As an email marketer, you are undoubtedly familiar with the upward stages of customer loyalty: Prospective -> First-time subscriber -> Customer -> Advocate Occasionally, your subscriber won’t make it to customer (“unsubscribe”) or your customer will become inactive (automatic email delete, decreased email opens, decreased/no click-throughs). Aside from the obvious important “hook” point to get your prospective to subscriber with email marketing best practices, these are other points in the customer life-cycle at which you as […]

We talk a lot about killer content, well, making your email marketing campaign killer. But while uninteresting, generic, too-long or too-technical content can hurt your email campaign, there’s nothing that will kill your email marketing campaign faster than an email with spelling errors. I’ve always suspected that typos, spelling errors, and to a lesser degree, punctuation and grammatical errors hurt the sender’s reputation, and ultimately, the bottom line. A single error in an email looks sloppy and unprofessional, and […]

Lately, buzz isn’t buzz unless it contains the word “social.” Social media, social sharing, and social sites are getting all the attention while email marketing is ignored.  But is email marketing fast going the way of the pony express (which is to say, down the road to extinction)? Absolutely not. In fact, thanks to social media and all of other social sites proliferating daily, email marketing is more powerful than ever. The purpose of email marketing […]

The past few weeks around ClickMail offices we’ve been gearing up for the ExactTarget conference, Connections 2011: Power of One,  in Indianapolis, IN from Sept. 13-15.  There are only 200 spots left, so it’s now or never to register, for a chance to learn about the power of positive change through connection from keynote speakers CNN anchor Soledad O’Brian, the founder of Wikipedia, and Aron Ralston (the climber who inspired the Oscar-nominated film 127 Hours). We […]

In our last post, we spoke about the value of using email preference centers to ensure subscriber-centric relevance in messages and frequency. But another important issue to consider when setting up email preference centers is the kind of data you’re gathering from your subscribers. A well-designed email preference center isn’t just an opportunity to listen to your subscribers tell you what they want, but also a good opportunity for you to gather information about them (within […]

In today’s world of email engagement, effective use of a preference center has to be at the top of your email marketing best practices toolbox. As early as last year, we discussed the importance of using preference centers to improve email deliverability, which by this point, we all know is of critical importance to email marketing ROI. When you show your subscribers that their preferences are important to you, you are implementing subscriber-centered email marketing best […]

We are excited to be attending the ExactTarget conference, Connections 2011: Power of One, in Indianapolis, IN from Sept. 13-15. This conference is all about using the power of connection to affect positive change. As email marketers, we all know how one idea can spread through effective email marketing best practices and possibly even grow into a world-changing phenomenon. This concept is even more accessible today with the “viral” and immediate nature of social network connectivity; […]