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Showing posts tagged with: relevancy

The Permission vs. Relevancy Debate: Navigating the Murky Waters of Email Append

by Karen Talavera

07 31, 2012 | Posted in Customer Loyalty, Email Lists, Email Marketing | 2 comments

Navigating the Murky Waters of Email Append There’s an ongoing debate over the role of permission in sending marketing email to customers you have a pre-existing business relationship with. Although in recent years opt-in list building practices have clearly been on the rise, there is still no clear legal mandate for opt-in as a standard email marketing practice in the US and many countries.  

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Could Inactive Email Subscribers Hurt Your Program?

by Karen Talavera

04 30, 2012 | Posted in Email Lists, Email Marketing, Multi-Channel Marketing | 7 comments

inactive email There’s a heated debate in email marketing over what to do with inactive subscribers and whether or not they can seriously  harm a sender’s reputation, deliverability and response enough to justify no longer emailing them.  The passion on both sides of this issue – the potential harmful downside of continuing to mail “inactives” juxtaposed with the potential helpful upside of keeping them on your list – makes this argument one worth taking a closer look at.  

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Email Like It’s 2012, Not 1999

by Karen Talavera

03 18, 2012 | Posted in Email Lists, Email Marketing, Marketing Vision | 0 comments

Email Like It's 2012, Not 1999Given that all things Internet seem to move at the speed of light and come or go overnight, it’s fairly impressive to see commercial email marketing approaching its fifteenth birthday. I remember first becoming involved in email in 1999 and being impressed then with what was creatively and technically possible – even though dial-up Internet connections still outnumbered broadband! Although anti-spam software and abuse-prevention delivery rules have often thwarted the channel’s technical capabilities (even since its early years - video in email was possible in 2000), there is no excuse to still be mailing like it’s 1999.  

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Email Variety is the Spice of Inbox Life

by Karen Talavera

08 15, 2011 | Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Messaging Strategy | 0 comments

Email variety like spices

photo credit: aechempati

  One of my email seminar students recently asked: “I feel like the only emails my company ever sends are sales messages: like we’re always asking people to buy, buy, buy.  Should we supplement these with other types of email and if so, what?” Don’t feel bad, lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for many marketers.  Businesses newer to email or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list. Here are just a few of the many greetings and message types you should include in your email program:  

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Social Media vs. Email Frequency: How Much is Too Much?

by Karen Talavera

07 19, 2011 | Posted in Email Marketing, Messaging Strategy, Social Media, Twitter | 0 comments

Social Media vs. Email Frequency

photo credit: katerha

This question was recently posed in a private online marketing group I belong to called Only Influencers: "If I can tweet five times a day, why can't I email five times a day?" Keep in mind Only Influencers is an invitation-only group of highly experienced and savvy digital marketers (most of the industry's "big names" in email already belong) from established and well-known brands, so they were not flippantly, but seriously, pondering the messaging norms we've come to think of as "acceptable" in different online marketing channels.  The question and the depth of discussion around it made me think, Why can't we? And if we can't or don't or won't, why not?  

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2011: Year of Marketing Alignment

by Karen Talavera

01 27, 2011 | Posted in Marketing Vision, Multi-Channel Marketing | 2 comments

Marketing alignment - holistic and working in harmony

photo credit: D.H. Parks

A little over a year ago, I theorized that 2010 would be the Year of Conscious Marketing.  And while I do think it has taken us more than a year to become conscious of how to use the increasingly fragmented and multiplying online marketing avenues available to us, 2010 certainly was a year in which the “what-how-which” and “why” finally began to gel for many business owners and marketing professionals. If 2009 was a watershed year – a year in which a lot of activity and change moved through at once – 2010 was what I called a waterfall year – all that change and activity began to come together in a cohesive flow.  Now, in 2011, it’s time to intentionally direct that flow to achieve our goals and desires.  

