By Loren McDonald, on June 24th, 2010
The email world had a lot of fun last week with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s comment that email “is probably going away.” (See “Teens Don’t Drink Red Wine, Red Wine Will Probably Go Away“.)
But now that the snickers have faded, let’s look deeper at Sandberg’s contention that email is dying because teens are shifting to SMS texting and social-network posts.
Sandberg’s prediction probably is correct in part. The teens I know (like my own 15-year-old) text,chat on Facebook, call via Skype or use other means to communicate with each other more than they use email.
As many others have written, the way teens (and other age groups) behave now does not necessarily predict their future behavior. I raced motocross as a teen and haven’t ridden a dirt bike, let alone race, since I was 19.
This doesn’t mean text or Facebook chat will kill email or make it irrelevant. Recent research from Hotmail supports my contention that interest in receiving commercial messages is not only as strong as ever, it’s also growing as a preference. (See “Hotmail Users Embrace Commercial Email“.)
Some Technologies Die; Others Shift
Yes, some heavily touted technologies do die (Pointcast, anyone?), become irrelevant or simply not achieve email’s critical mass. Others will simply shift in how they are used, the way real-time TV viewing is shifting to deferred viewing on DVRs, on-demand and online video.
Email use is beginning to shift as well. People rely on it less for personal communication and more for receiving communications from trusted sources, such as financial institutions or employers, and commercial messages, news sources and ecommerce providers whose messages they actively want to receive.
What Will Happen When Teens Hit the Job Market?
When my teenager enters the full-time workforce in 6 or 7 years (I hope), will she use email differently from her old-fogy father? Here are a few possibilities:
- She’ll use IM, Twitter direct messages and text messaging for short messaging with co-workers, replacing some of those seemingly annoying back-and-forth emails that clutter our inboxes.
- She’ll use email rarely to correspond with friends and family, except perhaps her mother, who prefers email for communications (and the landline phone). For everyone else, it will be Facebook, chat and text messaging.
- She’ll get notices of news and new content via mobile apps, Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds that probably don’t exist yet. Subscribing to an email notice of new content is not a habit she is likely to adopt, unlike we who have been using email for many years.
- For commercial messaging, she’ll readily opt in to discount coupons via SMS and location-based services. She will always opt for SMS flight alerts over email but will prefer HTML emails for vacation promotions from that same airline.
- Being fashion- and trend-conscious, she will absolutely opt in to promotional emails from her favorite retailers and brands.
Whether I end up being right or wrong on the specifics of my daughter’s future media use and other channels, I’m confident she will use email, just differently from me.
Marketers Control Email’s Destiny
Demographics will absolutely affect how people use email. However, email’s viability as a commercial channel rests on how responsibly marketers use it.
The greatest danger to email’s viability as a communications channel doesn’t come from my 15-year-old’s texting preference but from marketers who don’t respect the channel or their customers and subscribers.
If we just “blast” out irrelevant messages, then we will have only ourselves to blame if email begins a rapid decline. If we step up to the challenge, delivering valuable content and offers to our subscribers and customers, then the channel will likely remain vibrant for decades to come.
Your Comments
What do you think? Am I off-base or do you agree that email is shifting but remaining a trusted channel for email communications? Let me know your thoughts in the comments space below.
By Loren McDonald, on June 20th, 2010
As you’ve probably heard by now, on Wednesday June 16 at the Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, uttered the prognostication heard round the world:
“If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today. Email–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away.”
While there certainly are major changes occurring in how people of all ages are communicating, the premise that email is going away because most teens don’t use email is neither a new theory or one that most experts agree with. I’ll share my views on this in an upcoming post. In this post, however, I will share a light-hearted Twitter conversation that erupted on Friday June 18.
Friday morning I awoke early to an email from a client that wanted our views on Ms. Sandberg’s comments, which was followed closely by a conversation on the topic in an email marketing discussion forum that I am a member of. In a moment of inspiration, I decided the best way to respond to her flawed thinking was through humor and Twitter.
