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A recent whitepaper from the e-mail marketing firm StrongMail, called Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability, provides tips to multichannel marketers looking to improve the effectiveness of their e-mail campaigns. Among others, the whitepaper lays out best practices to improve sender reputation to protect against e-mails being filtered or blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs), preventing them from reaching consumers’ inboxes. Here’s a look at the whitepaper’s seven strategies. 1. Maintain a clean list. Sending to bad addresses not only skews response rates, it’s a core metric ISPs use to determine sender reputation, the whitepaper notes. To maintain a clean list,

A recent webinar from the e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising solution provider Mercado, led by the company’s director of worldwide merchandising consulting, Michael Klein, provided several tips to help multichannel merchants prepare for their busiest time of the year, the holidays. Here are some takeaway pointers Klein doled out. * Identify your top 20. This includes your top 20 products and keywords and the top 20 percent of your customers, Klein said. Then develop a promotional campaign around that top 20, with targeted e-mails and landing pages. * Test and analyze keywords and null results. For null results, Klein advised offering product alternatives

In the upcoming September issue of Catalog Success, our cover story spotlights Hodges Badge Co., a Portsmouth, R.I.-based B-to-B cataloger of ribbons, rosettes, medals and more. As a sneak preview to that article, here’s a portion of Senior Associate Editor Joe Keenan’s interview with Rick Hodges, president of Hodges Badge, on myriad topics that aren’t addressed in the print edition. Be sure to see the full article coming out next week, which contains a fresh look at how Hodges Badge has used a catalog format change, a new creative approach and some experienced talent to spur growth in its 89th year of business. Catalog

This week in the second of this two-part series on using cross-selling and upselling techniques to boost online sales, we continue our coverage of Michael Dell’ Arciprete’s presentation from the eTail East 2008 conference in Washington, D.C. This part lists several tactics the vice president of marketing for the online coffee retailer Boca Java advised the audience to avoid when attempting to cross-sell or upsell products online. (For part 1, click here.) 1. Too many cross-sell items. Confusion reigns and placements become random when you try to cross-sell too many products at one time, Dell’ Arciprete warned. 2. Don’t talk over the customer. “Don’t

E-mail’s potential and complexities are seemingly endless, according to Morgan Stewart, director of strategic services for the e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget. In a presentation he gave at last week’s eTail East 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., Stewart offered a number of pointers on how to make e-mail work in real time as a marketing tool. Here are the seven most noteworthy takeaway tips. 1. Use e-mail to turn a potentially negative out-of-stock experience into a positive. Include a callout when you’re out of stock for a particular product to have customers notified via e-mail when the item is back in stock. This helps accomplish

In a presentation at last week’s eTail East 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., Barry Judge, chief marketing officer for the consumer electronics giant Best Buy, presented five concepts his company strives to accomplish to ensure its customers have an enjoyable shopping experience, no matter the channel. 1. Make sure the customer knows all that we know. Examples of this include Best Buy publishing the return rates for all of the products it sells, publishing service rates for personal computers, among others, Judge said. 2. Deliver an experience that adds value. Be sure to deliver on all of your promises, Judge advised. 3. Blow the

As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, be it catalog mailings or other techniques, many marketers have turned to optimizing performance from existing customers as a way to limit costs while improving sales, namely through cross-selling and upselling. In a presentation at the eTail 2008 East conference in Washington, D.C., last week, Michael Dell’ Arciprete, vice president of marketing for Boca Java, an online coffee retailer, rattled off a number of best practices to help online marketers boost sales through cross-selling and upselling. (Note: This is part one of a two-part series on this presentation. Check back next week for Dell’ Arciprete’s tips on

A recent whitepaper from the search engine optimization and marketing firm MoreVisibility, 10 Critical Elements to a Successful Google Adwords Campaign, provides tips for multichannel merchants to help them realize the full potential, and profitability, of a properly managed Google Adwords account. Here are five pointers to take away from the report. 1. Keep your campaigns and ad groups tightly themed. Keep your campaigns and ad groups as relevant to your business as possible. Without tightly themed ad groups, you run the risk of Google not being able to determine the context of your groups, the whitepaper cautions. This results in Google misinterpreting

Simply put, the U.S. Postal Service can’t afford to have catalog businesses continue to go under. Consider the following: * catalog postage accounted for approximately $3 billion in revenue for the USPS in its 2007 fiscal year, 4 percent of its total revenue; * 21 percent of all priority mail revenue is catalog- or Internet-purchased merchandise; and * catalog transactions generate reply mail between companies and their customers, thus increasing volume for the USPS. With the USPS recognizing this fact, it’s begun to shift its practices toward creating a partnership with catalog mailers, in the hopes of securing profitable futures for both

In a presentation at the inaugural National Catalog Advocacy & Strategy Forum in Arlington, Va., on June 26-27, hosted by the American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA), Senior Vice President of Customer Relations for the USPS Steve Kearney (and the former vice president of pricing and classification) said that although postal rates won’t decrease in the future, there’s a silver lining for the 70-plus in attendance — mostly catalog marketers: A special prospecting rate specifically for catalog mailers is a possibility. After much prodding from the audience, led in particular by Lawrence Davis, vice president of marketing at Ross-Simons Jewelers, and Chris Bradley, president