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

Following Best Practices is virtually always a good idea, and email is no exception. There are a staggering number of emailers who don’t execute some of the most fundamental email marketing best practices — still conducting the lowest common denominator of “batch and blast” that might have worked in the email marketing strategies of yesteryear, but doesn’t work today. In the same vein, even the best marketers sometimes hang on to ideas that have become outdated and “corporate legends” about what works that are no longer valid or relevant. Parsing which are dogma, and which... Read More

“Enough is enough.” It’s a simple, intuitive colloquialism that seems to make sense to everyone, especially as it relates to email marketing. After all, everyone knows subscribers, prospects, and customers are annoyed by an overabundance of email messages. …Or Does It? Uncommon Sense Prevails. As is often the case in direct marketing, common sense turns out to be wrong. My friends at DMNews point out an interesting fact: Q2 of 2011 saw less emails sent than Q1 without any noticeable increases in opens or click rates. “Mailing less,” doesn’t necessarily mean your subscribers... Read More

The way to a Boomer’s wallet is through their mailbox – just not the one at the end of their driveway. As a demographic that pre-dates the Internet, Baby Boomers have historically been targeted through direct mail, television and radio advertising. But are marketers ignoring this segment as a viable target for online marketing efforts? Many marketers view GenX and GenY as the two groups most responsive to online marketing Understandably so, since these two demographics have spent a majority of their lifetime online. But as a group that’s rising rapidly in prominence and importance... Read More

Email marketing is a perfect weapon for non-profits when used wisely. While for-profit companies benefit from direct product sales and bottom line results, non-profits can get a huge lift from their ability to send just-in-time and targeted news and appeals. Before we dive in further, though, let’s identify the differences between a for-profit and a non-profit. The obvious main goal of a for-profit is increasing the bottom line by increasing revenue and increasing margins. Yet, non-profits rarely sell things. Instead their revenues come from donations for which there’s no “brown box”... Read More

A battle is brewing between marketers. In the red corner, weighing in at “The way things have been done”, is email marketing. In the blue corner, and weighing in at “Could work, but has yet to demonstrate strong, consistent, steady returns”, the new kid on the block, social media! It’s gearing up to be one heck of a fight, but does it have to? Well, let’s look at the numbers and we’ll see what kind of conclusions we can reach. . Right now, if Facebook were to declare sovereignty and take all of it’s users with it, it would become the third... Read More