I recently spent some time with the folks at eMarketer, who interviewed me about my thoughts on email marketing. They just published a sizable excerpt from the interview, and I think it does a nice job of capturing the state of email marketing at a high level. It also provides advice on how marketers can protect deliverability and successfully compete for recipients' limited attention in the inbox. Have a look.

Posted by at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read an interesting article in eMarketer about the popularity of email among retailers during this past holiday season. Advertising agency Smith-Harmon found that retail email marketers accelerated their email campaigns beginning in October, and on average sent customers more than 14.6 emails in December alone.

"Retailers ratcheted up their email marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers' dwindling spending dollars," said Jeffrey Grau, a senior analyst for eMarketer.

Incidentally, Jeffrey interviewed me in January for a report he has just written on the continued strength of retail email marketing despite the economic downturn. He was kind enough to send me a copy recently. You’ll have to purchase the report to get the in-depth analysis, but in a nutshell, email marketing is thriving in the recession because of its comparative low cost, high ROI and focus on customer retention.

Although these factors illustrate why email is an ideal marketing channel during a recession, the other side of the coin—and one we must be ever mindful of—is that a good thing can be taken too far. If marketers aren’t careful, they risk undermining the value of the inbox.

In fact, in a recent meeting with one of our consumer-packaged-goods clients, one of its executives jokingly asked me if we could tell our retail customers to lower their volumes a bit. "The inbox is getting a little crowded these days," he said.

Posted by at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My colleague Loren McDonald recently presented a session to a group of our executives, and I was struck by one of the graphics he shared. It's a great visualization of the multifaceted and rich social world created by blogger, author and public-relations guru Brian Solis.

Posted by at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

People who know me know I'm a big fan of testing. You never know for sure how people are going to respond to your emails and landing pages unless you test, and seemingly insignificant differences and simple changes can have a huge impact on response. What's really exciting is that marketers today can do more than ever, more easily than ever.

Three of the reasons I'm such a big believer and encourage marketers to pursue testing are:

1) You can test multiple variations and deploy your best performers.
Testing is growing and evolving alongside marketing. Marketing tools with built-in A/B page-testing capabilities, such as our landing pages solution, enable marketers to quickly and easily test multiple page variations, measure each page's performance relative to the next, and designate a larger percentage of display time to the best performers. Poorly performing pages can be pulled and tweaked, or swapped out for new pages. This isn't your mother’s A/B page testing; today’s testing includes capabilities that increase efficiency and begin to move us into the exciting realm of page optimization.

2) Optimization can yield tremendous incremental returns.
By tuning the elements of your landing pages to the variation(s) that will generate the greatest audience response, you'll achieve optimization that can yield tremendous incremental returns. Even a 5 percent to 10 percent lift—relatively small by comparison to some of the anecdotes I’ve heard from people using page optimization—can be substantial. For example, you could equate that kind of improvement on your email opt-in page to spending 10 percent less on your search ads, or increasing the size of your opt-in database by 10 percent. A seemingly modest lift can be significant in terms of real downstream revenue and loyalty impact.

3) Computers are taking over the heavy lifting.
The great news is that thanks to technology, these capabilities aren't as difficult to implement as they might sound. Sophisticated marketing applications have taken over what used to be a time-consuming and manual process, leaving marketers free to exercise their creativity, art and judgment. When your landing pages tool does all the work you used to have to do by hand—rapidly cycling through page iterations and providing real-time results on which pages and elements are working and which aren’t—you can focus on interpreting the numbers and making the appropriate changes to enhance the results of your marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation technology has taken A/B page testing to a whole new level by introducing page-optimization capabilities to the engagement marketer’s tool kit. And the best news of all is that it's wonderfully easy. With very little extra time and effort beyond creating an initial landing page, marketers can engage more fully with page visitors by providing a more measurably relevant experience that increases conversions and drives additional sales.

Posted by at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)