E-mail

Predictive analytics can allow you to best find who you should be contacting, what should you be offering, when to make the offer and how to make the offer for optimum results.

Cross-channel costume jewelry retailer PalmBeach Jewelry acquired thousands of email subscribers prior to the busy holiday shopping season thanks to a series of email sign-up ads it ran on targeted websites last summer.

Social media plays a much smaller role in driving traffic to retail websites than email marketing and search during the holiday season, according to ForeSee Results. Having watched in recent years as video calls to action disappear every November, I'm not surprised. Consumers are just too busy to participate in time-intensive social media campaigns, just like they're too busy to watch video content. However, social media does have a role to play in email messaging during the holiday season

Email marketing is alive and well — look in your inbox if you don’t believe it. Promotional emails sent by online retailers hit an all-time high in 2010, according to Responsys Inc.

To start, implement an email preference center to make your emails more relevant to your audience. In my mind, this is a must-have adjunct to your email program. It allows your subscribers to update their personal information, change frequency schedules and even select what content they'd like to receive from you. All this is accomplished by allowing them to link directly to a preference center from your email. Typically, marketers include this link as one of the choices in their email's footer.

"Social and email are converging channels," said Ed Henrich, Senior Vice President of Professional Services at Responsys. "Share-with-your-network and community links are a significant part of that convergence at the moment, but someday soon marketers will be able to talk to individuals on Facebook just like they do via email now -- personalized one-to-one."

DMA2010 sees the launch of AccuBaseE from AccuData Integrated Marketing.

While marketers are in business to sell products, a continued hard sell in email after email doesn't do much to engage readers. Innovative marketers try to find ways to keep their email recipients opening and clicking. They attempt to delight and amaze their readers, and connect with them. Consider occasionally including value-added content that creates an experience. There are many ways to accomplish this; here are six ideas to spur your thinking:

Tuesday is the busiest delivery day for email, at least according to the the recently published DirectMarketingIQ report titled "All About Email Creative."

Responsys, a global provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced the release of its 2010 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season. Full of benchmark data, sample creatives, and best practices and advice, the guide will help retailers and other business-to-consumer companies better formulate their holiday email marketing campaigns this year.