email | Internet Marketing Blog

10 great email marketing infographics

I've rounded up ten infographics on email marketing, covering delivery times, email landing pages, mobile email and more.

Where possible, I've added the infographics to this post in a readable size, but for others you can click on the image to see a larger version...

by Graham Charlton 19 August 2011 11:19am 12 comments

Using targeting and segmentation for email marketing

Targeting and segmentation methods for email marketing are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex.

If you are “in the business” it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the “how” rather than the “why” and the “when” and forgetting what the whole point of the exercise is.

In this piece, I’ll seek to bring things back to basics; it’s no good having the answers, if you’ve forgotten what the question was.

by Tim Roe 30 June 2011 13:03pm 5 comments

Start me up! A profile of email sentiment service Chorus

Chorus is a startup based in Australia which takes sentiment monitoring to another level by allowing customer support teams, marketing departments and PR professionals to analyse and prioritise the emails they receive.

It helps internal structures and processes to focus on the negative issues first, meaning that customer experience is managed on an intelligent basis, according to severity.

We caught up with Dave Trindall, one of the co-founders, to discuss sentiment monitoring, delivering excellent customer service, the problems with current email systems and, of course, Chorus itself.

by Jake Hird 16 June 2011 13:08pm 0 comments

20 reasons why customer service is broken

Social media gives big companies the fear because it is an unpoliced environment where bad noise travels fast. And increasingly consumers are using it to say all kinds of things about brands, and also to aim direct questions at them (in public).

In many cases these companies aren’t remotely geared up to deal with questions, and they would much rather communicate with customers in private.

But here’s why customers do their complaining in public: it’s easier. It’s really that simple. People don’t mind bitching out loud, and sometimes they take a little comfort from it, but if customer service wasn’t so broken in the first place I think customers wouldn’t be so quick to resort to the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

by Chris Lake 19 May 2011 11:36am 23 comments

Email and social media dominate digital in the Middle East

Digital marketing is thriving in the Middle East, according to new research published today by Econsultancy and supported by ArabianBusiness.com. The survey-based research has found that companies are spending 22% of their marketing budget on digital.

Companies are using a wide range of digital channels for marketing, and investment in online is expected to increase across the board. Encouragingly, over half of companies (58%) are increasing their digital budgets in 2011.

However, the market is still very much in its infancy, and still faces major barriers to investment. Company culture, a reliance on traditional marketing, and a lack of knowledge are preventing companies from investing further money into digital.

This post looks at the current state of digital marketing in the Middle East, and some of the trends covered in our latest report.

by Aliya Zaidi 12 April 2011 08:00am 7 comments

Groupon: your email marketing is failing your fans

Over the past 12 months, a lot has been said of email becoming a one-to-one channel, with many industry evangelists crying out to marketers to start segmenting a little more, and claiming that spray and pray senders will be perceived as nothing more than spam.

But did we manage to successfully communicate the severity of the situation and the benefits of change, as an industry? I’m not so sure we did, and Groupon is a prime example of a brand that would greatly benefit from this.

by Philip Storey 11 April 2011 09:59am 19 comments

The five stages of the email lifecycle

Email is a bit of a special medium. Most people have got an email address that is unique to them, which makes it more in common with a mobile phone number than a postal address.

An email address is individual (most of the time) and it can be linked closely to the customer lifecycle using response data alongside RFM data.

This lifecycle can be tracked, measured, anticipated and managed. Here are some ideas on how you can use the stages of the lifecycle to develop strategies that prolong the relationship with your customer and increase LTV.

by Tim Roe 05 April 2011 11:36am 9 comments

Please don’t go! The art of the email opt out

Recently marketers and consumers alike have been enjoying the creative element behind Groupon’s unsubscribe campaign ‘Punish Derrick’.

If you click on the unsubscribe link, it then it leads you to a page which enables you to punish the person who has been sending you your emails, Derrick.

by Richard Lees 11 March 2011 12:06pm 10 comments

Email break-ups aren’t so very hard to do

“It’s not you, it’s me. Actually no, it is you. You keep sending me boring, irrelevant emails that I don’t want. Our email relationship was going really well at the beginning but now its fizzled out and I’m unsubscribing from your emails. For one thing, you just send me way too much. It comes across a bit...desperate."

As an email marketer, does reading this make you cringe? Are you afraid this is what your email subscribers would say to you if they had the chance?

The unsubscribe process doesn’t have to be as painful as a “Dear John” break-up letter, but with the way some brands go about it, it might as well be.

by Margaret Farmakis 28 February 2011 10:26am 0 comments

13 tips: the science of email marketing

For those of you who missed it (and with 20,000 people registering for it I’m not sure who that may be) Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella’s “The Science of Email Marketing” was a reminder that testing and optimization are a core best practice which will ultimately drive the success of any email initiative.

Not that the webinar was focused on testing. Instead, takeaways were presented with the caveat “this may or may not be the case for you” ... which is another way of saying “test it and see what happens.”

by John Gibb 15 February 2011 18:34pm 9 comments