Email Marketing: April 2009 Archives

Email marketing offers one of the best advertising returns for any business, according to research by the Direct Marketing Association. In 2008, e-mail marketing returned $45.06 for every dollar spent on it--but industry experts say that small businesses are slow to adopt e-mail marketing practices.

The Biggest Hurdle: Getting Started

These misconceptions can be put to rest simply by knowing how to get started. Business owners should approach email marketing as just another way to open the lines of communication with customers.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3814946

From time to time we encounter a situation where we make a recommendation to a client. A short time later the client responds by saying that "legal" told them they don't need to do what we recommended or that it's OK to continue doing what they're doing.

What kind of recommendations get this response? Most recently, a recommendation to include an opt-out in an e-mail was denied because the message is technically transactional. And a recommendation to monitor the response address for a mailing was denied because "legal" says it isn't required. In one egregious case, a recommendation not to mail a list due to poor hygiene was met with insistence that they were legally allowed to do so.

This attitude is usually the result of one of two things: either a failure to consider there are multiple constituencies that should be taken into account when determining what e-mail marketing to send, or an attempt to hide behind the legal department when wanting to do something that isn't going to be popular with recipients.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3633401

Social networking site, Facebook, is used by more than 150 million people to share personal information with friends online. The site celebrated its fifth-year anniversary yesterday and is continuing to attract members with demographics that could serve e-tailers well in terms of extending market reach and increasing branding.

The Web research firm Hitwise reports that, overall, Facebook was the fifth-ranked Web site in terms of total market share of visits in January 2009. Furthermore, the time spent on Facebook has continued to increase and reached an average visit time of just over 21 minutes in January 2009.

More good news: When compared to 2008, there has been a pronounced shift in the age of the Facebook audience. According to Hitwise, visitors aged 18 to 24 represented a 42 percent share of visits for the four weeks ending Jan. 26, 2008, but have now dropped to 24 percent for the four weeks ending Jan. 24, 2009. Now visitors aged 25 to 34 make up the largest share of visits with 27 percent, with 18 to 24 and 35 to 44 closely following with respective shares of 24 percent and 23 percent.

Facebook is aware that ecommerce site owners may want to capitalize on Facebook traffic, so they allow members to create free Facebook Business pages or pay per click advertising campaigns.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/article.php/3800976

Understanding the impact of social media on our targeted email marketing campaigns opens up a new set of segments to leverage. Consider how you can split your list, not according to dollars list members individually spend, but by the collective dollars they influence others to spend (on top of their own spend). These new measurements follow the impact of a combination of reach and response. I

n the past, people who responded marginally or not at all to your list were typically the people you'd remove from your list. Today, though, those people might not individually respond but may tell others about your offer, news, or sale. They could very well become your best ambassadors.

Who are these experts, and what else did they have to say?

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3633360