With the Tweet below, I started a hashtag conversation – #emailisdeadanalogy – that at last count had more than 110 Tweets and Retweets – which was also helped by a mention in Sherry Chigar’s (Chief Marketer’s Big Fat Marketing Blog) post Rumors of E-mail’s Death Are Blah Blah Blah…:
Most teens don’t golf, golf has no future #emailisdeadanalogy – join the fun thanks to Facebook COO saying “email is going away”
Following are some of my favorite “email is dead analogies” (including a few of my own contributions) that have been Tweeted so far:
Kids don’t drive. Therefore, cars will soon cease to exist. http://conta.cc/aunRtp #emailisdeadanalogy (Martin Lieberman)
Most teens don’t buy stocks so Wall Street has no future #emailisdeadanalogy (Brent Shroyer)
Teens aren’t COOs. There’s no future for COOs. #emailisdeadanalogy (Jeff Rohrs)
most teens don’t bank so banking has no future #emailisdeadanalogy (John Caldwwell)
Most teens don’t get off the couch much, so walking doesn’t have much of a future. #emailisdeadanalogy (Brent Shroyer)
Most teens don’t vote, so democracy has no future. #emailisdeadanalogy (Jason French)
#emailisdeadanalogy Most teens don’t pay taxes, therefore the country has no future. (Bill McCloskey)
Most teens don’t use their cell phone for phone calls, therefore the phone is dead #emailisdeadanalogy (Scott Cohen)
Most teens don’t pay bills, bills have no future #emailisdeadanalogy (Morgan Stewart)
Teens favorite mode of transportation is the skateboard, the car will probably go away #emailisdeadanalogy (Loren McDonald)
 And I’ll add my own: Most teens don’t use good judgement, so reason has no future… #emailisdeadanalogy (Rand Wacker)
Most teens don’t have kids, there will be no children in the future #emailisdeadanalogy (Morgan Stewart)
Most teens don’t drink red wine, red wine is probably going away #emailisdeadanalogy (Loren McDonald)
most teens don’t work so business has no future #emailisdeadanalogy (John Caldwell)
Most teens don’t own homes, so home ownership has no future. #emailisdeadanalogy (Chad White)
Have any favorites or analogies you’d like to contribute to the conversation? Please add them below and on Twitter.
By Robert Consoli, on June 16th, 2010
Microsoft has recently announced several changes and enhancements to its Hotmail Web-based email service. While some of the new enhancements appear to be part of Microsoft’s continuing effort to catch up to the tools offered by other Webmail services, some are truly unique and likely will significantly impact on the way marketers do business today. Below are some of the most significant changes to Hotmail that marketers need to be aware of:
Individual preference auto-learning
Expands on Hotmail’s engagement metrics by measuring and monitoring user interactions with a sender’s email. While Yahoo and others have adopted metrics to measure user engagement such as opens, clickthroughs, TINS (This is not Spam) clicks, email deletions and abuse complaints, Microsoft appears to be joining the crowd with its new individual preference auto-learning feature.
False-positive reduction
For users who complain that wanted (legitimate) emails are getting blocked, this feature responds to user engagement metrics in the individual preference auto-learning feature to ensure that email lands in the correct location (inbox or junk folder).
Sweep
Provides users with a virtual broom that lets them easily “sweep” unwanted mail from the inbox into either folders or oblivion, leaving the inbox clean. An auto-sweep capability rids the inbox of email designated as unwanted. In a very important change, Sweep also offers an unsubscribe prompt for messages that the user frequently deletes unread. Users could accidentally sweep all of a marketer’s email to the deleted folder. And, because the default option is to sweep all future email, they may never receive another email from you. To minimize the chances of being inadvertently swept, always use a recognizable “From” name and brand, relevant subject lines, and keep your subscribers engaged.
Trusted senders
Places safety logos next to recognized, legitimate senders such as banks, which are commonly used for phishing scams. Gmail treats this issue similarly. What’s important for marketers to know about this feature is that it likely will use authentication as one of the metrics for determining which senders are safe senders. If you are not currently authenticating your emails and domains with an authentication protocol such as SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), now would be a good time to start.
Hotmail highlights
Enables users to see immediately upon login if they have new email from friends, social network updates, shipments, appointments and birthday reminders. Because this feature shows the top three messages in your inbox as soon as you log in, features like Send Time Optimization, which gives your email the best chance of arriving when users are likely to be in their inboxes, have never been more important
Junk mail descriptors
Tags junk mail so that users can learn why it landed there. This is a great addition. Now users whose wanted email messages keep getting filtered can understand why and take steps to keep it from happening in the future.
Single contact list
Brings all of a user’s online contacts—even those from services like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace—into one place, from which users can send email, and organize and manage contacts. By conveniently bringing contacts together into one list, this new feature also makes it easier for users to see whether a sender has been added to their address book.
