Sep
10
By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services
For many retailers, the holiday shopping season is a make or break selling period. Our recent webinar, "Boost Holiday Email Response: Give Subscribers What They Want," presented many actionable ideas for using email to boost revenue during this season. Here are three of those ideas that will help you drive strong response rates this quarter.
1. Balance your promotions and offers with useful content by thinking of ways your products can help your subscribers throughout the holiday season. For example ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Aug
21
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
The Internet has made sales cycles longer. "Selling now takes more time and resources then ever before. The sales cycle has become 22% longer as buyers are taking longer to consider their decisions. Plus, buying is being managed more professionally." (Source: Sirius Decisions)
Is this true for you? If you are a B2C marketer, check your ecommerce website path reports. If you are in B2B marketing, ask your sales team if they find it to be generally true. It's certainly true for my clients and at Return Path.
What a great opportunity for email marketing segmentation strategies! Just by segmenting your prospects from other subscribers, you can boost revenue, improve conversion from email marketing, strengthen buyer satisfaction and build your brand. Sound like a tall order for a segmentation strategy? Consider these ideas...
Categories: Response
Aug
20
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
As many email marketers know, the holiday season starts in August - and in the true holiday spirit, it can get pretty nasty out there with crowded inboxes, aggressive spam filtering, volume caps set by ISPs and subscribers looking for the best sale.
Those visions of sugar plums and high response rates that drive purchases and boost sales are not off base - our 3rd Annual Holiday Survey confirms what you already know: holiday email works. Roughly half of the respondents (49.1%) in our survey took advantage of several email offers during the holiday season.
Just how big of a challenge is it to break through the holiday clutter? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Aug
01
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Some new data released by the Windows Live/Hotmail team in Redmond illustrates what we all know from our personal experience -- that our inbox is the center of the online universe. Well, maybe "center" is too egocentric even for someone who works in email marketing. But it's certainly a primary starting and ending point!
Data from Microsoft indicates that people make social plans, arrange travel and discuss purchases over email. A few examples ...
Categories: Response
Jul
12
By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services
An eMarketer article reports that a survey conducted in May 2007 by the e-tailing group and BetweenMarkets asks online shoppers what they do when a merchant is out-of-stock on the item they want to buy. Almost half reported that they go to a competitor website for the same or similar product. However, 25% will sign-up for an email alert that notifies them when the item becomes available. An additional 31% will check back later. It would be interesting to know how many of those 31% would sign up for email alerts if they were available.
Online shoppers crave convenience. If a consumer has spent time finding what they want, at the right price, from a retailer they trust, only to discover that the product is out-of-stock, it's frustrating to have to start the search all over again. By contrast, it's easy to sign up for an email alert. If the item is exclusive to your brand the shopper may make a mental note to check back later. But what if they forget? Email alerts allow you to remind them!
If you don't have email inventory alerts, you may be missing a great opportunity ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Jun
25
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
How often should marketers send email to their subscribers?
According to Chad White at the Email Experience Council (eec), that depends to some extent on the industry norm. He compiled frequency data for 92 major retailers over 16 weeks and found that the average number of touches is 1.7 per week.
What's a marketer to do if you fall above or below the industry average? The knee-jerk reaction is to submit to the peer pressure of your industry's frequency statistics and fall in line accordingly. But will that really make a difference when it comes to response? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Jun
14
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
I spoke at both INBOX and Internet Retailer recently, and at both events heard smart marketers ask, "Why do readers unsubscribe, ignore or complain about my emails? They opted-in!"
The answer is that permission is not forever. Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions. Many marketers are not clear about what they will be sending, or at what frequency. That disconnect is real -- in fact, it's not unusual to see a high number of complaints and unsubscribes on a Welcome Message.
Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn't replace relevancy and keeping your promises.
To that end, here are a few key moments in the subscriber experience when permission should NOT be assumed ...
Categories: Response
May
29
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Email is so important to subscribers that the rising volume of spam really doesn't bother them so much. Really.
This according to a May report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project -- simply named, "Spam" -- 37% of email users said spam had increased in their personal email accounts, up from 28% of email users who said that two years ago. And 29% of work email users said spam had increased in their work email accounts, up from 21% two years ago. Yet fewer people say spam is "a big problem" for them.
This is very consistent with consumer research from Return Path -- in fact, consumers are pretty good at managing their inboxes using sophisticated tools and practices. They know what they like - and they are quick to delete or complain about email they don't like. ...
Categories: Response
May
22
By Chad Malchow
VP, New Business Development
Last week the Return Path crew traveled to Chicago for our second in a series of Email Marketing Leadership Forums. These are half-day workshops that include up-to-the-minute industry news on email deliverability and response.
The session was lively with lots of great questions from some of Chicago's top email marketers. Here are just three interesting questions, with answers from the Return Path expert panel.
1. Are my "best buyers" my best audience for effective segmentation?
Not necessarily. ...
Categories: Response
May
14
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
After three intense days at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit with some of the smartest email marketers in the business, it feels pretty good to be working in this space right now!
I was so delighted to hear so many speakers lead with the importance of relevance. We email marketers are the subscriber advocates at our organizations, and it's imperative that we take that role seriously. While I heard a lot of talking the talk at the Summit, I confess I didn't hear a lot of case studies that walked the walk. My personal goal this year is to help all our clients make 2007 the first year that they send more targeted, custom, relevant and high performance email than batch-and-blast email.
Melinda Smith and Carey Dietz of Expedia wound up the Summit on Saturday with a solid presentation on creating relevant subscriber experiences every week when most people take two or three trips each year. ...
Categories: Response
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