Shakespeare said “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But would an email about that rose, by any other name, get as many opens or clicks? Having solved most of the technical issues with email, from deliverability to getting videos to play in the inbox, email marketers are starting to slowly turn their attention to the linguistics of a great email campaign. Once the provenance of academics and zealous editors and copywriters, statisticians and analysts are jumping on board to find an effective and meaningful application of linguistics and word choice on the behavior of... Read More

Pundits have been heralding the “death of email” for over a decade now. Ever since Facebook opened up to the public, certainly. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t happened, and in fact, email has seen increases in use by marketers in the recent past. Not only does email marketing still represent the best ROI of any marketing medium (with returns like $40 for each $1 spent), but it continues to lead the way for e-commerce stores both for driving direct sales and branding. Case in point, InternetRetailer.com recently ran a case study about clothing retailer, April Cornell, driving sales with... Read More

Over ten years ago now, we had an idea: with all of the data clients were collecting about customers and their behavior, maybe they could use some of it to personalize their email. Today, various forms of behavioral based personalization and targeting have become more widespread –all based on a common principle: your customers know what they want from your brand much better than you do. It’s great to see that after all these years, marketers are moving away from stale, more academic models of how ideal consumers are “supposed” to react and replacing them with constantly changing... Read More

In our last post on How to Optimize Email Send Times, we talked about the set-up and planning stages of running a marketing experiment. From choosing a basic methodology, to selecting your experiment group, to deciding on success metrics, you now have all of the basic tools to design and set up a marketing experiment. In this blog installment, we’ll walk through building out and running the experiment, using one we ran for a client recently as an example. First Thing is First… Or is it? We recently helped a client, a major women’s cataloger & retailer, determine if changing the... Read More

We recently wrote about optimizing send frequency for email marketing, and got a lot of positive feedback from all of customers and blog readers. To build on that, we wanted to answer one of the top questions on many email marketer’s mind: When should I send my marketing emails? The answer is actually pretty simple: Best practices help, but we, and most likely even you, just don’t know. The problem with asking questions about individual companies is that, as we’ve mentioned before, individual companies vary so greatly that making an across-the-board pronouncement is as ineffective or... Read More

We’ve discussed using email marketing as a way to automate the lead nurturing process. But how do you figure out if those leads that are cycling through the top of the funnel are worthwhile to your company? Simply put, you would need to develop an effective lead scoring process. But First, What is Lead Scoring? Lead scoring is a method of assigning a point based relative value to each prospect that comes into your sales funnel. A set of criteria is assigned points, and those points are attributed by matching each piece of criteria with the qualifiers that a lead shows. These numbers do one... Read More