What are your recommended Email Marketing techniques?

That’s the question we posed in our recent email marketing tips competition. Thanks if you contributed a tip or shared the suggestions! We had lots of great suggestions, so it’s a pity we don’t have a prize for all, but we have now selected 3 winners and there are 3 “highly commended” tips. I asked our judges Chad White who offered up 3 copies of his new book Email Marketing Rules and Tim Watson, Email consultant at Zettasphere and regular Expert commentator on Smart Insights to each choose 3 tips and explain why they liked them. I then decided on a winning three based on the depth of the contributor’s insight and those who gave a specific example of a test.

Three winning Email marketing tips

Here are the “lucky winners”:

1. Alan Moir on Personalisation.

In one…

Dispelling some email marketing 'best practices'

In our email marketing campaigns, we are always looking to boost our open and clickthrough rates and the business outcomes we're looking to achieve. Following best practices can help here to avoid dumb mistakes like not having compelling headlines or clear calls-to-action. However, this contrarian infographic from Alchemyworx suggests many rules-of-thumb for email marketing are really just myths have developed and could be damaging our campaigns. For example, it questions whether we should we send our emails every Thursday, Should we stop contacting inactive subscribers after six months or if we send too many emails then they are ignored? 'Actually, sending 4 emails per month rather than one doubles the likelihood of one email being opened" 'Though we know, it has to be targeted and personalised etc. We like this classic infographic since…

An interview with Retail email specialist Dan Jak

There is a LOT written about best practices for email marketing, especially around creative and copy. Mark Brownlow has contributed many great posts to Smart Insights covering subject lines, email pre-headers and Email CTAs to name but 3. But  there is far less written specifically about best practices for email marketing in retail ecommerce. The obvious exception is Chad White's Retail Email blog although Chad has diversified into more general email marketing advice with his new Email Marketing Rules book - we have a competition to win 3 copies running at the moment. So, when I got chatting to Dan Jak in our LinkedIn group and discovered his experience  on Email marketing I was keen to learn and share more. So in this interview we look at some retail-specific email marketing challenges, many of which apply more…

The latest tactics showing why Email marketing is "alive and well"

If you think about innovation, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t marketing, probably you are thinking of the latest gadgets, self-driving cars and drones. But in the quickly-evolving marketing world a lot has changed in the way brands and consumers communicate. With a trusted and solid channel like email marketing, where does the real innovation takes place?

Email is mature, but not outgrown

Email marketing is known to be a trusted and versatile marketing channel. In the Gartner Digital Marketing Hype cycle published last July places it has moved beyond 'the slope of Enlightenment' and on emerged onto the 'Plateau of productivity'. Connected marketing concepts that we also find in this graph are still being hyped, meaning that it will take at least 2 – 5 years before marketers realistically will be getting the most out of these channels, if they…

Are you using all the options for email marketing?

For smaller business without a full-fledged email programme, it's not always obvious that email marketing needn't just be limited to the good old newsletter. To help you review all the other different email options, we’ll go through the ‘usual suspects’ available from email marketing that can help you as a marketer, achieve many different goals.

Best practices for encouraging opt-in to email marketing

In the wake of the recent prosecution and fine of John Lewis, the department store chain, for sending of unsolicited spam emails, we need to take a second look at communications we sent out. In almost types of emails, but not all, subscribers should be able to opt-out. To help avoid any legal issues, bear in mind it is best practice for email subscription to: Leave the email opt-in box blank on the sign-up form. I.e. do NOT pre-populate it with a tick. Operate a…

7 key areas of focus to review and improve your email marketing capability

The last couple of days, I’ve been attending the International Email Expo at Frankfurt. It’s been nice to listen to and discuss the latest advice from email marketing consulting friends old and new @JordieVan Rijn, @KathPay, @TamaraGielen, @DelaQuist, Bruno Florence, @pignonsurmail, Philip Storey, @MichaelLeander and last but not least, my host Torsten Schwarz. It’s been good to see how email marketing in thriving in Europe. It’s no more than what you would expect since email remains a core communications channel and Email drives far more revenue than social media. It’s been interesting to see from the talks and when judging the email marketing awards some really advanced examples of targeted, relevant emails which are delivering excellent results.

Reviewing your email marketing capability

In my talk I was looking to help attendees…

How does your use of key email tactics compare?

Following on from the post by Becky Hesilridge summarising adoption and examples of different email marketing strategies, Pure 360 have released an infographic from their research to share more insight on how email marketing is being used in 2014. Companies were asked how they are are using email marketing, and if they have an email marketing strategy. 57% have an email marketing strategy, and 65% feed back on results. The sector most likely to have a strategy is the Retail Sector and the fourth most likely to be implementing one. Thanks to Becky Hesilridge for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Becky…

A summary of research findings on email communications strategies

At Pure360 we work with a lot of marketers with different aims, objectives and strategies. To gauge the current state of email marketing strategies used, we recently completed this in-depth email strategy research based on a survey in partnership with PlanToEngage.

Over 600 email marketers responded, giving us a wide range of results. Results fell into the following categories; strategy, best practice and measurement & reporting.

The results were surprising; indicating that many email marketers are not currently practicing their email marketing with a strategy in place. Therefore many of the practices which would logically follow such as an editorial calendar or automated campaigns are also not being practiced.

Email Strategy

Having a clear and focused email strategy is vitally important to your marketing mix; without a well-defined strategy your email marketing ROI is likely to suffer. This may seem fairly…

How to create a water-tight email marketing strategy for building customer loyalty

The traditional definition of customer loyalty is a financial one– your most loyal customers are clearly those who keep returning to do business with you. But loyalty in the digital world has much wider implications.  For some organizations it can be the bald metric of how frequently their customers do business with them. For others, such as online retailers, it is also a measure of how often customers share favourable reviews or feedback on the organization or brand. However you define and measure customer loyalty Customer satisfaction vs. loyalty At the heart of any loyalty-driving campaign lies the need to raise customer satisfaction levels.

Ten steps to building customer loyalty

Step 1. Gain senior management and cross-business commitment to raising customer satisfaction across the enterprise.

Focus on the channel that lets you build intimacy. One of the most effective…

In webinar we covered Six Trends showing techniques and examples businesses can use in 2014 to increase the value of Email marketing. The six trends, if you want to fast forward, are: Trend 1 – More Email 5 Trend 2 –Offline gets digital 16 Trend 3 – Majority mobile 21 Trend 4 - Video 33 Trend 5 – Open rate retires 37 Trend 6 – Intelligent inboxes 40 Email marketing trends 2014 from Smart Insights This Slideshare was presented as a webinar by Tim Watson of Zettasphere at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2014 summit. You can view all 6 recordings from the Digital Marketing 2014 Summit here. Content marketing trends 2014 from Stephen Bateman Integrated marketing trends from Dave Chaffey Mobile marketing trends 2014 from Rob…