Six Steps To a successful Holiday Email Campaigns
September could be the busiest month of the year for email
Marketers because it’s usually when they begin planning their holiday email campaigns. How big the email
list volume and how many responses do you need to meet objectives? Which days should they send their holiday messages?
What should the offer will be and how will this beat our control package.
The following are six best practices outlined in the report, designed to help retailers and other B-to-C email marketers have a successful holiday season this year:
1. Review last year’s holiday campaigns. In preparing for the holiday email season to come, examine what happened during your 2009 and how can we improve response.
Ask yourself the following:
* Which of my email campaigns generated the highest conversions? On what days were they sent? What were the emails about and what were the subject lines?
* Which campaigns generated the lowest conversions? On what days were they sent?
* Which segmentation tactics were most successful?
* Which campaigns were forwarded and shared the most? What about those campaigns made them so viral?
* Which campaigns generated the highest unsubscribe rates? The highest spam complaints? Why was that?
* Did you have to send any apology emails? If so, why? Have steps been taken to fix the problems?
2. Start Christmas campaigns early. On average, retailers began their 2009 holiday campaigns 67 days before Christmas (Oct. 19), according to the report. This is on par with the 2008 holiday season, but it’s nine days earlier than the 2007 holiday season. Last year’s soft economy and the precedent set in the 2008 holiday season was likely behind the earlier start. With a slowly recovering economy, retailers may begin their holiday campaigns a bit later this year, the report says.
Clean your lists by asking customers for their preferences:
* Ask subscribers directly to update their preferences, or make the link to your preference center more prominent by moving it above the fold.
* Ask subscribers to complete a survey about your email program.
* Try a delayed reward program designed to bring customers back during the holiday season.
* If you have a private-label credit card, loyalty program or member-based shipping program, promote it in advance of the holiday season.
4. Increase holiday email frequencies. If that logic appeals to you, then send on the days just before or after these high-volume days, the report advises. Also, the report recommends targeting brand loyalists with a “daily deal” email series or a “X Days of Christmas” campaign that requires an additional opt-in.
5. Stand out among inbox clutter. With the increase in volume pouring into subscribers’ inboxes, it’s critical to stand out with not only relevant content, big deals and helpful advice, but also with compelling subject lines, eye-catching creative and effective designs. To do this, the report offers the following suggestions:
* craft better subject lines;
* introduce a holiday header and navigation bar;
* add a gift services footer;
* use animated gifs more frequently; and
* leverage social sharing.
6. Change strategies over time. To maximize your holiday email revenues, adjust your strategies throughout the season, the report recommends. There are 18 phases to the holiday email season, according to the report, including Christmas in July; early holiday messaging; core holiday messaging; Thanksgiving Day sales; Black Friday sales; Cyber Monday campaigns; X Days of Christmas campaigns; the end of express shipping and guaranteed Christmas delivery; and so on.
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About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options
How To Improve Your Marketing ROI
Email marketers today have faced their own unique challenges.
Spurred by increased program performance expectations, more email marketing messages have been pumped into inboxes with more offers – and more competitive noise.
It is more difficult to break through that noise and generate meaningful results; this has made creating relevance in email messages more important.
Email marketers do have unique opportunities to drive performance and ROI – if they know where to concentrate their efforts.
Email Marketing Remains the Cornerstone Of all the trends to watch, this is the one that many people will miss simply because it seems so obvious.
Email marketing alone
Isn’t exactly a hot new trend, but you’ll want to start using email more effectively in your marketing mix.
The primary reason why email has been, and will continue to be, of major importance of the online marketing world is that it’s the one method of online marketing that everyone uses.
As shown below, email marketing had the highest penetration of all the online mediums last year – with over 90 percent of companies using email marketing.
Email is the Most-Used Online Marketing Tool
Email marketing effectiveness can be improved through integration with other online marketing channels. For instance, social media marketing (SMM) is an efficient way to extend your email
campaigns between send dates, search engine marketing (SEM) can be used to build your email opt-in list and mobilemarketing is a great way to improve the response rates
of email offers.
Improving Email Marketing ROI:
• Optimize the opt-in. Don’t just ask for a name and email address; get to know your customers better when they opt in for your email. Ask for what products or services interest them, how often they want to be contacted and what
offers appeal to them.
• Make relevance the priority. By getting more than just the basics at the opt-in, you’re well positioned to send relevant, meaningful email messages each and every time. After the opt-in, continue to build a history on all customers in your file based on what they bought, what information they requested and anything else that tells you who they are as individuals.
Use this information to make your communication focus on the “what’s in it for me” from the customer standpoint and not the “what do we want to sell” that other companies may use.
• Leverage social media for email marketing, and vice versa. Email used in conjunction with SMM is a powerful combination because it makes email more interactive.
Once connected with you via SMM, your followers can communicate in an interactive way and become more engaged.
