCPenney’s recent press and social media’s impact on how we search.

What email marketing’s popular younger brother, social media marketing, can learn from its elder.

Email marketing and social media are both about connecting with an audience that said they want to hear from you. Better yet, that like you. So why wouldn’t they work best together? Social media has a natural sharing effect (buzz word alert: virality) that can carry your content across digital media. Here are a few ways to let your social channels boost your email marketing campaigns.

Ok, so the time to get local was last year, or the year before. But if you haven’t taken the time, or are new to the search marketing arena, here’s some insight that you want to take note of: local search is changing. Components are merging and the lines are blurring in the search world and businesses that aren’t paying attention are falling behind. The good news is, this is a good — no, a great opportunity to get on board. And when better than at the start of a new year?
But where to start?

A rule of thumb in the age of the Internet is that if you blink, you probably missed 28 updates to the various sites you use on a regular basis. Sometimes the changes are minor, but even those minor changes can be game changers for marketers and advertisers. So, it’s always good to take a second to consider any kind of changes on the sites you frequent, put your business hat on, and think about how it might affect you or your client.

In the spirit of giving this season, we thought we’d share a few bonus How-To Holiday tips:

The holidays are in full swing, at least according to the retailers filling our inboxes and mailboxes and news feeds. And it’s no wonder: some retailers make 25% to 40% of annual sales during the holidays, and 2010 holiday sales are expected to be up 2.3% to $447.1 billion this year. How do you keep up the energy for an eight-week holiday season? It’s all about timing. From when you send your offers to how many days between reminders to which offers work best at which times of the season… Here’s a suggestion on a holiday calendar with timely offers.

Sure, segmentation is a hot button in the email marketing world. Certainly, by now, we all know that segmenting your list increases the relevance of your emails which drives your engagement and your sales up. We know that sending relevant mail also keeps our sender reputation in good condition because users are more likely to read and less likely to mark the email as spam.

But here’s the question: how many companies actually use segmentation? According to MarketingSherpa, more than 30% of email marketers still don’t do even basic segmentation of content and offers to their email marketing subscribers. True, segmentation means you have to have data and the time to sift through it, but even basic-level segmentation is available to all email marketers. We’ve got email marketing segmentation on our Holiday Wish List this year.

Best-practicing email marketers know a valid, opted-in, interested email address is worth revenue to your company, so you should absolutely be providing value to the subscriber in return for their opt-in. Sure, you could offer a coupon. Or maybe you could go a bit further? Chili’s Restaurants sure did.

More and more, email is being described as one of the social channels. It’s still the number one way people share pictures, articles, links and more with their friends, family and co-workers. So when people ask if social media has endangered email, we know better. (Hint: no.) Marketing has always been about being everywhere your prospects are and that usually means more than one medium.

Email marketing and social media can be valuable comrades in growing your audience online. So are you taking advantage of their friendship? Specifically, are you working social into your email sign up and growing your email list through social media?

Take a look at weaving social and email together for list growth and new customer acquisition.

Last week, I got a great question from one of our savviest email marketing clients: “How are you advising your clients to prepare for the changes with Hotmail? Should we be versioning or quarantining our Hotmail lists and watching them more closely?”

Not that you’ve ever done this, but sometimes people type their email address wrong. When was the last time you checked out your own opt-in process? Do you know if your form will accept these common input mistakes as valid entries?

How do you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns? When our clients ask us our thoughts, we encourage them to measure email marketing like you do any other kind of marketing: by calculating your Return On Investment (ROI). Sure, we know that you know that email marketing still has the highest ROI of any marketing channel. But are you actually measuring your success?

At the emfluence User Conference last month, our CEO and Head Email Brainiac, Dave Cacioppo, gave a rockin’ keynote: “Email ROI: Let It Rock!” Our users voted it the best takeaway content of the day, so we thought we’d share the good info. So, Dave, how do you rock your email ROI?

Social Fresh’s fifth social media conference was hosted April 19th just across the state in St. Louis. We sent Jessica Best to soak up some knowledge about emerging media from some heavy hitters. Here’s what she gleaned:

Last week, our Marketing Nerd — oops Marketing Manager — Jessica Best headed off to New York City for the first Innovation Uncensored conference, put on by Fast Company. Here’s what she heard from some of the smartest and most innovative people in business:

We sent emfluence CEO/President (and lucky dog) Dave Cacioppo down to Captiva Island for Media Post’s Spring Email Insider Summit 2010. Here are 5 bits of information that will give you an idea of the value of the content and the experience:

As some of our readers already know, emfluence has an online bracket called Big Shot Bracket. For those of you who didn’t know, well, now you do. Every February, we kick off our call for bracket and group entries. Generally, we get a great response to the campaign as a whole because we’re sending timely, relevant email to those who have said they were interested in the past.

The challenge we always face, however, is that after 11 months of silence, our list isn’t pristine and our email address is slightly suspect with the major ISPs. Best practices say that consistent and relevant messages are key to your deliverability and ultimately your email success. But who wants to hear from Mr. Big Shot in October?