Cool Email Idea: Secrets to Email that Gets Opened & Read

What: Secrets to Email that Gets Opened & Read

Who: BLR (Business & Legal Reports)

Why we love it: Oh, you just can't make this stuff up! "Banana Decimates Office." "Workers Test Poker Faces." "Invasion of the Robots." "Wanted: Lackey to the Stars."

The stuff of supermarket tabloids? No sir. It's HR Strange but True, the fast-growing, interactive e-zine from BLR, the plain English business compliance training and resource company. Conceived as a column for BLR's human resources website and e-zine, HR Strange but True was so popular that BLR gave it center stage as a stand alone newsletter. Following the best practice that even a little bit of content exponentially increases the value of an e-newsletter, HR Strange But True is grew super-fast - from 278 to more than 7,000 subscribers in just under a year ...

Categories: Response

How Can Non-Profits Send More Engaging Email?

By Bonnie Malone
Director, Response Consulting

Retailers aren't the only ones gearing up for the holidays -- it's a big season for non-profits too. But just how well do non-profits use email to connect with subscribers (and potential donors), engage them in a cause, and spur them into action? Return Path's new research study, "Telling Stories: How Non-Profits Can Create More Engaging Email Marketing Programs," focuses on answering these questions by measuring email use among 50 well known non-profit organizations.

Assessing the entire subscriber experience for 30 days, the study analyzes practices across a wide spectrum of organizations - from children, to health, to politics, animals, and museums. The study identified several areas of strength among these mailers, including 62% of organizations that sent a welcome message immediately upon subscribe (something only 40% of for-profit counterparts do), and a strong integration of social media elements.

However, there were a number of areas where non-profits fell short. ...

Categories: Response

Great Ideas to Steal And A Sneak Peek at the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Let's be honest. The boss expects us to learn something every time we attend a conference. In fact, he'll be lurking when we return until we report back something great. Something to implement immediately that earns higher response and revenue. Something that makes him look good in the next meeting with the CEO.

That's why I'm delighted to be the "Mixologist" for the Must Know sessions at the upcoming Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer on October 21-22nd in Chicago. A mixologist is part Sherpa, part ambassador, part cheerleader for a track of sessions at the event. The Must Know track is dedicated to providing real world, how-to information about earning higher revenue from digital marketing. There are sessions on email, search and social.

You can learn about this track and the others by listening to the recording of the Sneak Peek webinar (MarketingProfs premium membership required). All the mixologists gave some highlights of learnings you can expect, and we all shared some ideas for your email and social programs that you can implement now. You'll hear from online community maven Beth Harte, customer satisfaction expert Becky Carroll of Petra Consulting and social-email guru Jason Baer of Convince & Convert.

My five ideas to steal ...

Categories: Response

Three Tips for Non-Profit Email Marketing

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

The British public are a charitable lot. Donations to non-profit organizations totalled £1.3 billion in calendar year 2007/2008, with cash being the most popular form of giving. A few stand-out organizations (of the 171,000 charities registered in the UK as of 2007) include Barnardo's, dedicated to helping vulnerable children through fostering programs and domestic violence education; Marie Curie Cancer Care, providing free nursing care for terminally ill cancer patients; and Mencap, offering support services for people with learning disabilities and their families.

Not surprisingly, email plays a large part in the fundraising initiatives of these organizations. According to a recent study by non-profit technology solutions provider Blackbaud, 62% of non-profits are using email as their most common form of communication with donors, just slightly behind direct mail. When done right, email can make non-profit organizations a lot of money, but when done wrong, marketers run two major risks.

The first risk is that subscribers quickly get tired of ...

Categories: Response

Do You Believe in Magic? Take Our Quiz and Find Out If Your Email Program Conjures Frogs or Princes

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of Return Path's new email marketing response quiz: Are You An Email Marketing Wizard?

