Archive for Email Marketing Programs
A Scrumdiddlyumptious Way to Help Small Business Grow. Email Marketing.
A powerful way for small businesses like restaurants, gyms, florists, and dentists to quickly and easily attract more customers using highly targeted email marketing programs.
Email Marketing Programs – Impact on Brand
Email marketing programs can have a very powerful impact on brand perception –and if you follow our advice, it will be a good brand perception. Market research data underscores the point that in today’s digital age it’s absolutely critical that the image you are projecting online, especially in your email programs, is an accurate reflection of your brand.
- 40% of internet users in the US changed their opinions of brands based on information they gathered online (SubscriberMail 2009)
- 50% of a survey’s respondents said they’re more likely to buy products from companies who send them Email, whether their purchases are online or at a place of business (Epsilon “Branding Survey” – Feb 2009)
- 32% of a survey respondents said they have stopped doing business with at least one company altogether as a result of its poor Email practices (Merkle – Feb 2009)
It’s obvious that the relevance of your Email marketing is a critical factor in the perception of your brand. Marketing programs with Email messaging and audience segmentation based on accurate customer profiling drive both increased conversion rates and positive brand impressions. On the other, hand irrelevant Email marketing programs can easily drive increased opt outs and negative brand impressions.
V12 Group has the tools and experience to make your Email marketing programs more relevant
Our rich database of 208 consumer records, with attributes including demographic, geographic, interests and lifestyles will make your Email marketing programs far more effective. These records are overlaid with self-reported offline data from sources like magazine subscriptions, catalog purchases, travel destinations, public real estate transfer records, and much more to create a powerfully effective database.
Our unique partnership with leading third party advertisers means we connect our offline data to over half the individuals in the U.S. They are then mapped to 196 distinct audience segments. Online data combined with off-line means you’re not dependent on IP data along. Now you’ll have “real world data” to make your brand more relevant to your prospects.
A direct marketing services firm with the highest standards
The last thing you want is for your Email marketing programs to be viewed as spam by the consumers you are trying to acquire or retain. Once you’ve been branded as a purveyor of spam it’s very hard to work your way back into that consumer’s good graces. Consumers and B2B customers hate spam. It chokes their Inboxes and eats up valuable time. There’s so much spam out there that the federal government enacted the CAN-SPAN Act in 2003 which is enforce by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The CAN-SPAM Act has seven major provisions
- There must be no false or misleading information in the header. The “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
- No deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the contents of the message.
- You must identify that the message is an ad.
- The message must include your address. This can be a current street address, a post office box, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency
- You must clearly tell recipients how to “opt out.”
- You must honor opt-out requests promptly (within 10 business days)
- Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sent the message may be held legally responsible for violations.
At V12 Group we have developed Email marketing standards that go beyond the CAN-SPAM act to guide our clients on the best practices in Email marketing programs that produce favorable results. They are:
- Full CAN-SPAM Compliance
- Immediate opt-out handling
- Strict creative guidelines to ensure proper rendering (ISP/Email reader)
- Testing that includes top email providers (AOL, Gmail, etc.)
- Complaint management and feedback loops with major ISP’s
- Ability to set-up dedicated domains and IP’s
- Standard and custom campaign reporting
In addition to these standards our highly experienced creative services team brings a unique combination of creative talent, industry best practices and state-of-the art software tools to implement creative designs that are optimized to impact your email marketing campaign’s response rates. Contact us or go to our Email Resource Center to learn more about how the V12 Group can help you to create high impact Email marketing programs
Email Marketing Programs – the Challenges
Designing an effective Email marketing program today is a complex and challenging task, but if properly designed and executed, Email marketing is still an extremely cost effective communication channel for both new customer acquisition and existing customer retention. In order to design an effective Email marketing program it’s important to understand the challenges. First and foremost, is the level of competition within the average consumer’s inbox.
The playing field
The amount of spam that consumers receive is growing constantly. Market research studies estimate that spam accounts for 45% of all Emails, and advertising related Email makes up 36% of the spam –which puts advertising related Emails at about 16.2% of all Email.
If your message gets through the spam filters, then you still have to get through an increasingly savvy prospect filter. Consumers scan subject lines in mere seconds and make determinations based on the relevancy of the sender and, especially, the subject line.
Advantage #1 – the door opener
When it comes to winning the Inbox competition, that is getting the consumer’s attention and tantalizing them enough to open the Email, the subject line is everything. The obvious challenge here is that you have to create a winning subject line with 50 characters or less. You can learn more about how to do that in our Email Resource Center. But, before your winning subject line gets into a consumer’s Inbox, in many cases it has to pass through a spam filter. So, your subject line has to not only be attention getting and motivating, but also not so obviously a promotion that it gets sucked up by a spam filter. Therefore, it is critical that when you do your subject line testing that you test from both the consumer and spam filter perspectives.
Advantage #2 – when you send
Another challenge you need to be aware of with respect to the Email component of an Email marketing program is the effect of time-of-day and day-of-the week on opens, clickthroughs and opt outs. You can find more detailed data on this in our Email Resource Center but, basically, for B2C campaigns weekends and mornings are the best times for the Email blasts.
Advantage #3 – where you send them
The Email component of an Email marketing program gets the consumer’s attention and captures the clicks, but it’s the landing page that sells the product. The big challenge here is that the typical consumer decides in about 8 seconds whether they’re going to read the landing page or click away to something else. So here again, succinct high impact messaging is critical. The number of offers is important, and also color and shape of both the message blocks and the offer buttons. All of these should be tested rigorously in order to maximize the conversion rate for your Email marketing program.
Some advertisers choose to send the prospect to the company’s homepage. We think this is usually the wrong move. If you’re selling a particular product in your lineup, send the clicks directly to a page where they can (1) see it ,(2) read more about it, and (3) be one click away from buying it.
Advantage #4 – who you work with
At V12 Group our highly experienced creative services team is committed to developing creative design that is optimized to impact your email campaign’s response rates. Contact us or go to our Email Resource Center to learn more about how the V12 Group can help you to create high impact Email marketing programs.
Extreme Email Marketing Experiment: How Much Is Too Much?
Source: Brian Massey, Conversion Science
Email marketing programs are like a marketing battery for search marketers: they store marketing potential that can be tapped later to generate sales and awareness. The most effective way to tap this resource is through targeted email marketing.
If you’re investing in search and have not considered growing your email lists for marketing from the traffic, you are probably missing a huge opportunity. When entrusted with an email address, and permission to continue the conversation, we have one, two, three or more chances to persuade a prospect to consider our offers.
When entrusted with an email address, and permission to continue the conversation, I have one, two, three or more chances to persuade a prospect to reconsider.
In business email marketing — the considered purchase — in which a decision will be made over a period of weeks or months, email is a true friend. And if it is executed with respect, it is a friend to those struggling with a purchase decision.
The question is, how many second chances am I going to take for targeted email marketing?
Read more: http://emailresourcecenter.net/blog/2011/01/13/extreme-email-experiment-how-much-is-too-much/