Archive for the 'Email Marketing' Category
Finally, an answer to the tricky problem of when to send email. A pundit named Daryl Jay states categorically that you can’t beat morning.
“If the campaign is B2B, the morning is an optimal time as most deskbound workers usually start their day by going through their email inboxes,” he says.
That makes sense, with some slight caveats. B2B marketers “tend to avoid Monday mornings when inboxes are crowded and people are busy,” another pundit writes. A third guru adds Saturday morning is the best time, and others argue that Tuesday afternoon produces the best results.
How do you make sense out of this welter of conflicting advice?
We agree that morning’s a good time—we check our emails first thing. But we keep checking them throughout the day. And we look at them late at night, on Sunday afternoon and just about any time it occurs to us.
Relevant offers will get opened regardless of the time.
But let’s agree, for argument’s sake, that timing is a critical factor. Should everyone send their emails at precisely the same hour?
Even when backed by research, that sort of advice may not reflect the behavior of the people on your email marketing list.
The best course is to test different times, or, as a U.K. writer has suggested, do a keyword Twitter search RSS feed to “find out when people are talking about the stuff you’re selling, and adjust send times accordingly.” Above all, be flexible.
Email specialist Michael Brownyard offers these tips:
1. Look at your past results.
2. Exploit benchmark data on open patterns.
3. Segment by time of response.
We agree. Let’s keep the “direct” in direct marketing.
Email remains the most productive channel when it comes to ROI, according to new DMA statistics.
In 2009, email returned a “whopping $43.62 for every dollar spent on it,” according to a synopsis of the DMA report by ace reporter Ken Magill.
That’s a slight dip from $44.93 in 2008. But it still beats out other media. According to Magill (and the DMA), here’s how some other channels stacked up: Read the rest of this entry »
The fur is flying in the B2B Online Marketing Group on LinkedIn. It started when Marty Thomas argued that text emails sometimes work better than HTML.
“For small businesses who don’t a strong brand and loyal customer following (or thousand dollar design budget for each email), it is better to use plain text emails,” he explained.
You’d think that this would have gone unnoticed on New Year’s Eve. But it drew an immediate response. And out of six people who commented, nobody totally agreed. Read the rest of this entry »
As we have long predicted, “a soft economy is driving renewed focus on email marketing.” That’s the word from Forrester, which last week released some findings from its latest email wrapup.
Foremost among the findings was that email marketers expect more from their vendors. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s some news that should warm the hearts of email marketers.
“Despite reports of its demise, email is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel,” writes Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, the online sharing network, in a blog post.
Schigel reports that 46% of all sharing is driven by email, compared with 33% by Facebook and 14% by channels like Digg, del.icio.us and LinkedIn. Twitter’s “share” of this traffic? Only 6%. Read the rest of this entry »
VertMarkets.com, a vertical marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together online, has named has named Edith Roman-ePostDirect as manager of its Business Buyer Masterfile email list. 
The opt-in file lists 173,915 executives, plant managers, purchasing directors, engineers and production and operations professionals. They go to VertMarkets.com to buy products, find jobs and read the latest industry news. Read the rest of this entry »
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last month titled: “Why Email No Longer Rules.” It stated that “email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet.”
Uh, what do you mean, “we?” Read the rest of this entry »
Online marketing sites are buzzing with the revelation that a bad campaign can hurt a brand.
This finding was announced last week by Dynamic Logic, based on an analysis of over 170,000 creative executions (yes, that’s what the firm said). It shows that brand image and purchase intent are undermined when the creative “falls below its potential.”
All well and good, but the real takeaway for us is in this line: “Not enough time is spent producing and testing high quality ads.” (Emphasis ours). Read the rest of this entry »