E-mail

No doubt you collect e-mail addresses and other consumer information on your Web site. Perhaps you have a box on your homepage offering a free newsletter, or a special page that offers discounts if shoppers supply personal data. Regardless of the method you use to collect this information, you should send an immediate welcome message to these new names, note officials at Internet marketing firm Topica in a recent whitepaper. Following are Topica’s tips for maximizing the effectiveness of these Web prospects: 1. Gather the correct information up front. In an effort to acquire as many prospects as possible, many online merchants ask only

Transactional e-mails, those key customer touchpoints that marketers typically use for purchase confirmations and shipping notifications, among others, offer the opportunity to reach customers with additional cross-sell and upsell opportunities. But not many online merchants use them for such promotional purposes. A recent study by e-mail marketing solutions provider Silverpop found that just 21 percent of online merchants use any kind of promotional content in transactional e-mails. Given that properly targeted offers in transactional e-mails can generate as much as $500,000 in additional annual revenue, according to JupiterResearch, this channel seems rife with potential. And in its recent report, Silverpop revealed the following

E-mail address churn and list fatigue plague your e-mail marketing campaigns, whether you’re aware of it or not. And the fewer addresses you have to e-mail, the fewer sales you close as a result. On a recent conference call hosted by NCR E-commerce Solutions, marketers, including men’s apparel cataloger Paul Fredrick MenStyle and a multichannel apparel and home goods merchant, offered several pointers on how to track, reduce and otherwise combat list fatigue. 1. Limit the number of e-mails you send. One merchant’s hard and fast rule is that customers never receive more than one e-mail per week, even during the holidays. While this merchant

While it’s widely known that hard-sell e-mails with product offers can be effective, at least one cataloger successfully focuses 80 percent of its e-mails on providing benefit-driven content, such as style guides and recipes, which isn’t directly sales-related. The e-mail campaigns that Monroe, Wis.-based multititle cataloger The Swiss Colony develops for 10 of its catalogs take more of a soft-sell approach that works. Aside from its namesake food gifts catalog, Swiss Colony's catalogs include Seventh Avenue (home furnishings, clothing, jewelry), Midnight Velvet (budget jewelry and gifts), The Tender Filet (gourmet foods) and Ashro (Afro-centric women’s apparel), among others. Designed to develop good relationships between Swiss

As B-to-B sales often aren’t as discount price driven as consumer sales, e-mails to a business audience can’t necessarily tout the latest promotional offer. Myriad other sales channels complicate the situation, making the decision of what and how often to e-mail even more perplexing. Following are successful e-mail communication strategies from three B-to-B catalogers and how they decide what kind of e-mails to send. VWR International The two-year-old e-mail marketing program at this scientific equipment catalog generally is coordinated around specific events, such as catalog mailings or buying cycles, says Lynn Homann, VWR’s director of marketing communications. “If we’re selling into the food and beverage market

Thirty percent of online adults have made purchases as a result of receiving e-mail communications from companies they frequently patronize, according to a survey released on Dec. 18 by marketing solutions provider Acxiom Digital and research firm Harris Interactive. The survey of 2,541 adults found that 94 percent of consumers received e-mail solicitations and 74 percent of them found these types of communication from companies they’ve done business with to be valuable or very valuable. Other data revealed by the survey: * 61 percent of online adults said the timing of an e-mail was an important factor in their desire to respond; * 60

The advent of e-mail as a marketing medium has provided catalogers and online marketers with the ability to reach their customers with personalized, highly relevant messages that drive them to purchase again and again. In fact, 39.6 percent of respondents to The Direct Marketing Association’s “2005 Postal and E-mail Marketing Report” used e-mail personalization to increase response rates last year; 93.2 percent of those marketers said the tactic was successful. But before you can start slapping your customers’ names and other personal details on all of your outbound e-mails, there are five things you’ll need, according to a recent white paper from catalog management

Editor’s note: This will be Jim’s final Contributions to Profit column. In October, CatalogSuccess.com launched his blog, Profitable Cataloging. He posts a new entry every Tuesday, and based on reader comments, responds throughout the week. Visit CatalogSuccess.com/blogs/JimGilbert.bsp, and post your questions or comments about catalog marketing. In addition to being my final print column, this also is the third in a three-part series on the hierarchy of customer status. A quick review: I’ve defined the behavioral groupings of prospects and customers as suspects, prospects, triers, buyers and advocates. Then I discussed strategies to turn prospects into single buyers (triers). Now, onto the next step: conversion. 1.

The Web is an essential channel for catalogers. Customers expect catalog companies to have effective, well-designed e-commerce sites. The Internet is undergoing a period of rapid innovation, often labeled “Web 2.0.” It includes tagging, visual search, wikis and Ajax. Web 2.0 technologies will transform online retail over the next two years. Catalogers will need to upgrade their sites to remain competitive. I suggest you read this month’s column with a computer close by — as I’ll tour some Online Retail 2.0 ideas that will transform e-commerce. The first stop is del.icio.us, the social tagging site. (Go to del.icio.us/catalogsuccess, and you’ll find a

I’ll keep this column brief (I know you want this week to end. I can’t wait for the advanced stages of tryptophan sleepiness to set in after the turkey is done). Want to add some revenue before the end of the year? Try the following:

1. Add an extra mailing in before the end of the year. Try it this way: After your last mailing is complete, mail one more catalog just to your hotline buyers, those who just responded from your last mailings of the year. If it’s too late to get your printer involved, grab some of your bounce back and office copy