If you haven’t started your holiday planning yet, it’s time to push the panic button.

Email marketers often don’t get pulled into the planning process until the end and then it’s often an afterthought or emergency: “Yeah, just send another email”. When email is an afterthought instead of the engine, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Don’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the coach to send you in. Develop your own plan, including copy and contact strategies. It should fit into the overall brand strategy, but it needs to be your design because you have your own revenue and goals to meet.

Develop your Black Friday strategy now

Although many consumers have already started shopping, Black Friday is still the official kick-off for the season. Locking down your strategy now gives you time to test it and have it in place. You’ll be ready to start building your base of subscribers from the fresh…

Automated customer lifecycle marketing will be the future of email marketing

To look forward to the future of email marketing 2020 - a report I have contributed to from Litmus, I believe we need to look back to appreciate how little the support for marketers from email marketing platforms has evolved to deliver customised lifecycle messaging. Frankly, I have been amazed how few companies have adopted email as a strategic communications tool for personalised, behavioural based email across the years since I started training on email marketing in 2001.

Research on the adoption of email targeting still shows us a reality where the majority of email marketing involves either no segmentation at all or targeting of just 4 to 6 segments.

So, by mid 2017 I’d like…

Applying the RACE Framework to eCcommerce

The eCommerce sector is soon to be hit with one of the greatest opportunities of the year. Sales, brand awareness and loyal customers are all opportunities to address within this festive period. Last year, eCommerce Black Friday sales hit an estimated £4.3 bn in the UK. The growing popularity of Black Friday amongst shoppers opens opportunities for eCommerce businesses that do not usually use discounted offerings (to maintain customer perceived brand equity and quality) to get involved with the heightened retail buzz. Within this article, the RACE framework is introduced and applied within the context of Black Friday and the e-commerce sector. Breaking down your Black Friday marketing strategy will give your e-commerce marketing initiatives a concrete structure to thoroughly approach, identify, and meet your outlined Black Friday objectives.

The RACE Framework, Black Friday, and eCommerce

The RACE framework takes into account all aspects of the customer journey,…

If your open and click rates are dropping, you'll need to re-think your strategy

You had the best intentions; you worked diligently to get those conversions and build your email marketing list; you vowed to run a quality campaign and build relationships with your prospects, turning them into happy customers. Somehow it all went wrong. Your analytics are telling you that only a small percentage of your emails are opened, that you have been marked as spam by many of those subscribers you worked so hard to get.

Crossing the Line

Somewhere along the way, you crossed the line and became a harassment rather than a value. And you didn’t even recognize that you had done it. Is it fatal? No. But as you recover from this, you will need to understand how it happened so you never make the same mistake again.

How to Recognize You Have Become a Spammer

Be honest with yourself.…

Tips to help you learn how to effectively utilise trigger emails and reduce shopping cart abandonment

When it comes to successful email marketing, it is evident that carefully worded calls to action must be married with incentive for the customer to convert. Consumers must be enticed to click through from the email message, enter the retail e-commerce website and make a transaction.. They must be provided with the assurance that their patronage is valued and that their satisfaction is of the company’s utmost importance. The internet is rich with “email marketing best practices” resources; articles, blog posts, software and how-to lists enlightening those interested in utilizing trigger emails as an effective marketing tool with vast amounts of information on the topic. Despite the wealth in available material, email marketers continue to commit trigger email faux-pas that extend beyond the realm of misspells and misplaced graphics. These errors dramatically…

What metrics are EMEA email marketers using to measure their campaign performance?

Following on from the  launch of the "Wowing with Contextual Email Marketing" - Email Personalisation report yesterday, I found it interesting how marketers measure the success of their email marketing activities. No matter what type of dynamic content, contextual personalization or segmentation used, the metrics used are largely the same. Most marketers use the basic metrics to measure success 78% of marketers are using Open Rates and Click-Through Rate 58% are using conversion rate 1 in 3 are using "sales value per 1000 emails" Every other metric is used by less than 29% of email marketers For more insight into the state of email personalisation in 2016, download your free copy of the report from our partners MovableInk. The report also includes: Which campaign types drive the most revenue. Welcome series, birthday promotions…? Which…

Dynamic content features are key to making your emails more engaging

Email marketing over the years has evolved in leaps and bounds. In fact, what seemed impossible in the previous decade can now be easily achieved with help of HTML-based emails. Rich design layouts including visual delights like photos, videos to GIF’s are all epitomes of a HTML-rich email. This drastically improves customer experience, boosts customer engagements and in turn increases sale possibilities. Studies have revealed that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Dynamic content can allow you add personalisation into your emails. If you have not already implemented it, this should be something you are working towards. In the below Email example from EEC, you can see the subscribers in U.S receive greetings for their Independence Day and non-U.S subscribers are greeted with a Rocking Summer, all thanks to Dynamic Content.

How Dynamic Content in Email Works

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Just what are the barriers to embracing contextual personalisation in email marketing? Budget? Senior manager buy in? Lack of strategy?

Today we launched our report Wowing with Contextual Email Marketing with our partner Movable Ink: we wanted to share some interesting stats from the report.  We wanted to understand what stops EMEA marketers from using personalisation in their email marketing campaigns due to its potential. As can be seen in the chart above, budget, platforms not up to scratch and surprisingly, a lack of email communications strategy were the biggest barriers. For this question within the report we found that: Lack of strategy was the largest barrier with 45% of respondents indicating this, this suggests that EMEA marketers may be using email without a long term strategy Budget was also a major barrier for over 4 in…

Email retains its position as one of the most powerful marketing channels

It's two chart's of today instead of one today, for the simple reason that I couldn't include one without the other. One is great news for marketers, the other for consumers. The good news for marketers is that ROI from email remains extremely strong. Long regarded as one of the most cost effective marketing channels, it's lead over others shows no sign of falling away. Email thus remains a key channel for investing in for 2016 and 2017, with newer tactics like personalization, dynamic content, and embedded gifs & videos helping to increase engagement on the part of users. The worry of course is that the effectiveness of email will cause marketers to ruin it with overuse. As more and more attempt to use the platform users will feel increasingly bombarded…

We interviewed Paul Farnell, CEO and Co-founder of Litmus about their new partnership with Microsoft

If you work in email marketing you may well have heard of the new partnership Litmus have just announced with Microsoft. Because it's such a big industry first, we talked to Litmus' CEO to find out more about the workings of the deal and how it will affect both email marketers and the future of email itself.

Congratulations on the new partnership with Microsoft, can you give us an idea how this will affect how email marketers use Litmus? Will Litmus’ capabilities be changing?

Thank you! We’re very excited about the partnership and anticipate some great work with the Outlook team. There will not be any differences in how email marketers use and test in Litmus. The goal is that when viewing an Email…