How to Get Your Emails Read
Email marketing, when executed properly, has been known to deliver impressive results. One important factor in email marketing is that it is not very expensive when compared to traditional mass marketing means. The CMO Council notes that email marketing accounts for 15% of SMB marketing spend. Small to medium sized businesses often have limited budgets, so they need to choose marketing communications mediums where they will get the best return on marketing investment. With email having the potential to be a cost effective medium, what are some ideas that brand marketers can use to get their emails read. Earlier Read More
Why Brands Should Not Pass on Local Customization
The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament will begin in earnest on Thursday, but the field of teams was chosen yesterday. The tournament is a noteworthy event in the annual cultural calendar, particularly in places where college basketball is closely followed by a significant portion of the population. This represents a tremendous opportunity for brand advertisers in all industries, including distributed marketing brands in insurance and financial services. Experian has compiled data and released research findings about the cultural significance of the tournament. According to Experian, the men’s tournament will reach nearly 20% of adults age 18 or over. This is an Read More
Why People Think Mobility = Survivability
Every day, there seems to be some sort of new stat that amazes me about how relevant smartphones are to the population at large. The latest evidence of this comes in the form of an article on Mashable entitled “85% of Smartphone Users Would Rather Give Up Water Than Mobile Apps.” In the article, we learn that Apigee conducted a survey of 762 smartphone users in 5 different countries and apparently 85% of this sample indicated that high degree of importance the smartphone has in their life. This seems astonishing to me because any junior high life science class tells Read More
Marketers To Upgrade Email Marketing Software In 2013
A recent survey conducted by The CMO Council found that almost 50% of marketers are looking to implement new Email Marketing Software in 2013. One reason for this is that marketers have moved beyond simplistic email marketing features and are now needing more sophisticated solutions. Investing additional marketing dollars in email marketing is certainly justified as it still ranks among the most effective and inexpensive direct marketing channels. In fact, a recent 2012 survey conducted by BtoB Magazine found that 59% say email is the most effective channel for generating leads. Three primary drivers for this email marketing retooling are: Read More
Survey Findings Point To Distributed Marketing Platform
The CMO Council recently released its findings from a survey it had conducted after gathering insight from over 550 marketing executives as to their plans for 2013. Many of the findings were inline with expectations but a few were surprising. One thing is clear, a multi-channel distributed marketing platform with permission management capabilities appears to align nicely with marketers needs in 2013. A summary of those findings are below: Marketers feel there is still misalignment and somewhat of an adversarial relationship between marketing and sales but that improvement was made last year. However, marketers feel that the relationship between marketing Read More
Big Data’s Key Ingredient: A Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing Platform
The buzz around the term “Big Data” is almost deafening and is now on course to be as overused as the glorious, all-encompassing “Cloud”. That being said, the hype and buzz around Big Data and its impact on the marketing world is certainly not without serious merit. As with most new buzz terms, the definition of Big Data depends upon who you ask. Some define Big Data using quantifiable terms such as achieving a certain data size limit. Others use relative terms, classifying Big Data as when an organization’s data becomes too big, moves too fast or becomes too complex Read More
New Research on Driving Revenue via Email
Gleanster Research recently published a new report titled Deep Dive: Email Marketing in the Distributed Enterprise. A PDF of the entire report is available for free download, but here are five email marketing best practices for marketers who work in companies with a distributed marketing model. In a study that showed that 76% of marketers use 3 or more technology solutions, top performers were twice as likely as everyone else to use a central marketing platform that manages email marketing best practices for corporate and local/partner campaigns. “Internal” communication — between corporate marketing and the “external” distributed marketing and sales Read More
4 Top Strategies to Drive Revenue & Cut Costs
If you’re like most marketers, chances are you have a clear mandate to drive more revenue while lowering your cost per lead. How do you do that? Sure, everyone knows that online marketing (social, email, digital, search, content) can be less expensive than traditional marketing communications channels, but online marketing costs are rising, too. In fact, if you work in some industries — like insurance, financial services, health care, the legal profession, or high technology — the costs for the most popular keywords used in search marketing are increasing so rapidly that even big brands are feeling the squeeze. Take Read More
Pinning Email to Pinterest for Faster ROI
Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site, far outstripping other recent entries into the social media sweepstakes. But Pinterest isn’t for everyone. People either love it or hate it. Forbes blogger David Coursey called it “Facebook with training wheels” in a recent article in which he said that Facebook’s purchase of Instagram would kill Pinterest. The same day, CNBC aired a story titled “Why Pine for the Pinterest Customer? They’re Worth More.” Here are three of the comments that business owners or marketers made during the CNBC segment: “Customers who come to (our) website from Pinterest have a 70 percent larger ticket Read More
Five Steps to Reviving B2B Email Results
When did you last open an unsolicited e-mail and think “Hey, this is really useful?” When did you last actually download the pictures for an unsolicited e-mail? There are those who make pretty convincing arguments that B2B email marketing is a dying art. I’m not one of them, although from a personal angle, I’ve seen more than my share of email campaigns that seem to be intent on killing it. The problem is that marketers have over-killed email marketing by getting it wrong, by thinking that because it was cheap, it was the best way “in” to a new prospect. And Read More
