Golden Leads

One thing I have learned in email marketing over the last 5 years - Labor Day is an email wasteland.

Unless you are sending to a highly targeted segment or sending a time sensitive offer, my advice would be to hold off until late Tuesday at the earliest.

Why?

This is one of the biggest travel weekends of the year. People will be with their family and friends or on the road. If they are on the road, many of them will checking email from a smart phone - not an ideal situation yet.

Also, when they do check their email, their inbox will be jammed, and many emails will be deleted before being read. I know I have done this when I miss a few days of inbox maintenance.

So, go out, have a good time this weekend and leave your email marketing cares behind. Think about a great fall kick off campaign, and stay out of the inbox traffic jam.

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Under the “too funny not to share” category, email industry veteran, Joshua Baer, the CTO of Datran Media, shared a funny story with a group recently, and I asked him if I could pass it along.

Joshua received an unsolicited commercial email the other day with the following footer:

“ADDENDUM- If you don’t know or remember me, HHH complies with the Federal Canned Spam Act of 2003, so your contact information will NOT be sold or shared with anyone. You can unsubscribe at anytime with no questions asked.”

Of course, lacking a postal address and clear opt-out instructions, this message wasn’t remotely compliant with CAN SPAM. Fortunately, and as the gentleman pointed out, it is compliant with the somewhat lesser known, but more culinary oriented Canned Spam Act.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

I think I may have received the more random Back-to-School email today, which made very little sense to me.

Detail Image

I am guessing 2 ideas went into the strategy behind this campaign:

1. We have a lot of Playboy bags left, let’s try to say they are needed on campus.

2. “What can we send that could tie into Back to School?”

Regardless, they came up with an timely offer and tied into a cultural event. I have a hard time believing this sold a lot of Playboy bags though….

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

A recent study by Datamonitor has found that email has finally surpassed the telephone as the preferred communications vehicle of choice. The same study also ranked instant messaging and the telephone as the most disruptive communication tools in the workplace.

It looks like email is going to be the best way for BtoB marketers to manage and build relationships for a long time to come.

Network World has a good overview of the study results here.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

There are a number of emails I get where people don’t put a link, mainly newsletters. This email from All Surf Industry, with a 40% off Store Closing sale really frustrated me. You are closing your store, trying to get rid of your stock and you don’t even link to your site or put an ALT tag in your email.

Yes they are local and have their contact info in the email, but people like to click, they may want to browse the site. Maybe there is a reason you are going out of business, your marketing doesn’t work…

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

This morning at 10AM we launched the public preview of Listrak 4.0.  Our marketing team as well as our Product Manager has done a great job at explaining all the features and benefits of our new email marketing platform.  Primarily the new update paves the way for future product growth as our sending engine has been completely re-written.  The big news of this release is the new Dynamic Content email marketing module.  Some people call this variable data others call it dynamic message assembly – we call it Dynamic Content.  It’s more than just replacing variables ala mail merge, rather our Dynamic Content allows conditional blocks of HTML code (or plain text) to be substituted using Boolean expressions.

In other news, I’ll be speaking at the DMA’s Annual Conference & Exhibition in Chicago this fall.  I’ll be sharing a session with respected wine marketing expert Bryan St. Amant.  Bryan has been a long time Listrak customer and consistently generates results that beat industry averages.  His secret?  Relevancy based on preference is the backbone of the email marketing programs that he deploys for his customers.

If you’re planning to attending the DMA show please drop me a line.

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

For anyone who thinks online BtoB marketers lead a less exciting life than their BtoC counterparts, think again. I recently read a great post about BtoB new media marketing on Valeria Maltoni’s blog Conversation Agent that may just change your mind.

Quoting the results of a June online survey of more than 300 marketers by research company, Guideline, Valeria reports that BtoB companies overall embrace more new media platforms sooner, and are much more likely to allocate a higher percentage of their media budgets to online marketing channels than their BtoC counterparts.

BtoB marketers also take a more bottom line approach. They concentrate on lead generation, and have more experience with proven platforms such as email, online ads, search engine optimization and Webinars. BtoC marketers on the other hand tend to focus on brand building through emerging channels. Although BtoC marketers have more experience with viral video, social networking and mobile marketing platforms, BtoB marketers also use emerging channels for brand building, and have more experience with blogs and wikis.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

Email marketing is something that needs a lot of attention. It is so easy to miss a rendering issue, a spelling error, a personalization error, etc…

I wanted to post this to show you that even a major ESP like Exact Target can send out a jacked up email. You need to stay on your toes and test that one extra time, even if you think you are set. You may catch that error you missed.

This was Exact Target’s monthly newsletter in my Gmail:

View Detail Image

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

I’m often amazed at how much my younger son is influenced by television advertising. A colleague shared an article with me that further opened my eyes to the power of branding, particularly among young children. (You can read it here.)

A pediatric researcher from Stanford University ran a series of tests with children ages 3-5 to determine their taste preferences for food. The trick was that researchers presented the same food—only in different wrappers. The results:

• Seventy-seven percent of the kids said the same French fries from McDonald’s tasted better when they came from a McDonald’s bag instead of a plain one.
• Sixty-one percent of the kids said milk tasted better in a McDonald’s cup.
• Fifty-four percent said carrots tasted better in a McDonald’s bag.

I won’t go into all the results, but it’s worth reading, especially if you have children, or you want to see just how powerful a brand can be.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

I managed to sneak in a great two-week vacation this summer, but my blog posting frequency dropped off a bit. Not to fear, I’m back now and my blogging will once again be streaming forth across cyberspace <grin>.

TechCrunch, a group-edited blog about new Internet products and technologies, referenced a blog posting by the author of RSS Dave Winer on how social networking Web site Facebook has quietly started putting RSS into its pages. What’s cool is that this is not your garden variety RSS, but full-out iRSS (individualized RSS). The new features let Facebook users track the status of their friends without having to log in first. If you really want to know whether Rachel is back from vacation or if Danny is having a good day, have no fear, RSS will make it easy to get this information anywhere, anytime.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.