50 Email Marketing Tips and Stats for 2014

Our friends over at Salesforce.com have written a ton of posts that deal with email marketing tips and tricks for your success. We thought it would be great to compile some stats, tips and suggestions in one post for your reading pleasure.

Email Marketing Stats

1. On average, subscribers receive 416 commercial messages a month. (Return Path)
2. There are more than 3.2 billion email accounts.
3. Email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012. (Interactive Advertising Bureau via Salesforce.com)
4. 95% of online consumers use email.
5. 91% of consumers reported checking their email at least once a day. (ExactTarget)
6. US internet users will average 3.1 email addresses this year, according to a July 2013 survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of MyLife. 
7. According to eMarketer there will be around 236.8 million US email users by 2017.
8. Worldwide, market research firm The Radicati Group forecasts the email audience will grow from 2.42 billion this year to 2.76 billion by 2017.
9. Purpose of email marketing programs according to UK brand marketers? 78% said retention.
10. 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. (TopRankBlog)
11. 89% percent of UK brand marketers polled by the UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) in December 2012 said email was important to their business strategies. 
12. For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment.
13. 56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013.
14. In Q4 2012, more than nine out of 10 UK internet users sent or received email at least once a week, according to data from Deloitte.
15. 70% say they always open emails from their favorite companies. Conversely, only 18% say they never open commercial emails.
16. 55.2% of global users use the desktop to open email (Harland Clarke)
17. eMarketer estimates the US adult email audience will reach 188.3 million in 2013 and will continue to climb to 203.8 million by 2017. 
18. 93% of consumers also get at least one permission-based email daily.

Mobile Design

1. A whopping 66% of Gmail opens occur on mobile devices, with only 19% opened in a web browser (Litmus)
2. When planning content for a multi-device experience, your most important content should come first. Think back to the top-down hierarchy taught in basic journalism—what do you most want your readers to see?
3. We recommend using text of at least 13px for body copy. In order to avoid having to zoom in, try starting at 15-16px (depending on the actual font) and preview it on your mobile device.
4. The mobile experience is highly interactive and every email is viewed in stages. Plan for each stage, using both the design and content strategically. (Designing for the Mobile Inbox) 
5. According to Bridget Dolan, vice president of interactive for cosmetics retailer Sephora, the percentage of email messages opened on mobile devices is already in the 50% range.
6. 43% of all emails are now being opend via a mobile device. (Return Path)
7. Know your audience—it’s the most basic of all marketing principles. If your brand’s mobile audience is at or above 10%, it’s time to start optimizing for mobile.
8. The #1 email client for Gmail users is the iPhone’s built-in mail program, with 34% of all Gmail opens. (Litmus)
9. In a world where smartphone penetration in the US has reached 55%, marketers can no longer afford to think of email messages in terms of “mobile” and “non-mobile.” The reality is that subscribers will likely view your messages on a wide variety of devices—including desktops, laptops, smart phones, and tablet computers.
10. Don’t focus solely on click-based interaction—instead, try to think in terms of swipes and taps. As with any good design, grid-based layouts ensure content is easy to read and digest.
11. Rather than asking for name, address, company, and so on, keep it simple. Try limiting your form to one field: the email address. (Salesforce.com)
12. A one-column layout works best in both aware and responsive design. If you have a  multi-column layout, carefully plan how elements shift or stack, using a grid to ensure the technical aspect is possible.

Mastering the Inbox

1. Do you want to help your bounce rate? Locate the emails that generated the high number of bouncebacks and investigate the source of the list. 
2. Comply with the guidelines in the federal CAN-SPAM legislation. Most importantly, make sure that all requests for removal from your mailing lists are honored. 
3. 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Convince & Convert via Salesforce.com)
4. More people read emails that deal with their finances and travel than any other category. (Return Path)
5. Desktop and smartphone email opens happened most often between 10am and 4pm—during the typical workday. (Harland Clarke)
6. Recipients often only read the subject line or the first few lines of an email. Include your CTA early on in your email. 
7. Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. (Adestra July 2012 Report)
8. According to Google, there were over 425 million active Gmail users as of June 2012. According to email testing and tracking service Litmus, approximately four percent of all email opens can be attributed to Gmail webmail users, as of June 2013.

