MarketingSherpa’s recent chart made me smile. After reading through countless articles and blogs this morning as I attempted to get caught up on my email marketing related reading, I was happy to see a recent chart of the week…and to see that improving customer relations and retention were second in priority. Because most of what I was reading about was social this and social that. This might just demonstrate that email marketers aren’t completely ignoring the […]

If you’re like me, and you live, breathe, eat this email marketing stuff every day, you might also be like me, meaning you find yourself some days thinking there’s no difference between B2C and B2B email marketing. That’s because everything published about email marketing and email marketing best practices can pretty much be assumed to be about B2C email marketing…unless it says otherwise. The difference is in the numbers: B2C email marketers are typically dealing with […]

A few months ago we published a blog on triggered emails in the Email Experience Council’s blog. So I was interested to read BtoB Online magazine’s article about B2B triggered emails, with suggestions for triggered email messages appropriate for the B2B email marketer to incorporate into his or her campaigns. Triggered email messaging suggestions included: Welcome emails Post-purchase emails News and staff changes Anniversary or birthday emails (yes, you can do those in B2B email marketing!) […]

As a follow-up to our email marketing blog post about being relevant to help you avoid declining CTRs, I want to remind you of one simple thing you can do to improve your entire email marketing program: Tell consumers what to expect. Then deliver it. I am still shocked, as 2010 comes to an end, at how many websites expect you to sign up for emails with no sales pitch, no description of what you’ll get, […]

Whether you’re a dog person or a cat person, you know the difference. As the saying goes, “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” Dogs love you no matter what. Dogs never hold a grudge. They forgive everything. They are miserable when you leave and ecstatic when you return. They think you walk on water and control the heavens and are the greatest creature to ever live. Ever. Dogs adore you. Cats could not care less about […]

In some ways, email marketing is like farming. You can’t just go along from day to day assuming everything will stay the same. If you’re a farmer, you’re dependent on the weather and you absolutely have to know what’s coming so you can adjust. You might know about what to expect, like hot weather in the summer and cold weather in the winter, but on a day-to-day basis, you can get big, costly surprises so you […]

It’s an email marketing best practice we harp on a lot in this blog, I know. But that’s because it’s an idea that’s so steadfastly adhered to, this idea that more names on your email list means more profit. No, it doesn’t. Do you need shocking proof that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to your in-house email list? Then click on through to this MarketingSherpa case study. The Indianapolis Symphony cut their […]

If you send it, they will share…not! Or at least, not necessarily. If your email marketing team has high hopes for the social sharing feature you’ve added to your email design, if you’re all thinking you’ll get all kinds of click throughs and sharing with social networks because people can share, well, hold on… Have you evaluated your content and message to make sure people will want to share it? Just because they can (the function […]