One-click filters
Lets users filter their entire inbox to show only messages that are from contacts or social networks. Because this filter works by making sure users see only messages from designated wanted senders, it’s more important than ever to request that your “From” address be added to the address book. If you are not added to the address book, you won’t make it onto a user’s contact list, and your messages won’t be shown if the one-click filter is applied.
These new features and enhancements are part of a larger trend by email providers and software clients to make the inbox more manageable for users. If your messages are difficult to classify, or don’t clearly provide value or stand out to users, they will be increasingly harder to find in the inbox.
While marketers need to be aware of these changes, Microsoft’s biggest update comes around the newest implementation of its SmartScreen filtering technology. SmartScreen has been around for some time now, but the acknowledgement of its uses and capabilities can help marketers better understand how messages are filtered. I’ll share much more about this in my next post.
In the meantime, for more information on Hotmail’s new features, you can visit:
What’s new in Hotmail
By Loren McDonald, on June 15th, 2010
The marketing world is experiencing a revolution like never in its history, with new channels emerging before marketers can grasp and implement successful programs in the previous hot new channel.
Are you feeling a little overwhelmed by all the changes or nervously scanning the horizon to see what lies just beyond it? The following list of eight assertions is intended to help you put some of these larger marketing trends into context.
1. Customer Service Is the New Marketing
In a world gone social and with hyper-transparency, the No. 1 priority today for companies is creating and delivering great products and services.
Responding quickly and honestly to issues, or better yet, enabling your other customers and community to respond for you, has become paramount to your ability to acquire new customers.
Customers who get slow or poor responses from customer support or whose experiences don’t fulfill marketing’s promises will air their complaints quickly on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook pages or community and review sites.
In this paradigm, your customer service and marketing departments must learn to work seamlessly to avoid inadvertent disconnects or bad customer experiences. Historically, these departments had very different missions; today, they must be aligned to create great experiences for customers.
2. Customers Become Your Marketing Department
Social media has changed marketing’s job description. Your ability to grow your business and acquire new customers begins with your ability not just to satisfy your current customers but also to “wow” them.
Marketing is more about actions that ensure a great customer experience and encourage your most highly engaged customers—your fans and fanatics—to share their loyalty with non-customers.
While marketing will continue to create and deliver push and pull marketing programs, its most critical role will be identifying your fanatics and influencers and enabling and encouraging them to, in essence, do your marketing for you.
3. Social Media as Swiss Army Knife
You might have heard these common refrains about social media: “Where is the ROI?” “Twitter isn’t a marketing channel,” or “Social media is about a conversation, not advertising.” The fact is, you can’t pigeonhole social media.
Like email, it’s becoming a “Swiss Army Knife” not just of marketing but also customer service, product innovation and more. Yet, so many people are trying to bring their existing marketing paradigms and budget, resource and staffing approaches to social media as if the channel only did one thing.
Social media—again, like email—can be sorted into buckets for communications, customer service, community, engagement, entertainment, advertising, marketing, PR and ecommerce. Some buckets will be huge and others tiny, depending on a company’s culture, brand, industry, marketing approach and, most importantly, how customers prefer to engage with your brand.
Social media is not a one-size-fits-all tool. Don’t treat it like one.
4. The iPad Changes Everything
Not just the iPad, of course, but also the coming explosion in tablet-size portable devices (40-plus tablets or e-readers are reportedly in development), all bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a desktop or laptop computer.
The iPad’s mobility, combined with the touch-screen interface and screen size, will create an explosion in publishing, gaming, entertainment, marketing, customer service and other applications. None of these provides a compelling experience on a 1-inch smartphone screen.
The iPad/tablet platform will provide tremendous opportunities for companies to create amazing brand experiences that are richer, more engaging and more valuable to consumers than the current PC/laptop or smartphone experience.
(Note: I wrote this mostly on my iPad using both virtual and Bluetooth keyboards.)
5. “Mobile Marketing” Simply Becomes “Marketing”
As more consumers spend more time connected to the Internet and to each other via portable devices, mobile’s distinction as a unique, specialized communications channel dissipates. It simply becomes the dominant way we interact with brands beyond the physical world.
More consumers will interact with your brand on a smaller screen, not at a desktop or even on a laptop computer. “Marketing” will concentrate on reaching people where they are and optimizing the experience for whatever screen size the consumer is using.
Mobile is less about being a channel and more about when, where and how people experience and communicate with your brand.
6. Marketers Become Software Developers
Consumers increasingly experience brands through technology—whether your website, mobile application, social network, kiosk, email interface or interactive vending machine.
