Why inactive email subscribers may be too good to dismiss
Conventional marketing wisdom tells us removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list is good practice - but is it? Here, we turn that wisdom on its head. I'll show why inactive subscribers are still valuable to your business and explore how you can reactivate them. First, I'm going to tell a story of how I was recently shunned for all the wrong reasons and then give some ideas on a structured approach to make the most from inactive subscribers.
It's simple really, I was recently removed from Dell's mailing list despite spending around $40,000 a year with them online for the past few years.
In Dell's eyes however, I was inactive. I hadn't opened any of their emails for some time and so their marketing department had purged me from the list.
But the fact a customer hasn't opened your emails…
Presented to eDialog Europe Aspire conference, November 2011
In this presentation I took a look at what I see as six of the email marketing techniques that will matter most in 2012.
In each area I looked at the key questions to ask to review strategies to improve. Plus I also looked at stats of adoption of mobile and social and lots of creative examples of how companies are responding to these challenges, particularly for mobile marketing.
1 Engagement
2 Mobile Email
3 Email contact strategies
4 Channel integration
5 Social-email marketing
6 Email marketing optimisation
Email marketing tactics 2012
View more presentations from Dave Chaffey
I also recommend taking a look at the other keynote from Dave Wieneke on the future of email marketing and messaging.…
Examples of testing the best time of day for email broacast
Last week we looked at the ideas on the best day of the week to send an email for different audiences.
This week I review a related issue, asking: "is there a best time of the day to send an email?" Again, the answer is "yes, definitely", but it depends, so you have to test it. It depends on audience, but I hope these 3 examples show it's worth testing.
Update - September 2011
I spotted a nice, simple infographic to support the stats later in this post. It can help you review the factors that may affect consumer attention during the day. These considerations also apply in B2B and the attention available during the office day - for example we find our newsletter works best around 8-9AM as can tweets/shares - also around lunchtime - although that's called the "Abyss"…
Three examples where absolute email marketing truth is...relative
As the original "killer app", email marketing has accumulated a lot of truths and best practices through its long history.
Some of those survive because they remain relevant, but some persist simply through the power of repetition and tradition. A constant challenge is working out what's really true in email.
What's a genuine best practice? What's a recommended practice for most (but not all) cases? What apparent truths are no longer relevant or accurate in an ever-changing online business environment?
Here are three examples of commonly-heard generalities about email marketing that are grounded in truth, but where the devil is in the details...
1. Email is about relationships
I'm not going to deny that. After all, in my previous column I argued that more attention should be given to the subtle, indirect and relationship impacts of a regular stream of emails passing across the inbox of your prospect…
This time next year it will be the 30th anniversary of Email. This is a great infographic (see full interactive version) reminding us of how email has grown in importance for consumers and marketers and the challenges of managing it such as deliverability and rendering across different email readers.
Email use is still on the rise. Did you know that the number of email accounts grew from 1.8 billion to 3.1 billion between 2009 and 2011?
…
Can email marketers learn from how social media marketing is evaluated?
In a recent article on evaluating social media, Jay Baer argues that our obsession with high-visibility numbers like "Followers" or "Likes" leads us to make false assumptions and wrong marketing moves.
At this point, some email marketers might feel the urge to smirk and point fingers at the supposed superficiality of their social media colleagues. But those same colleagues would silence the laughter with two words: open rates.
The metrics debate would then get out of hand, forcing the email marketer to pull out the big one: R-O-I.
Any self-respecting article on "why do email marketing?" doesn't take long to mention surveys showing the estimated ROI of email as somewhere north of 4000%.
This focus on profits and costs is admirable. But does our ROI obsession properly reflect email's value? And does it also lead to less-than-ideal decisions?
I believe the answers are…
5 areas of B2B email marketing to review
Email is in decline with the next generation of business professionals more likely to rely on SMS and social network messaging. Yet, most B2B companies still use email-based newsletters as a primary way of attempting to communicate with and engaging customers and prospects.
Email statistics
A recent Forrester report titled ‘How US Marketer’s use email’ heaped further concern on business use of email by summarizing:
6 in 10 B2B companies are keeping their marketing spend flat in 2011
71% use email to communicate with customers and prospects on a regular basis
33 % don’t routinely remove bad email addresses from databases
43% of B2B marketers think email will become more important to their marketing activity
(more…)…
Part 1 How content can help you succeed in the inbox
A lot of retailers are pretty good at "doing email marketing right".
A nice subject line, nice offer, nice call to action, nice numbers in your campaign reports.
The problem is that an awful lot of other people are competing for the reader's attention. And a lot of them are also "doing things right".
Some senders are lucky to have the right kind of brand, loyalty and pricing structure to glibly ignore such competitive worries.
Many do not.
And the problem with "functional optimization" is it can be replicated.
As competitive pressures rise, a common response is to discount more, shout louder and shout more often as we seek to grab as much attention as we can in the inbox gold rush.
It's tough going.
There are various alternative solutions to this problem, not least the switch to behavior-based, trigger emails, but one option is to look…
Our interview with Claire Rollinson of AlchemyWorx
I've been in touch with Claire Rollinson for a while swapping ideas on Email marketing via the social networks and through IDM Digital courses. Initially Claire worked out as a marketing comms manager at different charities and more recently as head of campaign management at specialist Email marketing agency Alchemy Worx. This gives her great experience of campaigns across a range of sectors and brands.
As always, in our interview series, I encourage the marketers I interview to share tips which prompt the question "Can we try that? Should we be doing this? Should we use this tool?". I hope you find Claire's recommendations useful. As she suggests, getting email marketing right is important because "every single message you send can have an incremental – and if you do…
Six examples where hype and hubris can trump common sense - to the detriment of your success
Spend too much time on the "cutting edge" of online marketing and you can end up like an exhausted puppy...hurtling excitedly from one new toy to the next before collapsing from the stress of too much choice.
There is much current excitement, for example, about the double whammy of email and social marketing: email as digital's rejuvenated workhorse, social as the hot new talent. Clear and proven models for combining the two need more time to emerge, but there's much promise in the social/email integration premise.
All this excitement, though, can take the edge off our sense of perspective and priority. As we choose a mix of channels to market through, we're easily lead astray by hype and hubris into making the wrong decisions.
Here are six seductive traps for email/social marketers to avoid...
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