From Automation to Journeys — 5 Key Tips
Most every digital marketing professional has basic automated email journeys in place, usually a welcome series. But the time has come for these email marketing automation programs to grow in maturity, to evolve from email automation to well-thought-out email journeys. Why? One reason: customer experience. Customer experience is the new competitive advantage We’re entering a new age, one in which customer experience will be the key competitive differentiator for those who send emails. And brands have some work to do to master the customer experience because they are falling short. According to an article at Forbes.com, almost all companies (89%) say they are competing based on customer experience. But are they really when 80% think they [...]
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Post-Promotion Email Marketing
For months now, you’ve been hearing all the hype leading up to the big shopping spree that now envelops the Thanksgiving weekend, like a fog rolling in off the bay to surround the buildings of San Francisco. And you might think your work here is through because your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails were done and sent out in a timely fashion, generating some serious revenue as a result. But just as the feasting of Thanksgiving can stay with you as leftovers that need to be cleverly concocted into new meals, so too should your Black Friday and Cyber Mondays have some follow-up. You can build on and even sustain that holiday weekend momentum with [...]
Restaurant Email Marketing
The Dangers of Stale Restaurant Email Marketing—and How to Make It Fresh Again Would you eat stale bread? Old fish? Over-cooked vegetables? Not by choice, right? Nor would your restaurant serve up such sub-standard food to their customers. But you might be serving up stale, sub-standard emails—through no fault of your own. To make sure your restaurant email marketing strategies match the quality of your restaurant chain’s food or table service, let’s take a look at how customer email technology has changed in recent years. A Fresh Approach to Restaurant Email Marketing You already know email marketing is unique among other marketing tools. It delivers a higher ROI for one thing, and it acts like a [...]
How to Create a Powerful Behavioral Targeting Email Strategy
Email marketing is becoming more difficult to do. Social media marketing, video marketing, and content marketing are competing with email to capture attention. But, for most digital marketers, email is still the bread and butter of their online business. That said, those who adapt to a more modern behavior based email marketing strategy will separate themselves from the competition. Improve Your Marketing - Behavioral Email Examples Are you still email marketing the old way? You narrow down your focus to a product you want to showcase and push that out to everyone on your list? FAIL. Sorry, Charlie, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Your open, click, and conversion rates will all suffer if this [...]
The All-in-One Marketing Cloud vs. Integrated Best-in-Breed Solution
Are you considering a marketing cloud solution? One that combines all kinds of disparate technologies and features into one package? Many companies are going that route. And it might be that it’s a good solution for you…and it might be that it’s not. A bundled solution has its downsides, as you’ll see below. And there’s a lot to be said for one customized exactly to your needs. The marketing cloud as a bundled solution A marketing cloud solution typically bundles together a variety of technologies onto one platform for you—technologies such as CRM, eCommerce, social media marketing, analytics, and possibly more. When you want your marketing solution offered to you as a total package in one [...]
How a Relational Database Can Help Stop Email From Falling Flat
Do you know where your email marketing is headed? Ideally, it’s headed down the path of hyper-personalized, one-to-one marketing. But hyper-personalized is only going to happen if your ESP supports a relational database. Relational vs. flat file systems Although many marketers have recognized the benefits of relational databases for several years now, surprisingly few email service providers (ESPs) support them—although iPost does. If you’re planning to take your segmentation to a new level this year, or to increase the sophistication of your email marketing, you need to know how a relational database differs from the usual flat-file one—and how critical this might turn out to be when choosing your new Email Service Provider. So… what’s the difference? [...]
Email Open Rate Meaning – Why You Shouldn’t Worry
Email open rates (the number of emails opened). We love them. We hate them. We obsess over them. They are typically one of the first email marketing benchmarks we check in our email reporting (after the total number of emails delivered.) We anxiously compare them to industry standards. And we’re constantly trying to get average email open rates ever higher. However, maybe we’re obsessing a little too much about open rates as open rates. There is much that we can learn from our email open rates beyond the basic question, “How many people opened our email?” Avoid only looking at email opens as opens With your digital marketing efforts aiming to improve, your open rate might [...]
10 Annoying Emails You Should Stop Sending
We all do things we wouldn’t like someone to do to us. We cut people off in traffic, pay bills late, and forget birthdays and anniversaries. It’s not because we’re bad people! We’re only human and sometimes we get impatient, careless, busy, "hangry", or absentminded—or all of the above. We overlook, forget about or even ignore the Golden Rule that says do unto others as you want them to do unto you. Sometimes we do this as email marketers too, and we do unto others—our subscribers and customers—what we definitely do not want to be done unto us. Are you guilty of that occasional violation of the Golden Rule? Are you “that guy”—or gal? Are you [...]
Your Competitors’ Emails Are Better Than Yours
OK, I went out on a limb with that post title, I confess. Maybe your competitors’ emails aren’t better than yours. But do you know? Do you know how they compare? Do you know how your emails stack up against the emails of “those other guys”? It’s surprising to me how many marketers don’t subscribe to their competitors’ emails in order to see what they are up against. We’re all trying to stand out in the inbox. Shouldn’t we know what we are being compared to? I say yes, we should. The easiest and cheapest marketing research you’ll ever do Doing this kind of comparison won’t cost you a dime, nor take up much time. You [...]
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