Email Marketing Articles
January 30th, 2013 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By RIeva Lesonsky
Are your email marketing messages optimized for mobile? They’d better be. According to the latest Return Path global bi-annual mobile email report, 37 percent of U.S. respondents surveyed now open their email on mobile devices, compared with the 30 percent opening them through webmail in a browser. The percentage of emails opened on mobile devices has increased 300 percent since 2010 and shows no sign of slowing down, says the report. Here’s some more of what you need to know:
Platform matters: While Android mobile phones still dominate in the U.S., Apple device users are more likely to open and read email on a mobile device than any other group. Although Windows Mobile saw an 85 percent increase in email opens since April 2012, it still accounts for just 0.3 percent of total email opens on smartphones.
Industry variation: Certain industries’ emails are more likely to get opened on a mobile device than others. The retail (40 percent), consumer product (40 percent) and real estate (38 percent) industries lead the way.
Is it safe? The information being sent via email is also a concern. For example, banking-related emails were less likely to be opened on mobile devices due to security worries.
Desktops aren’t obsolete…yet: Users check email more often on a desktop than on a mobile device during the day. I’d surmise that’s probably because they are sitting in front of their computers at work, but as more workplaces incorporate tablets into the work day, the desktop is likely to become less and less dominant.
Mobile sitting still: It’s a myth that mobile purchasing is taking place out of home. Just 22 percent of mobile purchases take place on the go; 18 percent occur at work and more than half (51 percent) take place at home. Your customers are more likely to be opening that email in bed or on the couch than in the car, so keep that in mind when designing your message.
If you doubt optimizing email for mobile matters, keep these facts in mind: Return Path found that email marketing messages drive twice as many conversions as social media or search. In addition, the average order value is higher on mobile devices, whether tablet or smartphone. However, since even those who open their emails on mobile devices still make most of their purchases on the desktop, you need to make sure your emails are optimized for both platforms.
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January 22nd, 2013 :: Maria Valdez Haubrich
By Maria Valdez Haubrich
How does your small business’s marketing budget for 2013 compare to that of your competitors? A new survey by StrongMail has some insights. Overall, businesses are bullish on marketing for 2013, with a total of 89 percent saying they will either increase or maintain their level of marketing spending in the coming year. (Some 45 percent will increase their marketing budgets and 44 percent will keep them the same.)
Email marketing, social media and mobile marketing will be the main focus of investment this year. More than half (55.5 percent) of marketing executives report plans to spend more on email marketing campaigns in 2013; 51.8 percent say they will spend more on social media; 42.8 percent say they will increase spending on mobile marketing; and 39.8 percent will boost spending on search marketing.
Two-thirds of the companies in the survey report they will spend more on mobile marketing programs such as mobile apps (39 percent) and SMS alerts (21 percent). Overall, mobile marketing spending will increase by 11 percent compared to 2012.
When it comes to social media, where are marketers putting most of their efforts? Facebook dominates, with 60 percent of businesses saying Facebook is the most valuable social media channel for them. Twitter and YouTube ranked second and third, respectively. Google and Pinterest were somewhere in the middle, cited by 31 percent of marketers, while Yelp, Instagram and LinkedIn brought up the rear.
Email is a strong area of growth for marketers, who plan to use it for a variety of purposes this year. While at one point some experts were predicting that social media would make email obsolete, marketers are figuring out email’s value in growing their social media presence and customer engagement. That’s reflected in the 46 percent who say they will spend more on emails to drive growth to their social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter. In addition, 38.8 percent will spend more on promotional emails, and 34.7 percent will spend more on email newsletters.
Where aren’t marketers spending? Direct mail, trade show participation and traditional advertising will take the biggest hits. Some 37.4 percent report they plan to cut spending on direct mail, 33.6 percent will cut back on trade show spending and 23 percent will decrease spending on advertising in 2013.
You can view a PDF of the full survey results here.
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January 8th, 2013 :: Karen Axelton
By Karen Axelton
While social media may get all the buzz in the marketing world, when it comes to boosting ecommerce sales, statistics show that email is still more effective. Data from trade organization the Direct Marketing Association show that email outperforms social media advertising by three to one when measured in sales per advertising dollar spent. This year alone, during the key Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, the number of online shoppers who bought something after visiting an ecommerce site from a social networking site declined by 26 percent compared to 2011, IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported. On both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, “social sales” accounted for less than 0.5 percent of all online sales.
