* * * * 4 star review
Email marketing may be out of fashion with all the talk of RSS, IMing and text messaging, but it’s as powerful and effective as ever. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there are dozens of variables to consider now that email is a mature marketing technique.
So where do you start? With MarketingSherpa’s 2006 Email Marketing Guide, of course. This is a chart and stat-filled reference from which you can glean dozens of insights. More importantly, you can create an immediate To Do list to improve your results.
Why only four stars?
It’s almost too much to digest. The guide weighs in at 282 pages and includes 310 charts and maps. It’s based on data contributed by 1,927 email marketers as well as 25 additional studies. That said, this is a hugely useful guide. I recommend it highly.
Extracting 5 keys to success
1. Your most important metrics
2. What to test
3. Growing your list
4. Design & usability tips
5. Beyond email: what you need to know
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Great article by MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland on why “exact verbiage” is so important online. I.e. the specific words you use on landing pages, in text ads, on your site, on (yes) your blog…
You need to be aware of what keyword phrases your customers search on. That translates into how you’ll be found in the search engines. And you need to be absolutely consistent in your use of words and phrases in order to get higher response rates (more click-throughs) from online readers.
People like consistency. Sounds boring. But it’s not. When the title of your sponsor text ad matches the headline on your landing page, visitors know they’re in the right place… and what to do next. Click & buy.
Hurry on over to DoubleClick’s (free) knowledge center. If you haven’t already seen it, you can download the Q4 2004 Email Trend Report released in March 2005. Highlight: the average open rate for HTML emails continues to decline. It’s now 32.6%.
In addition, DoubleClick’s director of research Rick Bruner (he also runs BusinessBlogConsulting.com) has just published a new 22-page report: The Decade in Online Advertising: 1994 - 2004. Rick has posted his favorite chart from the report here. It’s a trip through history, starting with Mosaic in 1993 and a flatline for number of Internet users and dollars of Internet ad revenue. By the end of 2004, Internet ad revenues were $9.6 billion and number of U.S. Internet users was about 170 million. Most notable stat: no medium since B&W television has penetrated U.S. households as fast as the Internet. It took only 8 years. Compared with 9 years for radio, 10 for the VCR, 17 for personal computers, 39 for cable TV and 70 for the telephone. I.e. the Internet was virtally unheard of just over a decade ago. (There’s also a good section with blog stats.) Hey Rick, a great report! Looks like your day job suits you.
That’s according to research by email vendor EmailLabs. Average read-time (yes, this is a new metric for email marketing) is a measly 15 - 20 seconds for an e-newsletter or email promotion. Useful article in MarketingSherpa explains exactly what this means and offers specific suggestions for limiting your email to one story OR one promotion in order to prompt higher click-throughs from time-strapped readers. In addition, tips for how to segment your list to see what design layout and content work best. Article is free until Jan. 23rd.
Chris Knight of Ezine-Tips is offering a free download of what he calls his “Top (70) One-Liners For Improving Your Email Deliverability.” They’re pretty straightforward but useful nonetheless. I don’t agree with every one of them. #37 is to publish “only” in ASCII plain text. Then he amends that in #38: if you publish in HTML keep the file size below 20K. 25K is a more reasonable number. He plans to sell this little PDF report for USD $47 beginning Nov. 16th. So hurry on over if you want to get it free. Sorry, as of Oct. 18th the PDF is no longer available free. The 70 tips are really a bribe to…
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