B2B Email Marketing

1. 61% of B2B marketing professionals worldwide said CTR was the most useful metric for analyzing email campaign performance, compared with 48% of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers. (Ascend2)
2. Use autoresponders to automate simple, recurring emails. Since welcome and thank-you emails will be sent over and over again as you gain new subscribers and followers, they are perfect for testing the marketing automation waters. (Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation) 
3. Bold, beautiful imagery is slowly taking over our inboxes, as we take cues from Pinterest and social hubs like Facebook and Twitter. Images help tell your brand’s story, so consider taking the time to choose artful shots that complement your message. For B2B emails, think outside the realm of traditional stock photography to make your messages are unique. 
4. The smart B2B marketers are personalizing their communication based on a prospect’s interests—using behavioral data and a whole new generation of online personalization technology.
5. Start building your landing pages, forms, and email templates using industryaccepted best practices. Many automation providers offer implementation services that will walk you through creating these assets, from template design to the content included in each. 

Data. Data. Data. 

1. Get accurate and detailed data from people who want to hear from you, then automate the numerous steps involved in sending them relevant messages. (eMarketer)
2. One of the top benefits of e-mail marketing is that it yields reams of data about who a company’s best customers are. Marketers can target those people in the social realm and offer incentives or discounts to encourage them to share with their friends and advocate on behalf of the brand. (eMarketer)
3. There’s a Big Data disconnect. In a recent study from Econsultancy, 77% of marketers said purchase history had a very high impact on return on investment (ROI), meaning they are leveraging that data for lead nurture and to aid the buyer’s decision-making process. (Joel Book)
4. 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week. (2012 Blue Kangaroo Study)
5. If the addresses were acquired organically via form submissions, consider using a Confirmed Opt-In process. With Confirmed Opt-In, an individual is required to enter an email address to access your site or content. Upon registering their email address, a verification email will be sent to the address provided. This way, new subscribers can only submit valid, active email addresses.
   

Social Media and Email

1. Email sharing is extremely important to any digital marketing campaign. It is important to include social sharing buttons at the top of your email. When the recipient clicks the share button, have the social post populated with interesting copy and a shortened link.
2. A May 2013 survey of US internet users, conducted by ad agency The Buntin Group and survey research firm Survey Sampling International (SSI) on behalf of disposable tableware company Chinet, showed respondents spent more time per week with email than any other digital activity—an hour more than popular digital diversions such as Facebook and texting.

Source : http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/50-email-marketing-tips-and-stats-for-2014/

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

20 Email Design Best Practices and Resources for Beginners

Even for experience designers, building email marketing newsletters isn't easy. You receive a lovely looking design, and you crack on with the development. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work as it should in every email clients. Styles don't display, images aren't visible, etc.

This is where these twenty best practices come in handy.

1: Keep the Design Simple
Email marketing newsletters are not like complex website designs; they should be nicely designed, but somewhat basic. Try basing your designs on a main header image followed by the main content.

The cleaner the design, the easier it will be to code, and the less chance of any abnormalities happening between various browsers and email clients.

2: Use Tables

Email clients live in the past, so all email newsletters must be built using tables for layout. Some CSS styling can be used, but we will discuss this later.

3: Have Web Browsers at the Ready

Make sure you have as many web browsers as possible available to you. Who knows who will view your email marketing messages, and what he or she will be using to view it!

At the very least, use these:

Internet Explorer 6

Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 8

Mozilla Firefox 3

Apple Safari 3

Google Chrome

4: Sign Up for all the Major Email Clients

Sign up for as many email accounts as you can think of. Below is a list of email clients to get you started:

Google Mail (http://mail.google.com)

Hotmail/Live Mail (http://www.hotmail.com)

Yahoo Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com)

AOL Mail (http://webmail.aol.com)

Please note that they're are other, more convenient services that can be used instead; however, many of these charge monthly fees. For more information, review Litmusapp.

5: Use Inline Styles

If this were the website world, every developer on the planet would say, "do not use inline styles, create a class for it". Unfortunately, in an email, this is not possible, as the email clients will strip them out, and we don't want that. So if anything needs to be styled, use inline styles.

Elements like font type and size can be used within the <table> tag, but individual styles should be placed on <td>'s.

6: Give all Images Alt Tags

This is a very important step to take, but is often forgotten by many. Styling the <td> for which images are in, with font types, size and color, will allow for your email to degrade gracefully when images are off by default.

7: Do not Set Widths or Heights to Images

Again, this is a further step to take in order for a lovely gracefully degraded email. If images are off by default, there dimensions will be present, leaving a lot of unnecessary white space throughout.