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Three Holiday Retail Email Marketing Lessons for Non-Retail Companies

by Karen Talavera

12 20, 2010 | Posted in Creative, Customer Loyalty, Email Marketing | 0 comments

Retail Email

photo credit: doug_wertman

If yours is a services business, B-to-B firm or solo-entrepreneurship, this time of year it can certainly seem like all the marketing focus is on retailers.  Yet just because retail eclipses other industries during the holidays doesn’t mean non-retailers can’t take a few lessons from retail marketers and employ similar strategies in their own communications, especially email. In the spirit of the season, here are three email marketing lessons non-retail businesses can swipe and deploy from holiday retail marketers.  Here’s hoping they enlighten your email for 2011!

Vary frequency and cadence seasonally

Retailers live and die by the holiday gift giving season (hence the term “black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year on which many retail businesses that haven’t yet made an annual profit will go from “being in the red” to “being in the black”).  Even before the days of e-commerce, holiday messaging was much more frequent than advertising done at other times of the year.  This increase is easy to see in the email marketing frequency of retailers, which goes from monthly or weekly to as often as weekly or daily during November and December. It may not be at holiday time, but chances are there is a period or there are seasons when it makes sense to increase your  

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Are You Pulling the Trigger? (part 3 of 3)

by Karen Talavera

11 29, 2010 | Posted in Customer Loyalty, Email Marketing, Targeting & Segmentation | 4 comments

Abandoned Cart Triggers, Trigger Based Email

Creative Commons License photo credit: FindYourSearch

If you’re just tuning into this series, Part 1 explored the difference between broadcast and triggered-email, explained the role of trigger-based email, and defined the fundamental characteristics that make it so powerful.  Part 2 took a deep dive into the first two of four must-have triggered-email campaigns no email marketing program should be without: welcome and re-marketing campaigns.  Here in Part 3, we’ll wrap things up with a look at the last two of four essential triggered-email campaigns: up-sell/cross-sell and reactivation campaigns.

The Up-Sell/Cross-Sell: Are You Leaving Money on the Table?

Too many marketers think about email campaigns as singular blasts rather than as a progression of offers and information interwoven into a conversation – a conversation designed to maximize customer lifetime value.  There are plenty of great tips for building ongoing engagement and loyalty with your list members here.  Still, if you’re thinking in terms of “one and done” campaigns, it’s time to develop an up-sell/cross-sell trigger program. Here are three types of up-sell/cross-sell triggered email campaigns to implement during or after the conversion process.  

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Are You Pulling the Trigger? (part 2 of 3)

by Karen Talavera

10 30, 2010 | Posted in Customer Loyalty, Email Marketing, Targeting & Segmentation | 0 comments

Welcome

Creative Commons License photo credit: Mooganic

If you’re just tuning into this series, Part 1 explored the difference between broadcast and triggered-email, explained the role of trigger-based email, and defined the fundamental characteristics that make it so powerful.  Here in Part 2 we’ll look at the first two of four must-have triggered-email campaigns no email marketing program should be without.

Welcome and Onboarding: Are You Saying Hello?

I like to think of email in the eyes of the recipient first and foremost as a conversation marketing channel.   

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Are You Pulling the Trigger? (part 1 of 3)

by Karen Talavera

09 28, 2010 | Posted in Email Marketing, Targeting & Segmentation | 1 comments

When I teach email marketing, I always explain that there are two main “flavors” of messages: broadcast email – a uniform message sent to everyone on the list, and triggered email – a message triggered by an event, time or action sent to a specific person for a specific reason.  Although you can segment your list and version your broadcast campaigns to specified groups with different offers and creative for say, men vs. women, the real power of personalization and relevance lies in trigger-based email. Jupiter Research* found that behaviorally-targeted trigger email campaigns get 30% higher open and click-through rates and three times the conversion rates of broadcast email (this is even higher response than tightly-segmented broadcast campaigns receive).  And if that’s not enough reason to get on board, eMarketer just reported that  

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