When looking for an ESP, delivery of your emails should be your #1 criteria.  If is not, then you are probably missing out on revenues.  Take a look at this scenario, XYZ company is using a low-end ESP and is getting an “inbox” delivery rate of 80% . Their average conversion rate is 3%. They have 500,000 names on their in-house email list. With a delivery rate of 80%, only 400,000 subscribers get the emails. That means 100,000 people do not get promotional emails from XYZ. At a conversion rate of 3%, that’s 3,000 people not having the chance to make the purchase. If an average sale is $60, that’s $180,000 in revenue XYZ misses out on due to poor email deliverability due to the wrong ESP.  Consider your ESP wisely.

The world of online marketing is very competitive and your customers can cast their votes this holiday season with their pocket-books.  By taking care of your customers today, ensures that they will be your customers tomorrow.  Sam Walton couldn’t have said it better:  “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”  Please keep this in mind when you are engaging with your customers and prospects.  If the customer doesn’t see value in your product or service, they will look elsewhere.

If you haven’t thought about it already, you should be planning for your holiday email markeiting deployments. The peak season for retailers is between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Plan your deployment now so that when mid-November arrives, you are not scrambling to get those Thanksgiving offers out the door.  If you need help, there are dozens of email marketing agencies who have partnered with the leading ESP’s that can help.

Your Client Experience Determines Pricing – How Much are Your Bananas?

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The Technology Issue | September 2009

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With the economy sputtering, most marketers today need to take a closer look at the return on their marketing decisions. Email leads the way when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing budget. It offers the marketer a highly engaging, customizable and targeted medium to strengthen your customer customer relations, drive sales and increase the brand experience.

List growth is the number one question I hear from our customers and prospects.   Here are a few quick tips I give them to help to build their subscriber lists.

• Leverage Social Media to get your current subscribers to post your email content on their social networks.
• Make sure you promote your ’subscription box’ on more than just the home page. 
• Keep the subscription questions to a minimum.  Email and first name is enough to start.  As you build subscriber “trust” you can ask for more information.
• Provide offer to attract more subscription. 
• Provide an example of past newsletters on your website for your prospective subscribers to review.  
• Make sure your content is timely and relevant.   This helps to promote word of mouth and social networking referrals.                  

If you  do these things, you can not help but grow your subscriber list.  Remember, there is no easy way.  It takes work.

Leveraging Video in Email. Video embedded within email is a logical extension of Web 2.0. Today smart marketers are leveraging the power of video by using simple screen captures to drive the consumer to the video content on a web page. New technologies from Goodmail offer other deployment methods where video can be viewed from within the actual email. LiveClicker uses animated GIFs to give the illusion of a video playing in email, whereas Goodmail actually streams live video into email at AOL inboxes. Check it out.

Understanding SMS and Mobil Marketing to Grow Your Email Lists

 Text capture via SMS allows marketers to quickly implement a list growth tool available anywhere a subscriber has their cell phone. By texting in information, such as email, you can set-up a perfect program for in-store or online promotions, webinars, and tradeshows. Based upon the couple of samples below here is how a program might work:

1. Customer receives a card or sees an in store display to learn about the program.
2. The customer sends a txt to a short code and then receives a text back to opt into the reward, specials, etc, program.
3. Customer is added to a marketing list with your ESP so you can continue marketing to then with special/ alerts via email or text.
4. By opting in via text customer receives a coupon or special for next time they are in the store for redemption.

There are many other use cases for using SMS to build your email lists and to keep your customers engaged.  Talk to your ESP or agency partner about how to get going.

You should be using SMS and Mobil marketing to grow Email lists. Consumers live on their mobile devices. More and more companies are using SMS as a way to make it easy for a consumer to opt into their email programs, and send them special offers via phone or traditional email. It’s immediate for the subscriber to opt-in using their cell phone and they can get a triggered confirmation SMS.  In the past the cost was prohibitive.  Now it is very economical to build your lists with SMS.  The subscriber does the work and there are no more collecting of business cards at trade shows and manually entering those names into a distribution list.  I’d look for B2C growth  with restaurant and retail chains. and a B2B no brainer is at trade shows.  SMS is much more effective and timely that the traditional, manual ways of collecting opt ins (response cards, fishbowl, etc.).