8: Wrap the Email in a 100% Width Table

Email clients only take the code within the body tags, not the body tags themselves. In order to use a background color, you must create a 100% width table to "fake" the background effect.

9: No Wider than 600px
Many people don't actually open their email; they instead view them in the preview panel. On average the smallest preview panel is around 600px, so always design your email marketing newsletters accordingly, unless you don't want your full email viewable in the preview panel, of course.

10: Link Styling
Don't forget to style the <a> tag. This will overwrite the email client's standard link tags.

11: Try not to Nest Tables
Apart from the 100% width wrap table, you should try your best not to nest additional tables. This is easily avoidable; use the stacking system instead.

This allows for a much easier, controllable email.

12: Avoid Background Images
Stick to block colors rather than images for the backgrounds for your text; only use funky gradients, images, etc. when no text is involved.

13: Borders don't Work
Within emails, we don't have much room for browser or email clients specific fixes, so when we have borders that can either sit outside or inside the <td> or be included or excluded from the <td> width, there's not much we can do.

The fix? Drop two extra <td>'s to either side of the main <td>, and set the background color in each one. This will again "fake" the look of a border and work in all browsers and email clients.

14: Hotmail Bug Fixes
Over the past couple of years, Microsoft has vastly improved the Hotmail/Live service. But... one huge bug you will come across is the strange padding added to all images. Why do they do this? Who knows? All I know is, there is a wonderfully easy fix.

15: Encode All Characters
Although we don't technically have to encode characters, it's best we do.

When viewing email newsletters in various email clients, we cannot guarantee the charset every website is using, so encoding characters allows us to be certain that all characters are being displayed as they should.

16: JavaScript = Junk Email
You cannot, unfortunately, include any type of JavaScript. So no fancy pop-ups or auto-scrolling emails please! If you do decide to include it anyway, your email marketing messages may be sent to the junk folder. Email clients will see you as a threat. And this is obviously not good. So please stick to plain old HTML.

17: Give the User a Way Out
When sending general newsletters to various clients/customers, although you have a lovely designed and developed email, that user may not want your email (hard to take, I know). Always allow them a way out, by adding an unsubscribe link to the bottom of the email, like so:

If you would like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, simply click here

18: Users Want Options
Some users may be utilizing a very basic email client - maybe they're checking there webmail at work or on their phones. Images and complex designs may not be best for these types of clients,. Consider, at the top of the email newsletter, having a link which points to the email on a web server somewhere, so the user can view the email in all its glory.

Cannot view this email? View it here

19: Use a spacer.gif
Some browsers (Internet Explorer), don't get on with empty <td>'s. Even if the <td> is set to 10px in width. IE will ignore this and set it to 0.

The fix is to add a transparent GIF, and set this to 10px wide. This then provides you with something to put within the <td>, thus fixing IE's issues with having empty <td>'s.

20: Send Tests
This is the most important aspect of email design; sending test emails allows you to view them in all browsers and email clients, looking for any bugs and odd variations.

Source: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/20-email-design-best-practices-and-resources-for-beginners--net-7309

9 Email Marketers Explain Why Nobody Opens Your Emails

9 Reasons Your Open Rates Are Plummeting

1) Lack of Customization

"It’s not surprising rates are dropping and there’s only one reason in my opinion -- people want customized content. Period. They don’t want to sift though a bunch of junk that isn’t intended for them. Know your buyer and give them what they want. Email newsletters are part of the reason email as a whole is diminishing."

– Justin Gray, LeadMD

2) Not Optimizing for Mobile

"Chances are, the way your audience is consuming your content is radically different than it was three years ago. In fact, in 2013, over 50% of all emails were opened on mobile. And this trend is only rising as we speak. If your newsletter (or your website) doesn’t respond to this change, it very well might be the “hidden reason” why your numbers are dropping. Check your audience device statistics."

– Juha Liikala, Stripped Bare Media

3) New Signups Don’t Know What to Expect

"Sometimes, what happens is your older leads are still opening your email, while new signups have no idea your newsletter is coming. Remember to automatically email new sign-ups with information about what they should expect from you and when. That way, they will be prepared to receive your email every Thursday morning instead of quickly tossing it in the trash because they forgot you even existed."

– Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

4) Email Subject Lines

"Often weekly business newsletters have the same subject line format. As email providers try to clear the inbox, emails with repetitive titles often start to go under Promotion tabs or in the spam folder. So you have to spice up your subject lines. One trick that helps is reaching out to inactive subscribers and asking them to update their preferences and contact details."

– Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster

5) Not Enough Value

"If your newsletter is always about you and what’s going on in your world, you’re missing the point. Any time you send out an email to your customers and potential customers, it should give them something of value. This could be a tip, a strategy, a tool you’ve used that they could benefit from, or other free resources. If your customer gets value from what you send, they will keep opening."

– Natalie MacNeil, She Takes on the World

6) Messages Getting Flagged as Spam

Spam is a moving target, as are the efforts of service providers to cut down on spam. If you have a sudden drop off in open rates, you may want to check to see if your mail servers or providers are on a black list.

– Mark Cenicola, BannerView.com

7) The Label Leads to Boring, Repetitive Material

"Creators often see a weekly business newsletter as another chore. This mindset is poisonous. The creator goes through the motions churning out uninspiring, repetitive material. People’s inboxes are flooded. Many people hate their inbox because mining a quality Golden Nugget is like finding a needle in a haystack. Instead, be contrarian; solicit conversations and write back when they reply to you."

– Joshua Lee, StandOut Authority

8) Stale Email Lists

"Nothing will kill your deliverability like a stale email list. To define stale, think about email subscribers who haven’t had activity in six months (either they haven’t opened an email or haven’t been sent an email since subscribing). Other contributors to a stale list are subscribers who were manually added without their permission. Both of these groups kill open rates and drive up spam complaints."

– Brett Farmiloe, Markitors

9) Format Congestion

"Like all forms of messaging, the success of a newsletter depends a great deal on being scannable and easy to absorb. Complexity isn’t ideal for inboxes."

– Sam Saxton, Salter Spiral Stair and Mylen Stairs

Source : http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/reasons-for-bad-open-rates

Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database

Google search changes will push SEO firms and social media marketers closer

Google's Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird search algorithms affect around 90% of online searches, according to Search Engine Watch. These algorithms strip out "bad searches" – sites stuffed with keywords, duplicated content and manipulated hyperlinks – and rightly so; the onus for higher search rankings has consequently been placed on the quality, originality and relevance of online content.

So must our understanding of search engine optimisation (SEO) fundamentally change in light of this? "Yes, SEO is dead (technically) in the way we used to be able to build links," says Matt Wilkinson, account director at Pinnacle Marketing Communications. "Now we are focused more heavily on content marketing."

Wilkinson, whose business employs former journalists, is adamant that "businesses still need SEO professionals". But he also admits that "SEO managers must change to be more creative and know how and where to share this content." He adds: "The basics of optimisation may seem simple, but implementing it isn't."

While Google does not comment on how it measures engagement on websites, it is believed that search rankings are now biased towards the context of content; if it's written by a reputable journalist or blogger then it ranks higher. SEO experts believe Google's new algorithms also consider users' engagement with the content, such as the time people spend on a website and its organic links, rather than paid-for content.

While a recent Econsultancy study found that 88% of the 2,500 firms surveyed now integrate SEO with content marketing, and 74% integrate SEO efforts with social media marketing, some marketers are sceptical about the evolved role of SEO firms.

Dane Cobain, social media specialist at Buckinghamshire-based FST the Group, says: "Social media requires a human touch, something that a lot of SEO professionals aren't equipped to deal with. SEO has always been tied to the performance of metrics, but you can't carry out a social media campaign if you look at people as numbers instead of individuals."

As expected, SEO agencies that focused on link manipulation through "black hat" techniques and keyword-focused methods of SEO are going out of business. However, those with a focus on content marketing are thriving. But what does this mean for brands' existing relationships with their PR, social media and digital marketing teams, whose remit digital content has historically been?

Tim Grice, head of search at Branded3, agrees that the "boundaries are blurring" between the roles of PR, social media, SEO and digital marketing. "There are some people in PR that feel like SEO managers are stepping on their toes," he says. "To create brand value, you need good, creative content, from all sides, and you need to be technically sound in implementing it. It's a collaborative game."

An SEO team alone cannot offer everything needed for great content marketing and this is one significant driver for increased collaboration across business roles that previously operated in distinctive silos. Consequentially, some brands are taking this to the next level, creating their own digital newsrooms for real-time marketing strategies.