Having experienced a number of cool apps on my iPad the last few months, I’ve become convinced that the tablet’s larger screen will transform apps into one of the predominant channels that consumers will use to engage with brands.
I’m not suggesting that marketers will be writing code. They will, however, evolve into “product developer/managers,” scoping out potential marketing-centric applications and managing their development, launch and lifecycles.
7. The Chief Marketing Technology Officer Emerges
More companies will grasp the technology challenges and opportunities I mentioned above and hire a senior-level manager (the “CMTO”) to oversee all technology-related aspects of marketing and help marketing, ecommerce and IT/MIS work together more effectively. (I suspect this position will not be C-level, but more commonly VP or director level.)
As new channels emerge, and the pace of change picks up, companies that don’t invest significantly in dedicated marketing-technology resources risk getting out-maneuvered by their competitors.
8. Email Marketing: The Killer App
With a seemingly never-ending flow of new marketing channels, and social media and mobile getting all the buzz these days, email sometimes feels like the forgotten stepchild. In fact, email is only getting stronger and more vital in its role as marketing workhorse.
Maybe email isn’t sexy anymore, but it continues to deliver consumer value, brand engagement, cost savings and revenue. However, a major shift is occurring, albeit quietly.
Consumers are using email less for personal communications, relying instead on texting, tweeting, posting on Facebook, etc. But because email has a strong permission foundation and gives users control over the inbox, it has become consumers’ preferred channel for communications with companies and brands.
Additionally, devices like the iPhone and iPad are actually enabling a better email experience for consumers and making reading and engaging with email fun again.
Finally, I believe we have reached the point where more companies simply do email marketing better by moving to lifecycle and trigger-based messages that truly deliver on the promise of “right message, right time.”
What are your thoughts? Think I’m way off base on some items or have completely missed some other huge marketing revolution? I welcome your comments in the space below.
By Chris Arrendale, on May 26th, 2010
After looking at our email logs and ongoing discussions with our third-party partners, we’ve noticed that AOL has recently started disabling old and inactive email accounts with no activity for over 90 days and upwards of 6 months. Clients can expect to see a larger number of hard bounces if sending to AOL email accounts with no activity for greater than 90 days.
With this in mind, it’s important to make sure that, as an email marketer, you’re sending to “engaged” subscribers that open and click on your email. AOL tracks the number of hard bounces that you send into its network, and this can degrade your reputation on the IP address. Data hygiene is critical and can be the difference between inboxing and bulking at an ISP—in this case, AOL.
By Robert Consoli, on May 18th, 2010
While email continues to be a fantastic way for companies and consumers to maintain a dialogue, spammers also continue to flood inboxes—making the sea rough for both legitimate senders and recipients. Add the recent rise of “disposable email addresses” and the water becomes even more treacherous.
With large ISPs, like Yahoo, now advocating the practice of creating separate email accounts for consumers to provide to companies that have not yet earned their trust, marketers must be more diligent than ever about list practices and acquisition. Let’s face it, at some point many of these disposable email addresses will receive unwanted messages until the recipient cancels the account. And if you’re legitimately sending relevant messages to that address, your emails not only won’t reach the recipient, but your program will likely suffer from higher bounce rates that could damage your deliverability.
So what’s a marketer to do? First, make it clear to a potential recipient why you are asking for their information, how you will use it and who you will (or will not) share it with. Convince them that your emails deserve to land in their primary inbox. Do this by being honest and up front about the types of emails you distribute and how often you do so.
Even better, give recipients choices and let them shape their marketing by telling you what they want to receive, through what channels and when. Then deliver.
If they do decide they want to stop receiving messages from you, make it easy for them to opt out or adjust their preferences to make the dialogue more beneficial to them. While no one wants to help a recipient end a relationship, it’s better to let them go easily than to let them feel the SPAM button is their best option.
The key to success in a highly disposable world is to ensure your messages are wanted and even anticipated. Start by being transparent and true to your word.
By Loren McDonald, on May 17th, 2010
Testing has always been an essential part of email marketing. If you don’t test, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t—and whether you’re reaping rewards or wasting your marketing money.
However, testing as we know it is evolving to keep up with the complexities of email and constant changes in consumer behavior. It’s no longer just a one-shot deal with lag time between testing and implementation.
Instead, new testing technologies measure results and serve up the winning variable content assets in real time, eliminating the delay between testing and implementation.
The New Testing Environment
In the typical A/B split or multivariate testing protocol, you isolate an element to test, such as subject-line copy, image choice, message design, call to action, etc. You send test messages to a random sample of your database and then apply what you learned to the balance of the campaign.
