email marketing

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.

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:

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?

Indigo Wild, an all-natural soap happily went home with a shiny AMBIT Award from the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association. Their Holiday 09 multi-part email marketing campaign won kudos for being both beauty and brains, with a 40% growth in seasonal sales over 2008.

We hear email marketers ask all the time: when is it ok to email to a business-to-business prospect? If you want to follow up with prospects after a trade show using your email service provider, can you? Should you automatically add prospects from demos or business meetings to your promotional email list?

Email marketing professionals will handle these differently, but as always, we think there are some best practices. What are the guidelines on when to send email b-to-b?

In addition to beautiful 80 degree weather in January, Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 Email Summit once again proved to be a fact-packed conference about our beloved email marketing. Here are some of our favorite take aways:

Top Quotes at Marketing Sherpa’s Email Summit 2010:

No matter what media you’re using, the more eyeballs, the better. And in today’s highly targeted world, getting in front of more relevant eyeballs is key. So, it’s not surprising that we hear from our clients all the time, “Can you help us grow our email list?” There are lots of great ways to grow email marketing list size, from search engine marketing to online promotions to banner ad campaigns. But, inevitably, the most popular follow up question is “Can we buy an email list?”

So, how do you leverage relevant marketing lists outside of your own subscriber list?

Research says that up to 30% of your email list could turn over every year. With no official National Change of Email Address list, in a worst case scenario, you could lose over 80% of your email addresses in 5 years unless you take action to maintain your list. These email addresses represent valid prospects that originally told you they wanted your mail and reconnecting with them is still a lower cost than new customer acquisition.

According to a 2008 ReturnPath study, more than 75% of marketers who use email marketing aren’t taking advantage of personalization at all. Surprising, given that there’s solid evidence that even limited personalization boosts email response rates. And, with technology provided by virtually every Email Service Provider, it’s very easy to implement.

So what’s preventing marketing experts from using personalization in their email marketing campaigns?

Gmail just announced on their blog that they’ll automatically allow images from some of its users’ contacts. Good news for email marketers who already encourage whitelisting from list subscribers, but there’s an important additional step.

Worldwide, marketers ideate and speculate on the perfect execution of email marketing. What gets the most opens, the most clicks and of course, the most conversions? What time of day and day of week is best to send an email marketing campaign? Which offer will work best? What graphic is most eye-catching?

Well, gather ‘round for the secret of creating that elusive perfect promotional email…

So, you just finished up a rockstar online promotion and gathered thousands of potential prospects… but you didn’t ask them to opt-in to your emails (shame, shame). Or you have an existing transactional email relationship with a certain group of contacts, but they don’t receive your promo emails yet. What’s next?

Getting in to the inbox comes down to two key concepts: Content and Reputation. In this issue of emsights, we’ll focus on Content. We’ll discuss how you can “Pre-Flight” your message to determine whether or not it’s likely to pass common Spam filters and show you how you can verify that your HTML code will render properly across a broad range of email clients.

Slight changes in copy and/or images can make a world of difference in the rendering and deliverability of your email campaign.  It seems like a…

Ok, as part of your Pre-Flight routine you’ve previewed your email in the 7 most important email clients. Now it’s time to see if they’re getting past the guard dogs, aka SPAM filters. Good code and good design are important, but not if nobody sees your campaign.

As an email marketer, you have plenty of challenges when it comes to getting your messages out the door and into the inbox. And getting in doesn’t mean the end of those challenges. A good Pre-Flight or Campaign Preview tool will allow you to view your message in some or all of these email clients before sending so you can fix or rearrange any issues before you deploy.