Adidas, for example, has created its own "brand newsroom", operating from a global digital centre in Massachusetts and liaising with other newsrooms around the world. Herbert Hainer, chief executive of the Adidas Group, told Marketing Week he hoped the brand newsroom would "bring greater consistency, increase speed and drive higher levels of brand activation online". Adidas follows consumer brands Puma and Nike in developing concentrated, centralised digital content marketing hubs.

Priyanka Dayal, content manager at Cision UK, a communications and marketing software company, says that brand newsrooms will remain the preserve of large multi-nationals that are able to maximise on the benefits. "The future for PR, SEO and marketers still involves traditional distribution platforms. Home-grown newsroom successes will be the exception."

Andrew Smith, a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) strongly disagrees that the expansion of SEO is a threat to PR professional, though he says there may have been some fear of this five years ago: "With these changes, PRs are the ones who have the skills to get mentions in established media companies, which Google is now emphasising. It's not putting PR people out of a job, more changing where you might find them; there's a chance they may now be found as part of a team in an SEO agency. Their skills are more vital than ever before."

With its algorithm changes, Google's search is more human-friendly. People are now searching online using questions and complex phrases rather than just entering stand-alone keywords. To solve their query, it makes sense that content marketers meet this content demand, with SEO in mind.

Source : http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/28/google-seo-social-media-search-marketing-panda-penguin-hummingbird

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company

What is an SEO Article Writer?

SEO article writers are writers specializing in providing small business websites with articles designed to ensure maximum search engine optimization.  This is an important service for any business needing to draw people to their site. Businesses need that traffic to visit their sites, stay there, and purchase their products and services.  One way to achieve this is to hire a professional SEO service. This service will provide you with freelance writers who will know exactly how to design your articles more effectively for search engine recognition.  The search engines will then acknowledge your website as a valid website. An article writer will provide specific written content which in turn will make business websites gain higher search engine rankings. Well written content includes well-chosen keywords or phrases, proper positioning of keywords and phrases, original text, length of the article, and key word density. When this is done properly, the content will raise the websites relevancy for directing search engine hits and send traffic the site.

After gathering the content, the article writer must then write the article to gain the interest of the reader. The writer’s goal is to provide clients with the service of well researched content for the website articles.  This process is the key step in grabbing and keeping the consumers’ attention. SEO article writers compose the articles in such a way to provide the best results to target both search engines and target audiences. This is an investment every business should consider as a way to increase their website traffic and subsequently, expand their client base.

Paula Nazarian is a published freelance writer who specializes in SEO article writing, cocktail hour and self-inflicted bruising. She typically locks herself out of her car and house by always managing to lose her keys.

Source : http://teamwildflower.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/what-is-an-seo-article-writer/

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company

Email Marketing: 5 Ways to Sabotage Your 2014 Holiday Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most powerful promotional tools available to online sellers. When done well, a good holiday email marketing campaign can increase sales, which in turn will require ecommerce businesses to pick, pack, and ship many more orders than usual.

But all of those extra orders will likely increase customer service questions, emails, phone calls, and chat messages. If this is too much hassle, you might want to sabotage your 2014 email marketing before it is too late!

So, rather than list tactics to improve holiday email marketing, in the post I’ll rely on sarcasm — and, hopefully, humor — to list what not to do. Here are five tips for encumbering, constraining, and, perhaps, disabling an otherwise excellent marketing vehicle.

1. Write Bad Subject Lines

Several factors — including list quality, message relevance, email frequency, time of day, or even day of the week — can impact open rates for holiday email marketing campaigns, but almost none of these things will get a potential customer to click “delete” faster than a crappy subject line.

To write a truly wretched subject line, consider the following.

Use more than 150 characters. Both MailChimp and the Maximizer CRM blog recommend using fewer than 50 characters for a subject line. Subject lines with about six to ten words perform the best.

Misspell something. Nothing says spam like misspelled words.

Capitalize every letter. Open source spam blocker SpamAssassin considers excessive capitalization to be an indication of spam, so do this and your messages might not even make it to the recipient.

Include poor performing keywords. In 2013, digital marketing technology firm Adestra sampled about 2 billion emails to learn which subject line keywords improved open rates. For retail and ecommerce the words “latest,” “free delivery,” “new,” and “% off” all performed well, while “cheap,” “free,” “win,” and “buy” all tended to scuttle open rates.

2. Don’t Bother to Proofread Your Email Messages

If some over-zealous Christmas shopper gets past your sabotaged subject line, consider making your actual email message incoherent.