Traditional testing works well for determining standard and recurring aspects of your email program: navigation, layout, location of administrative information and share-to-social links, tone and personality, and other factors.
But your variable and conversion-oriented content needs to be tested perpetually. There simply is no guarantee that the green “Get your free sample” button that tested best in one email will work best in every subsequent email.
Ongoing real-time content optimization helps ensure that the majority of your subscribers will see only the best content assets.
Email effectiveness is fluid. Not only does content change from one campaign to the next, but one highly targeted campaign may send out hundreds of different versions of the same message.
Each version may have a different offer, image or call to action and face different external factors such as message timing, time of year and competition within the inbox.
The smart move is to begin testing in real time. Perpetual testing leads to perpetual optimization of your core message content.
Real-Time Testing Optimizes Email on the Fly
We know that highly targeted email messages deliver higher ROI than standard broadcast messages. The first frontier in targeted messages incorporated customer data such as preferences or website/purchase behavior into email to create messages that come closer to one-to-one communications.
The next frontier is real-time content services (from Silverpop partner companies among others) that make email even more highly targeted and improve upon standard testing methods.
Real-time testing services (Silverpop partners 8Seconds, WebTrends Optimize and Omniture Test & Target among others) use A/B split or multivariate tests and measure responses on the initial portion of a campaign while it’s being delivered.
As recipients open and act on the messages, the software calculates the winning message combination and then delivers it to the rest of your mailing list once it reaches a desired confidence level (typically a 95 percent interval).
Delivering Benefits
Real-time testing can raise your email marketing performance quickly and noticeably:
- In-delivery testing can cut the lag time between testing and implementation to hours instead of days.
- Testing and its resulting optimization become a standard element of your marketing workflow. Your email team has more time to work on other projects, and you don’t have to ask repeatedly for a testing budget.
- You can be more confident that you’re basing campaign decisions on updated, relevant data instead of hunches or outdated data.
If you want to take your email program to a higher level these days, real-time content, testing and optimization can help you accomplish that.
By Chris Arrendale, on May 17th, 2010
In one of my recent conversations with an email marketer, she confessed that her company doesn’t monitor replies from the email campaigns it sends out. Big mistake. It’s crucial to monitor these replies, either in a separate mailbox or by having them forwarded to your main mailbox. Not only will this help you answer your subscribers’ questions and keep you up to date with unsubscribe and change-of-email-address requests, but it could also give you “safelisting privileges” at many ISPs.
This special status will result in the automatic enabling of the images and links that you’ve carefully selected to increase customer engagement. Here are three tactics for getting safelisted with your subscribers:
1) Monitor your replies and respond accordingly. In addition to the benefits listed above, this will enable you to reap safelisting rewards from several providers:
- Gmail: If the subscriber and the company/email marketer reply to each other two or more times, Gmail will automatically enable images and links in future communications. (Read more in this blog entry.)
- AOL: If a user replies/clicks‐through to a sender, moves a sender’s message to a personal folder, or clicks “not spam” on a sender’s message that was found in the spam folder, the sender will be added to the address book and receive address book benefits. (Read more in this Pivotal Verocity white paper.)
2) Send a welcome email encouraging recipients to add you to their address book. It’s an excellent idea to immediately engage subscribers with a welcome email program, and one of the elements you should include in this message is a request that recipients add you to their address book. Clarify the benefits of doing so—namely, that this guarantees they’ll receive your valuable content moving forward.
3) Include an “Add to Address Book” statement at the top of all subsequent emails. Including a prominent reminder will help you catch recipients that didn’t add you when you sent your welcome email(s), and it will also remind them to do so if their email address changes at a later date. Also, if your company transitions to a new “From” email address, you should consider letting subscribers know about this before making the change. This way, they can update their address book with the new “From” address and continue to have images and links enabled.
With many recipients automatically disabling images and links, your messages run the risk of not being viewed as you intended. By taking the time to follow the steps above, you can help ensure that your emails show up with their content fully rendered and can better stand out from the clutter filling up your recipients’ inboxes.
By Loren McDonald, on April 6th, 2010
We’re unveiling the future of marketing automation today at Silverpop as we launch our new digital marketing platform, called Engage 8.
This new platform combines the sophisticated email marketing functionality at the core of Silverpop’s Engage platform with the lead-management and marketing automation tools of Engage B2B. Marketers can now access the best features from both platforms all in a single digital marketing platform.