We get asked all the time by clients and prospects how their email programs compare to the best in the industry and what best practices they should be implementing to increase email channel ROI. With this Quiz, email marketers can now benchmark themselves based on the answers to ten questions about their email program. Find out if your email marketing skills qualify you as an Apprentice, a Magician, a Sorcerer or a Wizard.

Each of the 10 questions are designed to rate your email program on whether the best practices you use are basic (e.g., sending a welcome message); advanced (e.g., implementing segmentation); or best-in-class (e.g., employing a testing plan to optimize results). We also provide you with helpful information throughout the quiz that explains ...

Categories: Response

Retailers: Certification is a Holiday Response Booster

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Retailers enjoy some of the lowest complaint rates in the business. Perhaps this is because of the "shopper mentality" among consumers. Many like to be treated like VIPS or insiders when it comes to sales and new product lines, and so even the high frequency (up to 10+ messages per week during the holidays) doesn't seem to drive a lot of complaints for retailers with strong brand affinity.

Problem is, it doesn't drive that much response, either. Sending more messages is not enough. The messages must offer more value.

I spoke at the Shop.org Annual Summit this week and met with dozens of retailers who are doing great things to strengthen their brand relationships through social and multi channel experiences. Email is such an integral part of the ecommerce equation, so it's well past time to take it off auto pilot and start to improve relevancy through segmentation and added value.

I blogged about this at the Shop.org site. Let me know what your thoughts are - and if you'd like a copy of the full presentation.

In conversations with retailers about how to improve relevancy, one thing is very clear ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | Response

Cool Email Idea: Personality Quiz to Drive Engagement, Viral Marketing

Smart consumer product marketers know that email can be a great at branding and building loyalty. But how do you encourage interaction when direct sales is not the goal? Maybelline recently featured a...

Categories: Response

Mary Queen of Shops: Cool Retail Ideas from the UK That Work in Any Market

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

The BBC recently aired a documentary called "Mary Portas: Save Our Shops." The narrator was Mary Portas, a UK retail and brand expert who also has her own popular series on BBC 2 called Mary Queen of Shops. The documentary, much like her show, included her vision for how local (meaning, UK-based) independent retailers can improve store traffic and revenue by emulating both traditional and innovative tactics that the big retail brands have found successful.

Why do our shops need saving? Because in the UK, like the rest of the world, the retail industry has been hit hard. According to BBC research, over 35,000 shops could be closed during 2009 in the UK, and Experian research shows that High Street shops (US translation: brand-name stores generally found in city and town centers) could be closing at a rate of 100 per day, a scary statistic considering that the UK retail sector generates £900 billion annually and one in six workers are employed by the retail industry, according to BBC research.

So Mary has her work cut out for her. ...

Categories: Response

Measuring Digital Marketing - And a Free Pass to DigiDay SOCIAL in New York

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Digital marketing data has a tendency to overwhelm us, limiting the intelligence we gain and filling our days with just too much noise. As we expand our email marketing strategies to include social marketing, our spreadsheets bloat with conversation metrics, engagement measures and viral counts. As always, the way to stay sane (and strategically use data to meet your forecasts) is to identify the most important metrics and focus there. I hereby give you license to ignore some data points, in order to make better business decisions.

For example, if your executives only care about total revenue, then tracking referrals per subscriber is only important if you can track total sales by forwarded messages. Of course, to optimize that revenue, you will want to segment by the most active social influencers on your file.

If your social marketing strategy is all about brand, then tracking the ...

Categories: Response

Don't Forget About Email, And Do It Better

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Over the holiday weekend Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and prominent tech blogger, had a great post titled "Don't Forget About Email." As a proponent of all kinds of new messaging services, Fred's post serves to remind marketers that while hot new technologies like Twitter are great, they don't replace the need for smart, well-executed email marketing. [Disclosure: Fred is an investor in both Twitter and Return Path.] He gives some examples of emails that he especially likes from Hype Machine and Etsy.

I'm sure you're not surprised that we at Return Path agree that email is important. But what I think is really important for marketers to think about NOW is that ...

Categories: Response