Cool Email Idea: Email to Encourage Store Traffic

What: Email to encourage store traffic.

Who: Bath & Body Works

Why we love it: When Bath & Body Works launched their website, they didn't do ecommerce so their email needed to build their brand and send traffic into the brick-and-mortar stores. Their solution was to create print-and-go coupon emails. This is great technique for increasing sales, plus it proves the value of email to store employees, making in-store email collection easier.

What would make it better ...

Categories: Response

Christmas in June

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

Yes, it seems to be that time of year for retailers...time to start planning for holidays promotions. (Can you believe it - already!?!) In the blur of deciding on campaign themes, offer strategies, and creative approach, don't forget about the Shopper, who is at the center of this whirlwind. To optimize success in the inbox, take a few minutes to consider subscriber feedback from last year's campaigns (via Return Path's 2007 Holiday Survey). Implementing adjustments now, during the planning period, is most efficient -- as this is the ideal time to affect change:

Relevance is still key. Nearly half (45%) of subscribers ignore every email if prior value has not been proven. And, 58% use the subject line to determine if the message will be of interest to them. Don't give in to the temptation to "batch-and-blast," which may negatively affect subscriber response and your brand perception.

More isn't necessarily better. 29% of subscribers deleted messages ...

Categories: Response

Give Your Subscribers Options Sooner Rather Than Later

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

Our friends over at Silverpop have a new study out on how top internet retailers use email marketing. We were most intrigued by this stat:

"And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn't offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content."

This strikes us a very risky strategy, for three reasons:

1. As Bill Nussey at Silverpop points out, this tactic can hurt deliverability if your recipients use the "this is spam" button rather than the unsubscribe button to stop getting content that isn't interesting to them. ...

Categories: Response

Cool Email Idea: Call to Action for Email Capture

What is it: Call to Action for Email Capture

Where it is: TechWeb homepage

Why we love it: Crush the competition? Who doesn't want to do that? This newsletter box screams "sign me up!" Of course, compelling calls to action don't mean anything if taking the action is difficult. In this case, the easy-to-use box eliminates all barriers to sign up (i.e., no passwords, no demo data) so the compelling copy can do its job without hindrance.

What would make it better: More prominent placement. This sign-up box should be ...

Categories: Response

Email is Electric

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

Three times in May I spoke at industry events with folks who are preaching edgy things with mobile, social networking and rich media. Ideas that are way out there, very high tech and extremely whiz bang. Makes your heart thump. Being the email expert made me feel like the red-headed stepchild (and since I have red hair, I can say that with all impunity). Email is standard, and boring, and not at all the new kid on the block.

Bah, I say, bah humbug. I started out my talk at Digital Hollywood with a slide that showed a huge stack of money. This, I declared, is why email is anything but boring and dull. It earns a tremendous ROI and it's a powerful opportunity for growth. It's not some "future" thing that hasn't been tested and reaches a potential audience in the tens or hundreds or thousands. Email is ubiquitous for both B2C and B2B, proven, and incredibly profitable.

Roy Young, publisher of MarketingProfs agreed. "I think of email as ELECTRICITY, the juice that makes all the other activities/channels possible," he said. ...

Categories: Response

Research Study: Creating Great Subscriber Experiences

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

With all the industry buzz around relevance, you would expect that the email marketing programs of most major US brands would be fairly sophisticated. Best practices, like sending a welcome message and targeted segmentation would be common. Preference centers would be everywhere. But, our recent study of 61 top-brand marketers found that wasn't typically the case. (And, we're talking about companies like Best Buy, Nike, Sony, and Disney, to name a few.) In fact, we were rather surprised by the findings:

Anyone home? A shocking 60% of the companies in our survey did not send a welcome message. Of the 40% that did send a welcome message, only 33% sent it within 24 hours. The remaining 7% took anywhere from two days to three weeks.

Blackhole? The shock of the missing welcome messages was compounded by the astonishing number of companies ...

Categories: Response

Study Finds Top-Brand Marketers Are Missing Out On the 1-to-1 Marketing Advantages Offered By email Marketing

Eighty Five Percent of Marketers' Initial emails Lacked Personalization According To Return Path's New Subscriber Experiences Study

New York, New York and Denver, CO - For Immediate Release - Eighty five percent of companies failed to personalize the first email message sent to new subscribers, Return Path discovered with its new Return Path Subscriber Experiences study. This lack of customization, combined with other missed opportunities, leaves marketers unable to leverage the true power of email marketing.

Return Path, the leading email performance management company, conducted the study by subscribing and studying the email programs of 61 companies from the retail, consumer goods, travel, and media/entertainment industries.

The problem is not lack of data. Marketers are collecting information at sign-up that could be used to personalize their initial and subsequent emails. ...

Categories: Press Releases | Response

From the Email Insiders Summit: The 18-24 Perspective - Is Email Archaic?

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

One of the most interesting sessions at the Email Insiders Summit was a glimpse into the perspective of the 18-24-year-old demographic. To kick off the conference sessions, MediaPost invited three students from Ball State University to participate in a panel discussion about their communication practices, and how email fits (or doesn't) into those habits. For the audience comprised entirely of email marketers, their answers weren't exactly welcome news:

• Social networks (primarily Facebook) have a monopoly on the 18-24-year-old attention span. These young people use Facebook as their primary communication method, not email. One panelist noted the efficiency of the channel to communicate instantly to all of their friends and contacts - - everything from causes supported to birthdays to events they are attending. For most, whenever they were online, they were logged into Facebook. ...
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  Categories: Response

Email Fills the Gaps in Society and eCommerce

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

I am proud and humbled to have led a team of incredible email marketing professionals in a volunteer effort to help a charity through the DMA's Email Experience Council annual "Eality" nonprofit initiative. This year, the small but scrappy Women's Bean Project of Denver, Colorado was selected. The Women's Bean Project helps disadvantaged women gain life and job skills by making bean soups, brownie mixes and other goods for sale online and through retail partners. When we started the project last August, there was no email program. When we officially closed the effort last week, there was a program - and not only were email newsletter subscribers viewing two times the number of pages views than other customers, we nearly collapsed the organization's production capacity with a Mother's Day email promotion that sold 85 baskets in a week.

You can read all about it in eec founder Jeanniey Mullen's ClickZ column or in our case study.

Like all great projects, this was a good learning experience for me. Three things stand out ...

Categories: Response

Five B2B Email Marketing Tips and $200 Off The MarketingProfs Conference

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

Here we are, oh email marketers, caught in the middle. On one hand we are celebrated for being the go-to resource for generating short term revenue results (anyone have that "hey, our numbers are down, send another email" conversation this week?). And yet, funny how the applause dies down when the budget talk comes around and we continue to be handicapped by limited investment and strained resources. What's an email marketer to do?!

With that reality as our foundation, I'm leading a panel of great marketers at the upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Marketing conference in June. Return Path blog subscribers can save $200 with promo code ESPK08.

Here are five ideas from our panel that you can steal now for application to your own program, and which will be expanded upon during our panel at the conference.

1. Turn the recession to your advantage. Email is so easy and inexpensive to get into, so more and more businesses are sending messages. You can see the result is in your inbox - more and more clutter. ...

Categories: Response