Silverpop recognizes that while B2B and B2C marketers cater to different audiences, they share common goals and often common marketing tactics—making it logical for them to leverage features previously exclusive to one marketing tool or the other to raise their marketing performance to a higher level.
In particular, Silverpop Engage 8 helps email marketers increase the relevance and sophistication of their marketing programs by using three functionalities near and dear to a B2B marketer’s heart, including contact scoring and Web tracking to create campaigns that are as close to one-to-one messaging as is possible.
Here is an overview of three features and capabilities in more detail:
1. Contact scoring and lead management:
Contact scoring for targeted messaging and lead management is more prevalent in the B2B marketing world. Contact scoring uses both explicit data (actions taken or not taken) and implicit data (demographic and survey data) to assign a point score to a prospect and assign them to distinct messaging tracks based on their initial and ever-evolving score.
Instead of treating those prospects to a barrage of standard messages, they receive messages tailored to their unique position in the lifecycle and designed to move them more quickly along the buying cycle.
Although some email marketers use database marketing techniques such as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) to segment their customers and target their messaging, many still use the “one size fits all” email strategy that sends the same email to each of those segments—which sometimes account for tens or hundreds of thousands of recipients.
The benefit: Email marketers can use demographic and behavioral information to score and forecast how likely customers are to buy or how engaged they are with your marketing campaigns. This drives the ability to create unique campaign tracks based on those score ranges, and not just on how well they fit standard, and often broad, segmentation criteria.
2. Connecting Web behavior to email addresses:
Web tracking ties your prospects’ activity on your Web site prior to their opting in to email your email program.
The benefit: You’ll gain access to a host of Web behavior data you can leverage to create highly relevant email messages once an anonymous visitor becomes a customer or email subscriber—beginning with the very message.
The opportunities to leverage this behavior to immediately send targeted messages and potentially identify a new subscriber with specific interests or characteristics are tremendous. Suppose you operate an online travel business. A prospect browses your vacations in Maui and Kauai and then opts in to your weekly deals newsletter.
If you didn’t know her browsing interests, her first regular email received may not have any content or offers related to Hawaiian vacations, but instead promoting Disneyland, Florida or Europe.
But with this data, and with her contact score based on her email subscription and Web browsing, you can assign her right to your track for Hawaiian and similar vacation destinations.
3. Using data gained from contact scoring and Web behavior to create highly targeted campaigns:
The Engage 8 platform has a unique visual campaign builder, which uses drag-and-drop, movie-editor-style functionality to build a campaign workflow that can be based on contact scoring data and executed through multiple message tracks.
The benefit: You can create highly personalized marketing campaigns that are designed based on the actions and profile of each individual customer over the course of their lifecycle, not just a single message. For example, you could create a multi-part welcome series that changes the message content according to what your recipient does or doesn’t do in prior messages, landing page interactions, etc.
If your recipient doesn’t open either the first or second messages in your three-part welcome program, you could program your campaign to send an alternate message seeking feedback or offering an aggressive offer instead of the next regular message in the series.
Automation: A Key to Marketers Future Success
Sophisticated email marketers have continued to move their programs further and further away from a one-size fits all approach of “batch and blast” – incorporating Web behavior, trigger-based emails, dynamic content, lifecycle segmentation and more.
One challenge for marketers has been: How do you best leverage all of the data you are collecting to drive a series of automated email programs. By leveraging a number of proven B2B marketing automation techniques, Silverpop’s Engage 8 platform should prove invaluable to email marketers looking to take their programs to the next level through greater use of automation.
By Loren McDonald, on March 30th, 2010
How would you like to be able to test and optimize your email campaigns even while they’re being delivered? A free Webinar at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT on Thursday, April 15, will look at the concept of real-time testing, which uses automated software to optimize email campaigns using subscriber behavior.
Real-Time Testing: What is It?
Real-time testing can make continual testing and optimization an integral part of your email marketing program instead of a one-time or occasional activity.
A 2009 study by eROI found that 37.1 percent of US email marketers did not test their email campaigns, either because they didn’t know how or didn’t have the time to test.
Automated testing tools are helping to eliminate these “time and expertise” challenges. Further, a relatively new approach to testing based on “real-time content” is taking email testing to another level.
What You’ll Learn in This Webinar
Pieter Wuyts of 8Seconds, a real-time content testing and optimization solution provider and Silverpop partner, and I will examine these aspects of real-time content testing:
- How it works
- Approaches to testing strategies
- Case studies
- Best practices in continual testing
Want More Information?
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