Posts Tagged E-mail marketing
eBrand Media uses seven proven strategies to heighten e-mail marketing efficiency
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
E-mail marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing, and relationship management, tools available. Even if you’re already inlcuding e-mail marketing as an important part of your media plan, I think, you’ll find the information contained in this blog to be of great interest.
SUMMARY: If your marketing team is forced to do more with less, consider tweaking your email strategy and expanding it into other areas. Below we’ve outlined 7 strategies that come directly from Case Studies and how-to articles.
Strategy #1: Use best practices and basic tests
In short — the basics work. Before expanding your emailing marketing to other areas, make sure that it is strong. Follow the industry’s best practices and test continually.
Applying the basics to an unrefined strategy can yield significant results. Erick Barney, VP Marketing, Motorcycle Superstore, related that sentiment after getting a reliable analytics system to measure and segment email.
Here are a few changes his team made:
o Scrubbing the list – removing names that bounced three consecutive emails increased deliverability by 30% after just five sends.
o Frequency – the team previously mailed once a month and tested more frequent sends, up to once a week. They eventually settled on a twice-a-month send, which boosted revenue over 100%.
o Day of week – the team found that the best days to send promotional emails were Mondays and Tuesdays to give them the most amount of time before hitting the Saturday brick wall.
o Subject lines – benefit-oriented subject lines worked best, and complimentary shipping outperformed the “lowest price guaranteed” phrasing.
o Segmenting the list – the team identified eight customer segments to whom they would send customized emails. Open rates doubled (38.6% from 18.5%), and clickthrough rates more than tripled (20.6% from 6.2%).
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing, eBrand Media on March 6th, 2009
Autoresponder targets opt-ins who don’t buy & delivers 10x ROAS
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
E-mail is still a powerful marketing tool. It’s been my experience that most companies still, to this day, do not manage their in-house lists effectively, if at all. There’s gold, in them there hills, folks. Below is an article we found in a leading journal which illustrates a unique and effective way to target visitors with autoresponders.
SUMMARY: Shopping-cart-abandonment emails are a standard tactic for getting customers to complete a purchase. But a vast majority of website visitors never make it to the shopping cart.
Here is how a marketing team used an autoresponder program to send an incentive email to all members of their opt-in database who visited the site but didn’t buy. The email generated nearly 10 times the revenue of a standard promotional campaign.
CHALLENGE
The marketing team at e.l.f. cosmetics faced a variety of problems tracking, identifying and segmenting shoppers and customers who did not complete purchases. Looking for a cleaner process to boost sales, they turned to one of their marketing staples: email.
“Email marketing and customer retention is the number-one piece of our business that we can understand and rely on in terms of continuity and forecasting,” says Joey Shamah, CEO, e.l.f.
The team looked at shopping cart-abandonment email first. But they realized they were missing an opportunity to connect with a large percentage of visitors who never made it to the shopping cart. Here are four steps they took to set up an autoresponder program that tied into their email marketing campaigns, which include newsletters and special promotional offers.
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing on February 25th, 2009
Increase ROI & build brand equity by cultivating good relationships
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
eBrand Media has always been a proponent of relationship management. This is done in a number of ways; give and get clarity, stay away from presenting yet another emotional “dog and pony show”, target your offer based on expressed preferences, and give something valuable to the recipient for free. If you’re using social media, personalize your homepage, and be willing to accept the possibility that you may have to give more than you get back.
The giving away of something is of critical importance. This invokes what is known as the reciprocity rule. It’s deeply ingrained in all of us. Society was built on it. I do something for you, I give you something, and the unspoken agreement is that you’ll reciprocate. E-mail is a great way to create, cultivate, and manage relationships with clients, and customers.
Sending an e-mail is so cheap you might as well send e-mail to every as often as possible, right? Besides the ROI is so good at the beginning why wouldn’t you, correct? Dead wrong, say, Arthur Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser. Hughes is senior strategist and Sweetser chief marketing officer at e-Dialog, an e-mail service provider that was acquired last year by e-commerce technology provider GSI Commerce Inc.
They argue that bombarding consumers with e-mail blasts is akin to hunting, in that the marketer is setting traps, hoping to capture new customers. Instead, marketers should adopt a strategy more analogous to farming, cultivating their best customers by sending them relevant e-mails and using e-mails to build a relationship. At one major retailer an e-Dialog analysis found that 1% of the customers on the list accounted for 50% of the revenue from e-mail marketing, Sweetser says. But the retailer was not marketing to those customers differently. And that’s not atypical, he says. “Maybe 10% of our e-commerce retailers have messaging tailor to prior purchase and loyal customers,” Sweetser says.
Posted by Tom Polanski in Growing a Business, Marketing on February 17th, 2009
Take The Oath Of Office
by David Baker , Monday, January 26, 2009
AS I SAT WATCHING President Obama sign his first executive orders, it made me think about the first 100 days of an executive term and how that sets the tone for the whole time as leader. There is a great read
by Michael Watkins, “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels,” that is a must-have for any manager or leader in a new role. Some of the principles in this book are important to people running eCRM and email programs for major corporations. The theme of the book is one we should all take into account TODAY: “You’ve just been promoted to a new leadership position and you’re not sure of the challenges ahead of you or how you will meet them … all you know is you have three months to get on top of the job and move forward — or fail.”
As an agency, service provider, or marketing manager, this is very much the real world.
According to Watkins, your plan should consist of seven core elements (and I’ll skew this toward leaders who run email channels):
Posted by Tom Polanski in Marketing on January 26th, 2009
eBrand Interactive creates great permission based direct marketing e-mail campaigns!
By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive
eBrand Interactive currently manages Can-Spam compliant, permission based, e-mail marketing campaigns, to third party lists, for a number of name brand advertisers. An increasing number of companies are moving management of their e-mail campaigns to us because of the length and breadth of, not only our experience, but our relationships across the internet. eBrand Interactive can deliver to a wide variety of preferences, aspirations, habits and purchase histories. We have successfully created, launched, and managed, hundreds of e-mail campaigns, from mass broadcasts of tens of millions, to small mail outs for niche products.
There are thousands of databases but only a handful has any real value. Six years of experience has taught us the following:
E-mail Lists
We know which databases keep their e-mail lists fresh, and offer truly high quality e-mail recipients, and which don’t. In addition we can target, with statistical confidence, databases that have the highest probability of meeting or beating a targeted CPA for the advertiser while backing into an eCPM for the e-mail database. This knowledge gives our advertisers an opportunity to roll their initial CPM campaigns into ongoing, scalable CPA programs.
Audiences
We have historical and current information regarding the audience demographics, and sometimes, the psychographics, of the highest quality e-mail databases. This in-house intelligence includes, but is not limited to, the percentages of women and men in that audience, their average household income, their level of education and their lifestyle preferences. For example one database we work with is comprised of 87% women, with an average household income of $77,000. 70% of that database is college educated, and 80% of the database shops online. This type of database is perfect for some products/offers but not others.
Posted by Tom Polanski in E-mail marketing, Marketing, eBrand Interactive on January 13th, 2009