Different Subscriber Segments Require Different Success Metrics

Our subscribers aren’t all the same. They have different goals, which means that marketers should have different strategies for optimizing those relationships and measuring the success of those relationships. Vicky Ge, Marketing Manager, Trade Books, at Amazon.com, is very mindful of the different audiences that the ecommerce giant serves. At The Email…

The Shadow War for Holiday Email Marketing Victory

Retailers have long been concerned about tipping their hands to competitors, particularly during the critical holiday season. Using more personalization, segmentation, and triggered messaging increases the fog of war, making it more difficult for competitors to broadly know what you’re doing, especially when these strategies account for a majority of program revenue….

10 Tips to Get Your Email Marketing Program Ready for the Holiday Season

It’s November, which means that it’s official: The holiday season is here! Retailers, hopefully you’ve been warming up your subscribers and generating some early holiday sales over the past month or two, but now things start getting serious. To help you make the most of the holiday season, here are 10 tips…

Improve Your Holiday Season Campaign Results by Sending These 3 Emails Now

The email marketing holiday season will kick into overdrive during the week of Thanksgiving. But before we get to that point, here are three emails that B2C brands should be sending now to get their databases in good shape for a successful holiday season: Re-permission Emails for your chronically inactive subscribers Win-Back…

5 Tips to Get Your Triggered Emails Ready for the Holiday Season

Triggered emails are not “set it and forget it”; they are “review and renew.” That’s especially true going into key selling seasons, like retailers are about to do. During November and December, retailers’ transactional emails and triggered emails will be high-performance assets. Here are 5 ways retailers can make their triggered emails…

4 Reasons Broadcast Emails May Be Making Your Email Program Less Competitive in the Future

Mainly driven by increases in broadcast messages, per subscriber email volume has increased at more than a 15% compound annual growth rate over the past decade. It’s an impressive growth streak—and a testament to consumers’ strong preference for brands to communicate with them via email versus other channels. It’s also a streak…

4 Characteristics of Contextually Aware Emails

“Email is the most contextual medium—much more than the web,” Kevin Mandeville, Litmus’ content designer, said during a targeting and hacks workshop at The Email Design Conference in Boston last week. “We know much more about our users.” Kevin was speaking mostly about marketers’ ability to target email clients like Outlook and…

‘The Email Episode’ of Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloudcast

I was honored to be one of the first guests on Salesforce’s new podcast, the Marketing Cloudcast, which is hosted by my friends Heike Young and Joel Book. The podcast is available on Soundcloud and via iTunes. In “The Email Episode: Giving Email a Little Respect,” we talk about: What I do…

The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs: Are You Satisfying All 4?

Everyone wants to send more “relevant” emails, right? That’s been the buzzword of the email industry for a few years now. However, typically relevance is discussed in narrow terms, generally in regards to content. But relevance is much more than that. Just think about all the reasons that people mark your emails…

Shopping Cart Abandonment Gamesmanship

Consumers are smart. If you play games, they will figure them out, exploit them, and then tell their friends. In this Internet Retailer article, Don Davis looks at the results of a Shop+ survey that shows that shoppers—especially millennials—are crafty deal-seekers. For instance, 47% of consumers ages 18-34, and 37% of all…