We have talked a lot about not relying on open-rates as a final metric for judging the effectiveness of your email campaign. We have always stressed using rigorous and conclusive numbers, like revenue per email or conversions per email. However, at the end of the day, if your email isn’t opened, then your recipients aren’t converting, and your revenue per email is non existent. So email open rates are important to keep track of, right? Right, but email open rates are more important for the trends they show than for the actual numbers themselves. As long as opens are going up relative to... Read More

Studies indicate that email subject lines are the third most important factor for subscribers opening your emails. Between 45-50% of people open emails because of the subject line. The only two factors more important, in fact, are who the sender is and whether the subscriber has found your emails to be of interest in the past. You can’t really do anything about who the emails are coming from, other than tweak your sender name — as your emails come from you. And if you’ve done done everything you can to provide useful, timely, and relevant content to your users (the alternative is... 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

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