This engagement can result in quicker response, faster conversion and higher ROI. And properly engaged, your followers will share your message with others. So ask your recipients to “tag” your email to spread your messages virally.
With little or no investment on your part, your email has new life. And review the discussion threads on social media sites to get ideas for offers, what content is interesting and to find out what your customers want.
Promote your opt ins on those sites as well to grow your list.
• Make search earn its keep. Optimize your pay-per-click (PPC) and organic search programs by making sure that your opt in is promoted on each destination page. And as they are opting in, record by customer what interested them and what the source was of their initial interest. Use this to segment your messaging to increase relevance from the beginning.
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About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
Is E-mail Marketing Doomed to low Response Rates?
Monitor your campaigns
It is strongly recommend that email marketers monitor their subscriber responses and adapt their campaigns to either slow down the emails to once per month or send a permission email to determine subscribers or your email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing campaigns are plagued by a lack of response and not much adjustment by marketers to solve the problem, according to a new study from company Return Path. Without appropriate monitoring and follow-up your email campaings could be doomed to a low response.
The new study—“The One-Way Conversation: Email Marketing to the Non-Responsive Subscriber”—analyzed the continuing email efforts of 40 e-commerce companies after Return Path purchased a single product from each.
A majority of the studied marketers sent follow-up emails at a steady, high frequency for a 19-period despite a total lack of response—no opens, clicks or other purchases.
Eventually, 27% of the companies stopped sending email, but a quarter stopped without any attempt to re-engage or request continuing opt-ins.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
Email Marketing for The Small Business Budget
Email marketing is constantly evolving…
which means the best practices you take for granted today could easily change tomorrow.The small business entrepreneur must
make the most of every cent for a return on investment.
Email marketers are often doing their job on a limited budget.
These two facts are the main reasons that email.
Always include compelling pre-headers. Pre-headers are the short text messages that appear above graphics or body copy. Typical pre-header content includes, “Click here to
add us to your address book” and “Click here to view this email in your browser.You should test and create a compelling pre-header that gets the most clicks.This is a great place to tell people why they might want to open your email.
You can include your call to action
Massage the text-only version. It’s a given that all emails should go out with a text-only option because, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA),
about 20% of all recipients view their email on smartphones or other handheld devices. Yet many marketers don’t even bother to look at their text-only email to make
sure it is formatted properly. The bottom line: It’s not enough to simply clean up the HTML and dump your copy into text-only format,
Don’t just hand off your coding. Placing code—either links or formatted content—into an email is typically left to a technical person, Berger said.
While Web browsers might be tolerant of mistakes, email servers and clients are not.. Yes, it’s OK to hand off the technical details of your email campaign, but
make sure you’re outsourcing to or hiring someone who has significant email experience.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
Building Effective E-mail Campaigns
Effective e-mail campaigns require two critical elements…
Good clean and updated list and an understanding of customer preferences.
These elements form the foundation for a successful e-mail program. Below are some quick tips for building and maintaining a good e-mail list, and recommendations on how to capture customer preferences so that you’re able to deliver relevant and effective e-mail marketing messages to your audience.
Good clean and updated list hygiene
Regardless of how well an e-mail is updated, cleaned if it’s not making it to the inbox, it has no impact. Current statistics show that more than 25% of e-mail addresses churn per year.
Therefore, no matter how clean your initial list, it is imperative that you have a process in place that manages and removes bounce-backs and inactive addresses.
Are your e-mail addresses accurate? Have they been updated? Are your prospects and customers still receiving communications at their listed e-mail addresses? If not, your Internet Service Providers will notice that you consistently send messages to bad addresses.
Left unmanaged, this will have a direct impact on your companies ability to deliver e-mail to any customer’s inbox. Moreover, if a significant percentage of your e-mails are not being delivered, your marketing ROI will be negatively impacted; the CPM rate you pay to your ESP doesn’t discern between delivered and undelivered e-mail.
There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your list is clean and up-to-date:
Send a triggered opt-in confirmation e-mail while collecting addresses. This confirms that the address is active, and gives you the opportunity to explain what communications the recipient should expect to receive from you.
Develop a system to remove inactive and/or invalid bounceback e-mail addresses from your database. Internet Service Providers are increasingly measuring engagement or how many people read or click on your e-mails. Removing inactive addresses keeps engagement measurements high.
Collecting customer preferences
Customer preferences help you understand two key things: your customer’s specific interests, and their preferred method(s) and frequency of receiving information.
Your goal is to leverage this information and create relevant messages that speak to your customers as individuals. In short, you are aligning your messages to the topics they find most important, and delivering those messages at the times and frequency they find most appropriate.
Once you collect customer preference information, you should append this infromation to the other preferences who opened what, which links they
clicked, what they are buying, and how often they are buying. Understanding these inferred preferences will enable you to further refine your messaging and content to drive even greater results.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
How Social Media Can Impact E-mail Marketing
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
How Do I Make My e-mail Messages Relevant?