Perhaps, the simplest approach would be to write a stream of consciousness. As an example, imagine that a particular holiday email was supposed to promote a sale on toys. Rather than coming right to the point and explaining the offer, type out the first few hundred words that come into your mind when you think about toys, including anecdotes about unfulfilled Christmas wishlists from when you were eight are fair game.  Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. When you’re done typing, call it good and click send.

Concise, properly punctuated email messages that have a clear call to action will likely get shoppers to click through to your site and, perhaps, even make a purchase, so if your aim is to subvert holiday email marketing success, you definitely don’t want to bother proofreading your holiday email messages.

3. Bombard Your Customers’ Inboxes

Email frequency is something of a balancing act. If you don’t send subscribers regular email messages, they might forget that they even subscribed. But send too many emails, and they are likely to unsubscribe.

In fact, according to a 2013 survey cited on the Econsultancy blog, email frequency was the most common reason that former recipients gave for unsubscribing from an email list. Also mentioned in the Econsultancy post is a MailChimp study from April 2013 that found that as a marketer sends more emails, customer engagement drops.

With this in mind, bombard your customers with email messages. Consider scheduling messages for every 30 minutes from now until at least New Years Day. And don’t try to reinvent the proverbial wheel, just send the exact same message over and over again.

4. Treat Everyone the Same

Your customers are individuals. They have different needs, wants, and reasons for buying. So treating them like generic lemmings should pretty much cripple your holiday email marketing.

Personalized email messages improved open rates by 29 percent and unique click-through rates by 41 percent according to a 2013 Experian Marketing Services study. So for poor email performance, don’t even come close to mentioning the recipient’s name, local, or similar.

Also send the exact same message to everyone on your list. Segmenting an email list around customer type, known shopper interests, sales history, or even geographic location might significantly improve email performance.

5. Don’t Actually Send Any Emails

Email marketing, according to a recent INC Magazine article, is mobile friendly, easy to customize and integrate with other marketing tactics, inexpensive, and a real sales driver.

A holiday email marketing campaign is likely to boost site traffic. It can be automated so that messages are sent in response to particular customer actions, and it is very easy to measure and optimize.

With all that it has going for it, perhaps, the best way to sabotage an email marketing campaign is to avoid actually sending any email messages — no sale notifications, no gift suggestions, no reminders, nothing. Even just an average email campaign would likely improve sales and create far too many annoying orders to process.

Source : http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/74449-Email-Marketing-5-Ways-to-Sabotage-Your-2014-Holiday-Campaigns

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

Top Email Marketing Initiatives and Challenges in 2014

Email marketing is slated for an increase in budgets, according to results from a recently-released StrongView study [pdf]. So what will be the top priorities for email marketers this year? Interestingly, the study reveals that respondents are paying more attention to increasing subscriber engagement (a leading 44% naming this one of their top-3 priorities) and improving segmentation and targeting (36%) than to growing their opt-in email list (31%). (See here for email marketers’ most popular – and effective – list growth tactics.)

When it comes to email marketing challenges, a plurality 40% said that one of their top-3 is accessing and leveraging customer data from multiple channels and data sources. Issues with coordination across marketing channels (34%) and developing more relevant engagements (32%) also appear towards the top of the list of challenges, with these pointing to the emphasis being placed on targeting and engagement. Of note, significantly fewer (17% of) respondents said that maintaining high email deliverability is a top-3 challenge this year.

The study looks further at how email marketers are using data in their programs, a particularly salient area given that leveraging data from multiple channels is their top challenge. According to the results, demographic (53%) and purchase history (49%) data are most commonly leveraged to power email marketing. After that, there’s a fairly steep drop off to the proportion using web behavior (31%), location data (26%) and life stage (25%) data. More respondents would like to use web behavior data, though: a leading 34% named this the most valuable type of data that they’re not currently able to leverage.

What’s holding email marketers back from using more data in their campaigns? The cleanliness and quality of their data is the top challenge for the largest share (22%) of respondents. Data hygiene (or lack thereof) was fingered as a pain point for marketers in a few studies last year, and ought to be a point of emphasis this year.

About the Data: The StrongView “2014 Marketing Trends Survey” was administered online in conjunction with StrongView’s survey partner SENSORPRO. The poll, which gathered feedback from 387 business leaders across a wide range of industries, was conducted from November 18 – 27, 2013. 75% of respondents come from companies headquartered in North America.

Source : http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/top-email-marketing-initiatives-and-challenges-in-2014-38921/

Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database