As email marketing experts, our clients often ask us how many emails they should send per week/month/quarter to get the best results. But there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer because optimizing email send frequency depends on how your list responds to your mailings, and how relevant, timely, and expected your mailings are, as well as a host of other factors. In fact, the MarketTraq™ motto of “relevant, timely, and anticipated” is more appropriate to optimizing send frequency than any other aspect of planning an email marketing campaign. Any attempt to optimize your email campaign... Read More

If you’re one of the 54% of companies that is not using automated email lifecycle marketing, (46% do according to a June 2011 eMarketer study) –then statistically speaking, you’re losing money. As the meeting point between website analytics and email marketing, automated email lifecycle marketing allows you to “hyper-segment” your email lists based on real-time information on list subscribers station in your sales funnel, interests, motivations, and other critical behavioral factors that can drastically increase the effectiveness of your email marketing. What is lifecycle email... Read More

By 2014, online gift card sales are slated to hit $5.86 billion in revenue. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 29% over the next several years, according to Javelin Strategy and Research. E-commerce, retail, and hospitality companies regularly use gift card sales as a way to drum up revenue during peak holiday seasons. Now gift cards have gone digital, and because of the relative ease to develop and send online gift cards and the ability to drive incremental sales, they’re becoming increasingly popular with B2C companies. Restaurants in particular are making a renewed push towards... Read More

Only 33% of B2B marketers say that they have an effective lead nurturing process. According to a 2011 DemandGen report, 67% of all B2B companies are scrambling to introduce new leads into their sales cycle, creating a chaotic situation and impairing effective lead response. A systematized process that moves prospects through the sales funnel isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessity for companies to grow. Even more so, a lack of a systematic lead nurturing process wastes resources by tying up a company’s most important asset for sales: the sales team. To add insult to injury, there’s... Read More

19 hours. That’s the average amount of time that passes between the moment when an online abandoner first visits your page to when they finally make a purchase. A whopping 20% abandoners wait 3 days or more. These numbers, from the National Mail Order Association, present a very interesting view of the problem of shopping cart abandonment. When we did our blog post on conversion optimization a short while back, we mentioned “not ready to buy” as one of the leading causes of abandonment, and today we’ll look at what it means to abandon a cart and what to do about it. Before we’re an... Read More

Two items in the news recently have focused the debate about privacy and its role in online marketing communications. The first: Google’s plan to move to a unified privacy policy across its services. The second: a very interesting article in the New York Times which discusses the way Target uses behavioral analytics to market pregnancy and baby products by statistically determining when (anonymous) women were likely to be pregnant. Read more about that here. The Google news has sparked controversy because of the move from individual privacy policies for each service, to a blanked policy... Read More

For years, email marketing professionals have been pounding the drum of personalization. But according to a July 2011 article in DM News, conventional wisdom may be wrong again. The most unexpected finding was that emails with a personalized subject line underperformed generic subject lines by just about 75%, seeming to undermine everything most people thought they knew about email. Generic subject lines were opened at a rate of 11%, while personalized subject lines were opened at just 4%. That’s a huge discrepancy. Even in our testing across dozens of clients, we’ve seen similar... Read More

In today’s business environment, there are three types of marketers: 1.  Those who think the QR code is the greatest marketing invention since the television commercial and will solve any problem, 2.  Those who think QR codes are a complete waste of time, and 3.  Those who realize that you can never have too many tools in your toolbox, provided you use them properly. What is a QR code? A QR code is one of those odd-looking square bar codes you may have seen cropping up all over the place. The technology has been around for a while now, but only in the last year or so has it gained enough... Read More