Rush rush rush, many marketers are faced with an ever expanding job description, print, web, social… EMAIL! When will you get it all done with so little time and less resources? That is a question that many of my clients face every day. I hear so often after sharing my recommendations of what the program could be doing, I love that feature but I just do not have time to implement. You are not alone! Remember back to yesterday's post I wrote about the ROI of your email program. Understanding...

Do you have an answer to that question? If you don’t you are not alone. Tracking the ROI of your email program can be difficult if you don’t know where to start. So, where do you start? What will you track and how do you determine the results? What is the value of an email subscriber? How much do I spend in time and money to use my email service provider? These are all things you need to know to understand the ROI. Here are a few examples of how to get started!

First of all, the easiest way to...

Expectation is the root of all heartache - William Shakespeare

Every shopper prefers a well-fitting and comfortable accessory rather than mass-produced one-size-fits-all kind of stuff. The same is true for email marketing. However generalized the content in your email marketing campaign, it is foolish to expect your target market to embrace it fully. That is, unless you tailor the content to look good not only within inboxes and full-size browser pages, but also on the more popular but smaller screens of mobile phones and tablets.

The marketing community...

A recent survey by Exact Target brings good news for email marketers. 77% of the entire population prefer to receive marketing messages via email than any other medium.

Marketing is all about using engaging content that grabs attention and ensuring it reaches the audience at the right moment. The success rate of email marketing is assured if these two factors are on track. A ticket discount for an upcoming movie will be long forgotten if sent too early and is of no use, if the movie has...

How do you track your email marketing performance? Your answer is likely to be “XYZ specialist analytics software” or “I use metrics returned by my ISP / ESP”. 

How many performance metrics do you get on your desktop for campaign analysis? Your answer may be “5” or “7” or “10”, or more, or less, depending on what the software or the SP makes available.

Theoretically, you can identify as many as 17 performance metrics that can help you to assess your campaign’s performance and eventually your...

By now, there are enough “Big xxxxx” doing the rounds: Big Business, Big government, Big Chocolate, Big Oil, Big Science, Big Tobacco and Big Media. A recent addition is Big Data, which broadly refers to the humungous amounts of information that gets generated in this digital age.

Naturally, Big Data is complex and unwieldy. In fact, it is defined as “a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional...

Let's be honest. You get a lot of email. That's true of almost everybody these days, not just people looking for email marketing advice or those who work for an email marketing firm. 

That means that you're probably fairly aggressive when it comes to judging other people's email campaigns. It's likely that when you see a piece that isn't too impressive, you hit the delete button. Or worse, you unsusbcribe.

If great email design makes a difference to you as an end user, then you or your email...

One can be forgiven for thinking email marketing is getting boring. Or worse, outdated. It's not time to dig the grave yet, thanks to intelligent emailing.

Traditionally, email service providers (Google, Hotmail, and so on) try to provide a hassle free experience to their customers, thus bringing only the most relevant emails to their attention. How do you get past this barrier? Intelligent emailing, also known as engagement email marketing, is the need of the hour. 

Engagement RFM - Strategic...

Of course it does. Was there ever a doubt?

No, but here is a heads up. Plenty of email marketers continue to work under a bunch of assumptions and end up with a pace of email list growth that can compete with, well, a snail.

“My subscribe page looks OK” is the biggest of those assumptions.

An OK-looking subscribe page is one that appears satisfactory with two main elements in place – clear call to action (subscribe/opt-in) and clearly stated what’s-in-it-for-you.

Such a page may have been good...