The more relevant and “personalized” the message
the higher the response rate.
But how do you determine which information is necessary to make your communications more personalized?
Write a short marketing plan to determine your objectives. How you plan on using the information—for example, for promotions, for invites to special events or for up-selling opportunities—will drive the type
of information you gather.
Customer Profiles
Customer profiles can include are they business to business or consumer if so will we need certain titles and job descriptions along with company size and location.
Consumer would include net icome or worth, credit rating do they
purchase online frequently using credit cards or PayPal, do they spend over a $100 per purchase?
Capture information
Now that you know what information you need, how do you capture it? Ask your customer. If don’t already have a way to do so, a powerful technique is to set up a preference center on your website.
A preference center gives you a mechanism to capture useful information such as name, age, gender, ZIP code, mobile telephone number and permission to use it for SMS messages, type of communications they want to receive and which social media sites they’re using.
Driving customers to the preference center and encouraging them to share information there can be as simple as sending an e-mail (or posting something on your Facebook page) and offering special discounts, coupons or contest eligibility in exchange for preference information.
Gathering these data into a customer database enables you to create more relevant, personalized messaging:
- ZIP codes help you to better promote local events.
- Demographics can help improve the relevancy of lifestyle-related product offers.
- Collecting mobile numbers and getting permission to use them for SMS allows to you send out last-minute clearance sale
- announcements.
Network” e-mail links to Twitter or Facebook can help you leverage these channels and determine the influencers within your customer base.
Web-click data can be tracked to determine product interests and allow you to immediately respond to abandoned sessions.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
E-mail Marketing for Nonprofit
With the current recession stinging non-profit orgainzation budgets, it can be difficult for businesses to effectively stay in touch with their customers.
Those in the nonprofit organizations dealt with these challenges before the economic downturn. Those in nonprofits find e-mail marketing is a cost-effective, timely way to reach donors, volunteers and sister agencies.
Nonprofit that use a monthly e-mail newsletteror blogs to publicize everything from fundraising events to special facility tours. Can cost effectively take advantage of e-mail campaigns.
Using templates available in the iContact application, its monthly newsletter gives them a professional look and feel, without costing them significant resources.
In iContact’s experience, nonprofits enjoy a higher open rate than the average for-profit business due to the recipients’ increased level of trust with the
organization. The Conservators’ Center has seen open rates between 24 and 28 percent for their e-mail marketing messages.
For nonprofits, the benefits of e-mail marketing has sereral advantagres and they include cost-efficient communication; the ability to attract and retain constituents; and the delivery of timely information in a professional manner.
The cost of entry — in both application knowledge and staff time — is relatively low, making e-mail marketing the best communication channel for nonprofits that rely on reaching their donor and volunteer base to be successful.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
Papa John’s Markets Using e-Mail List and Social Media
The pizza chain Papa John’s
is encouraging it’s customers to create a new pizza from it’s menu.
The promotion name is Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge
and Papa John’s is e-mailing its customer database using banner ads, TV ads and Facebook page to promote the promotion.
They had a Facebook app developer in house to work on the social networking application.
The pizza giants objective was to draw attention to it’s better ingredients, better pizza brand positioning. They wanted to do something that was authentic and engaging and to give customers a reason to learn more about the ingredients.
Consumers can enter the contest on facebook.com/papajohns and entrants must share the recipe and name and tell about the company in 250 words or less and what makes their pizza special.
Papa John’s will feature all entrants on their Facebook page and judges will consider each items name, recipe and story when picking the semifinals. The company’s goal is to both customer acquisition and retention.
Pizza business is very competitive…
with every body actively engaged in marketing and talking about their products so they can reinforce loyalty from existing customers while encouraging new customers to stay with you.
Papa John’d founder, John Schnatter and CEO will test different recipes at the headquarters in Louisville and give three finalists a $1000 marketing budget to drive sales to their recipes.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
Consumers Demand Personalized E-mail Lists
More than half…
of US consumers said they would be more responsive to e-mails from marketers if they were more personalized and highly-targeted.
That is among the key findings of a new report issued from e-mail service providers
According to the report for E-mail Marketers
Consumers Demand Relevance, 64% of consumers want marketers to know the types of products or services they like; 54% want marketers to know whether the consumer is a new or returning customer and 36% want marketers to know their shopping habits.
In addition, 85% of surveyed consumers want companies to ask about their e-mail preferences at registration.
Consumers have clearly indicated, according to the experts that they will reward marketers for personalized, preference-driven messages
with their engagement.
E-mail marketers…
Need to capture information that allows them to get to know their subscribers better, group director of strategic services for e-Dialog, in an e-mail.
They need to stop looking at e-mail as a tool for a quick sale and instead look at it as a way to build more profitable and enduring customer relationships.
2,000 consumers were polled in an online survey, which took place during the first quarter of 2010.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
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