How can you make your email marketing messages more effective?
- Target your messages. A generic email blast about a sale won’t be as effective as specific emails targeted to different consumer groups based on their behavior. You can target emails based on what consumers have done in the past (such as past purchases) or what they’ve browsed on your site recently.
- Whet shoppers’ appetites. Limited-time offers still work well to drive shoppers from your email message to your website. “Today Only,” “Just 3 Hours Left” or other subject lines that convince customers they’d better act now are a good way to get shoppers to click through.
- Use landing pages. Be sure when shoppers click through your emails they don’t just go to your home page. Create a landing page designed for that specific email that includes strong calls to action to persuade customers to act. For instance, an email touting a sale on children’s clothing should go directly to your children’s clothing sale page.
- Don’t let shopping carts sit abandoned. Many customers put items in their shopping carts, then don’t check out. Set triggered emails to remind customers of their waiting items or update them when a price has changed on something in their cart.
- Use cookies and online advertising. Use cookies to track customer activity on your site. Then when customers browse your site, you can serve up ads later on unrelated sites for the products they viewed on yours. This is a great tactic to keep your website and your products top-of-mind until customers are ready to buy.
- Be aggressive about retaining your email list. Instead of a simple “unsubscribe” option, consider offering a range of choices on your unsubscribe page. For instance, some e-tailers ask customers if they’d like to see the emails less often, such as once a month instead of once a week. You can even set up your unsubscribe to ask customers if they want to take a break (such as three months off) from emails before receiving them again.
Image by Flickr user Jonathon Narvey (Creative Commons)
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Tags: ecommerce, Email marketing, Marketing, small business, Technology
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December 12th, 2012 :: Maria Valdez Haubrich
Buckaroo
For businesses looking to attract local customers but wanting to avoid the costly fees charged by daily deal providers, Buckaroo offers a do-it-yourself daily deal alternative. It’s free to create your ad on Buckaroo, and if you want to send an email to your local market, that’s where the fees come in. Send to 10,000 subscribers for only $100, 20,000 subscribers for $200 and so on. There are no hidden fees, and unlike some daily deal sites, merchants keep 100 percent of the money made in sales.
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December 10th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
How can your small business reach the elite group of high-achieving small companies? Online marketing is the key, suggests a new Forrester research study commissioned by Act-On Software. In the face of continuing economic uncertainty, the study, “Driving Revenue in a Volatile Economy, found that the top-performing small businesses are those that truly embrace online marketing.
The study identified these lessons small businesses can take from top performers and large companies:
- Don’t automatically cut your marketing budget in a down economy. Top performers were less likely than bottom performers to cut their marketing budgets (33 percent vs. 56 percent). On the contrary, top performers prove that maintaining or increasing marketing spending does pay off in terms of revenues.
- Take lead generation seriously. The top-performing small businesses carefully manage sales leads, vetting, qualifying and nurturing them before handing them off to sales to close. They were also willing to spend more to get new leads, while bottom performers spent their time and money trying to squeeze new sales from existing customers.
- Adopt digital marketing techniques. All small businesses in the study focused primarily on traditional marketing techniques, such as print advertising, tradeshows, events and seminars. However, top performing businesses were more likely to have adopted digital marketing tactics and technology tools to help scale their marketing efforts.
- Get serious about social marketing. While larger businesses are realizing that “social media” is not just an abstract tool for generating buzz, small businesses are lagging behind in developing a social media strategy and making social media part of the sales pipeline.
- Increase collaboration between sales and marketing. By working together, these teams can drive leads more effectively and close more sales.
- Invest in marketing automation. Companies that automated marketing functions had better results. For example, 61 percent of top performers used CRM vs. just 46 percent of bottom performers. And only 5 percent of bottom performers used marketing automation, compared to 28 percent of top performers.
- Measure results. Nearly half of the bottom performing businesses did not measure any aspect of their marketing. In contrast, top performers measured everything.
Visit Act-On’s website for a free ebook, 7 Marketing Habits of Today’s Highly Successful SMBs.
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November 28th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
If you’re like many small businesses—and especially retailers this time of year—sending out emails is a huge part of your marketing strategy. But how can you ensure your emails get opened, and clicked on, among the deluge of messages swamping recipients’ inboxes? Email marketing provider GetResponse analyzed some 21 million U.S. email marketing messages and has some useful advice about the best—and worst—times to send emails. Here’s what they found:
Retailers’ newsletters and emails are far more likely to be opened in the first hour after delivery than at any time afterwards. In the second hour, results drop by half; in the third hour, they drop by another 30 percent; and in 5 hours they dwindle by 90 percent.
