E-mail Marketing Industry Benchmarks: Highest Open Rate in Q1 2013 Since 2006

The Q2 2013 E-mail Trends and Benchmarks Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month and it showed some interesting trends.

The first quarter of this year saw the highest average open rate (31.3 percent) since at least 2006. It was also the largest quarter-over-quarter jump (14 percent) in opens that we've seen. In second quarter, the open rate dropped but it's still the second highest we've seen (28.5 percent), suggesting that the upward trend in open rates will continue.

The real surprise for me here was the click-through rate. After reaching 5.1 percent in the first quarter, a boost of 13 percent over the fourth quarter of last year, it's down to 4.3 percent. This is a 16 percent loss over first quarter and the lowest click-through rate we've seen since at least 2006. Prior to 2012, the industry average was consistently 5 percent or higher. I was hoping the click-through rate would stabilize, but the slide continues.

Full story

Is Amazon's New Small Business Lending Service The Right Choice For Your Business?

Amazon seems to have branched out into every business imaginable. So last year’s news that the company would be offering loans to its online sellers wasn’t too surprising. After all, Amazon is often considered the Wal-Mart of the Internet, and Wal-Mart has broken into the lending business, as well.

For Amazon sellers, the loans are welcome in the face of repeated rejection from other lenders. Designed to show its support of the many sellers in its marketplace, the lending program was offered to merchants. Loans are provided through Amazon Capital Services, Inc. and are meant to serve as an alternative source of funding for those sellers who are unable to secure funding through traditional lenders.

Full story 

3 Counterintuitive Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing

Sometimes we get stuck in the same email marketing ways and don't necessarily take a step back to assess campaigns. We get focused on growing our lists as fast as possible and keep mailing large lists as much as we can. We never stop to second guess some of our practices and then we wonder why open rates are declining, inbox rates are poor, and revenue is dismal.

Below are three tips to boost your email marketing results. Some may seem counterintuitive, but give them some thought and you might be surprised by how your email marketing efforts start to shape up.

Unsubscribing is great

As email marketers, we should make it as easy as possible to allow our subscribers to unsubscribe. You're not going to win over anybody by making them take 10 steps to unsubscribe.

Read Full story 

Driving Loyalty With Customer-Centric Marketing

There are two contrasting approaches to marketing—customer centric and product centric. Product-centric marketing focuses on what's being sold; campaigns are organized by product. Currently, product-centric marketing dominates the marketing landscape. But customer-centric marketing, which begins with analyzing customer behavior and deciding which customers to target, is a powerful and underutilized alternative that is key to building customer loyalty.

Both approaches are useful. When a company introduces a new product or its warehouse is overflowing with inventory, marketers roll out product-centric direct marketing campaigns featuring those products. Customer-centric marketing is a newer skill with far fewer practitioners and a less well understood methodology, despite its many advantages. Here are the components of that methodology.

Targeting

If the focus is on the customer, the place to start is deciding which customers to target. The product-centric extreme is a “spray-and-pray” campaign targeting everyone with the same message and offer. More sophisticated segment targeting can be either product centric (find potential buyers for our new widgets) or customer centric (target customers who have recently visited our website).

Read Full story 

Brand Building Through Mergers And Acquisitions

Relationships are becoming more one on one; communications are becoming faster and more frequent; customer loyalty cycles are becoming shorter – and yet organizations, returning to merger mode after the global financial crisis, are scaling to breathtaking size. The dichotomy between the intimacy with which customers are looking for and the footprint that companies are generating in order to, supposedly, reach those individuals more efficiently is glaring.

My awareness of this incongruity sprang from a conversation recently about the mega merger of Omnicom and Publicis. We were talking through how such a merger would probably be great for the agencies’ biggest clients but might read as a signal to depart for the many that would now fall below the horizon of attention. Imagine how much clout you’re going to have as a marketing client with even a few million to spend in a Group that will be billing around $23 billion? Imagine how difficult it is for a company of that scale to deliver communications that feel one on one?

Full Story

5 Direct Marketing Mistakes and how to Avoid Them

Long gone are the days of mass mailing cheesy, generic postcards—or so we hope. The modern marketer uses direct marketing as an enticement to spark interest and get a response. It's definitely an effective tool, but starting a campaign with a bland, general mailing can be costly and annoying to customers.  

Here are five common mistakes and ways you can avoid them:  

1) Going too broad

Not properly segmenting your audience is like throwing darts while wearing a blindfold. It hurts your brand when customers receive irrelevant promotional materials.

Instead: Identify and target your ideal customers by delivering your marketing message using the right channels at the right time. For example, if you want to capture the Gen Y market, find them on Facebook, but if you're after the older, more tech-savvy male audience then go to Google+. If you're doing email marketing, make sure your list is clean with updated information and stay away from mass mailing. Rely on your in-house list as those are the people who opted-in and have already shown an interest in your company. Better yet, allow customers to pick their preferred method of correspondence whether it's by phone, email, postal mail, or social media. 

Full story

Digital is key to brand building

At the IAB’s annual Engage conference, representatives from companies including Unilever, Microsoft and Yahoo, talked about how they were using digital media to establish ongoing relationships in an ‘always on’ world.

Jay Altschuler, Unilever’s director of global media innovation, told attendees the FMCG giant aimed to be a people-centric company and that digital, and mobile in particular was at the core of its communications strategy.

Meanwhile, Ross Honey, Microsoft’s general manager for Xbox Advertising, said content-personalisation will be a key area of focus in the online services giant’s marketing of the Xbox One, which launches next month.     

Also speaking at the event was IAB chairman, Richard Eyre, who said companies need to focus on becoming people-centric brands, not revenue-driven ones.

He said: “For brand marketers, technology has made a 1:1 relationship with customers a reality. The most important value for brands to pursue is trust, because if you don’t have that, then customers won’t let you use their data.

Read Full Story