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; […]

One of the main reasons you have an email marketing program is to add to your organization’s bottom line.  Whatever this means to you and your organization, generating email marketing ROI is every email marketer’s ultimate goal. Successful email marketing programs come in many “flavors”: they can increase sales, develop brand awareness and brand loyalty, grow new relationships, increase customer engagement, or even increase awareness of issues and raise support for social causes. But as an […]

As an email marketer, your goal is to increase your overall ROI, and that’s accomplished by improving not just email deliverability but also open rates. And as we wrote in July,  while email deliverability rates improved, from 93% to 95%, email open rates fell 9 percentage points to 17% in 2010, resulting in hundreds of millions of emails that were delivered to inboxes and never opened. We’ve been considering reasons for this decline, and more importantly, […]

I shouldn’t say “oldie but goodie” but I think something six months old is actually old in the email marketing world. I am referring to a MarketingSherpa chart published in February 2011  showing tactics used to improve the relevancy of emails. I looked it up again as I’ve been thinking on making email not only more relevant, but more, shall we say, personal? And by personal, I mean customer-centric. In a way, personal is what we […]