Open and click rates vary widely depending on the time of day. Recipients’ top engagement times are 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Ideally, you want your email to land in the inbox one hour before these times for maximum attention and results. Sending newsletters during readers’ top engagement times can increase your average open rates and click-through rates by 6 p.m.
However, the study also found that messages sent in the afternoons and evenings were the most likely to be opened or clicked. Although morning is a top engagement time, it’s also the time when most emails are sent, so your email could be more likely to get lost.
There are other factors to keep in mind:
- Time zones. Use time zone segmentation so an email you want to hit inboxes at 9 a.m. arrives at the appropriate time for the recipient’s time zone.
- Know your recipients’ routines. For instance, if you send an email to a busy mom at 3 p.m. when she’s picking up the kids from school, it’s likely to sit in the in-box until homework, dinner, bathtime and bedtime are over….several hours later.
- Know what your competitors are doing. Learn from big companies in your industry by watching when they send their emails and testing similar timing.
- Track results. What works for the competition might not work for you—or you might want to try something “counterintuitive.” You need to assess your open and click-through rates and test different times to see what works for your business.
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November 9th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
U.S. retailers have high hopes for the upcoming holiday shopping season, and are spending accordingly on their marketing programs to make sure they grab their share. According to a new survey from Retail Systems Research and Bronto Software, more than 20 percent of U.S. retailers say they plan to significantly increase their spending on mobile, social or email marketing channels this year. An additional 22 percent will slightly increase their marketing budgets.
Overall, retailers are very optimistic about the coming holiday, with 68 percent projecting their sales to increase compared to last year. Of those, almost one-fourth believe that their sales will increase by over 50 percent.
Email, mobile and social media marketing channels are all top concerns for retailers this year, with a full 20 percent of respondents planning to allocate more than half of this year’s holiday marketing budget to one or more of these channels. However, out of the three, email is by far the most important for retailers, with a whopping 87 percent using it and more than 50 percent saying they will send more marketing emails this year than they did in 2011.
To prepare for this massive email marketing push, retailers have been spending money on:
- Subscriber acquisition (46 percent)
- Automated/triggered messages (43 percent)
- Personalization (36 percent)
- Segmentation (21 percent)
Other areas where retailers have invested in the past year to improve their service and operations include:
- New email service provider (50 percent)
- Mobile applications (49 percent)
- New ecommerce platform (46 percent)
- Mobile website optimization (43 percent)
“While email is a more established channel and has inherent technologic advantages for communicating with consumers, marketers are getting ready to use mobile and social to break out of the pack,” said Joe Colopy, CEO of Bronto Software, in announcing the results.
Free shipping is the main promotional tool that retailers will use this holiday season; all of the companies surveyed say they will offer some form of free shipping. How will ecommerce retailers lure customers back to abandoned shopping carts? Some 43 percent say they will use an email message offering free shipping, and 35 percent will use percentage-off or dollar-off emails.
Although this survey focused on large retailers, knowing what tactics the “big guys” are planning for the holidays can help you determine your own business’s marketing strategy. How will you beat the giants this holiday shopping season?
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Tags: ecommerce, Email marketing, holiday 2012, retailers, small business, social media
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November 5th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
How does your small business’s digital marketing strategy measure up? A recent study from BIA Kelsey, Local Commerce Monitor Study, Wave 16 found that small businesses are expanding their digital marketing efforts. Some 40 percent of small and midsized businesses in the study say they plan to increase their digital spending budget in the next 12 months; just 3.7 percent say they plan to cut digital marketing spending.
Beyond spending more on digital marketing, small businesses are also expanding their reach into more channels. In 2007, small companies in the survey said they used an average of three media channels; in the latest survey, the average almost doubled to 5.8 channels.
Overall, small businesses’ spending on all kinds of advertising and promotion is holding steady, at about $3,000 annually. Given that limited budget, it’s probably not surprising that Facebook was the top digital channel for small businesses. More than half (52 percent) of small businesses use Facebook for marketing. By comparison, 25 percent use email marketing, about 20 percent use Google + for marketing, 17 percent use online videos for marketing and 14 percent use online ad banners. “Social media appears to be rapidly evolving into a core medium for SMB advertising and promotion,” the study reports.
