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

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

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

Is Bigger Better? When it comes to your email list the answer is that it’s less important than having a well managed and growing list. Short term growth accomplished with low value subscribers (folks that really don’t want your email) is very unlikely to create much value. But what makes a good email list, and how do you get your hands on one? Those are excellent questions, but because of time and space limitations, we’ll break them down into two parts. First we’ll look at the how to build a great email list, and in the next installment we’ll go through and sort your list out to see... Read More