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

At MarketTraq, we make it a priority to find the most effective email practices for producing client revenue. The following is a list of our best tips. Enjoy. 1. Make sure your email offers the subscriber value. Answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Focus on what you’re offering them, not on what you’re telling them. 2. Make sure your email is anticipated. Are your subscribers expecting your email? If so, what frequency and which format (HTML/text)? 3. Make sure your email is relevant. Does it answer the question… “Who cares?” customize email content, imagery, and... 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

If you’ve read our blog post on how Selltis, a CRM software company, you’ll know how they used the M-Connect API to make their CRM a full-featured marketing solution and add tremendous value for their existing customers. Today, we’re going to look at another solution built on top of the M-Connect API to make an existing product even better. This time, it’s the local online marketing platform SimplyEngage. So what is SimplyEngage? According to Founder Ed Vincent, SimplyEngage is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that allows local businesses, franchises, and other multi-unit... Read More

There’s a new kid in town, and she’s taking the social media world by storm. Pinterest, a virtual pinboard, has retailers and other marketers very excited about about the potential cross-channel marketing opportunities of this powerhouse of a social platform that’s already been ranked by Mashable as the third largest social network. A Brief History Pinterest emerged in early 2010, but it wasn’t until early 2012 – after its SXSW Interactive debut – that it started gaining traction among users –and rapidly. The social site operates on the basis of collecting,... 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

Not everyone is a marketer. Even fewer people are email marketers. This was the dilemma facing Selltis, an industry-leading Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) software company. Selltis recognized that email marketing could be a great addition to any salesman’s arsenal of tools, if it could be made simple, easy and intuitive enough to be integrated into existing sales tools. Combining email marketing with the sales process would also get them one step closer to their philosophy of “Closed Loop” sales, one of the key tenets of which is minimizing the space between the marketing... Read More