While small business owners are mastering Facebook as a marketing tool, one area where they still have a long way to go is mobile marketing. Only 20 percent of small business owners had a mobile marketing strategy in place. About 50 percent have heard about mobile marketing, but either don’t know much about it or simply aren’t using it. Ready for the real shock? Thirty percent haven’t even heard of the concept of mobile marketing.
Given that local, social mobile marketing can bring huge advantages to a small business that relies on a local clientele, this knowledge gap is especially amazing. If you’re a small business owner with a community focus, you need to get your feet wet in mobile marketing or your business is going to fall behind.
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Tags: mobile marketing, small business marketing, social media, Technology, Web Design
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October 31st, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
Consumers are feeling good about the upcoming holiday season. In a new study by PriceGrabber, more than half of consumers say they plan to spend the same amount of money or more this holiday shopping season than they did last year.
But even increased spending doesn’t mean Americans are ending their price-conscious ways. On the contrary, shoppers are looking for bargains with more vigor than ever, and feeling confident in their ability to search out the deals. Two-thirds of consumers surveyed say they expect retailers to offer better prices and discounts this year than last. What will persuade them to buy? Free shipping was cited by 77 percent of respondents, price cuts by 74 percent and coupons by 55 percent.
In fact, customers are already looking for holiday bargains. “Our survey data found that … 59 percent of consumers plan to start shopping even earlier this year to spread out the impact of purchases, compared to 53 percent in 2011,” said Rojeh Avanesian, vice president of marketing and analytics of PriceGrabber. Some 17 percent of consumers started their holiday shopping in September, and 31 percent said they would begin in October this year.
Worried that means it’s already too late to get the business? Don’t be. A follow-up study by PriceGrabber found that while there are those early-birds, more than half of consumers still believe the best holiday deals are found between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Got an ecommerce site? Then you’ve got an edge: When asked where they planned to shop this year, 75 percent of respondents said “online retailers.” By comparison, just 49 percent mentioned department stores, and 41 percent said they’ll shop with local independent retailers.
Even if you don’t have an ecommerce site, you can use local search to give your retail store an edge. A whopping 88 percent of shoppers say they’ll stick to their budgets this year by going online to research products and pricing before they buy their holiday gifts.
Make sure your store is listed on local search directories, on ratings and review sites, and that you use relevant keywords on your website so it comes up in the results when potential customers search for products you sell. You might even want to consider taking out online ads such as pay-per-click or Facebook ads to direct local customers to your store.
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October 24th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
When it comes to holiday shopping, Black Friday and Cyber Monday typically grab all the headlines—but the real powerhouse this year just might be Thanksgiving Day, according to data reported by Internet Retailer.
A study by email services provider Responsys found that some 80 percent of major retailers plan to send email marketing messages on Thanksgiving Day this year, up from 76 percent last year, 60 percent in 2010 and 45 percent in 2009. That will make Thanksgiving Day the third busiest day for email, after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Last year, online shoppers spent $479 million on Thanksgiving Day, an increase of 18 percent over 2010, according to comScore stats reported in the article.
With Thanksgiving “[replacing] Black Friday as the unofficial kick-off the holiday shopping season,” as Responsys puts it, what kind of marketing messages should you send on the holiday?
Reponsys says there are two different tacks retailers typically take with Thanksgiving Day emails: one, promoting special Thanksgiving Day sales, the other, teasing Black Friday promotions or offering them a bit earlier than normal.
With some brick-and-mortar retailers opening stores on Thanksgiving last year, you don’t even have to be an ecommerce retailer to take advantage of the Thanksgiving Day trend.
Of course, there are some consumers who dislike the idea of shopping on a national holiday—but there’s even an appropriate marketing email for them: You can tell them that your store will be closed on Thanksgiving Day to honor tradition and family.
What’s behind the growth in Thanksgiving Day marketing and shopping? As you might expect, the rise of smartphones and tablets is a big factor. After the turkey is eaten and the family togetherness starts to chafe, consumers looking for digital distraction are likely to whip out their phones.
If you don’t like the idea of shopping or marketing on Thanksgiving Day, you’re really not going to like what Responsys says is the next up-and-coming trend: sending marketing emails on Christmas Day—another time when people are on the go, out of their homes and likely to get bored.
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Tags: Email marketing, holiday retail, sales process, small business
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