Looking for tips from the top? Three chief executives from online and multichannel merchants fired out ways to increase profitability by creating a unique multichannel experience through personalization, at last week’s Mid Market eTail conference in San Francisco. On hand were: Hannes Blum, CEO of online bookseller Abebooks.com; Josef Mandelbaum, president/CEO of greeting card marketer AG Interactive; and Mike Stamn, CEO of multichannel auto supplies merchant The Eastwood Co. Following are their recommendations: 1. Organize customer information to provide better personalization. Eastwood produces multiple catalogs, sends different messages and provides separate offers depending on whether the targeted customer is a consumer, a small business or
When developing an e-mail contact strategy, define the purpose of e-mailing your customers, advises Chris Topping, chief executive officer for silk flower and accessories catalog Petals, in a recent whitepaper. While catalogs continue to be the primary driver of online sales for Petals, e-mails provide a more narrowly defined target strategy for the promotion of online sales While Petals mails print catalogs every three to four weeks, it sends e-mails slightly more often, about every two to three weeks depending on seasonality, Topping says. While the e-mails are sent in support of the catalog mailing, they usually incentivize customers in a way that the
During a session at last week’s Lenser & Associates client summit in San Rafael, Calif., Lenser partner Michelle Farabaugh offered several Web and e-mail marketing tips to the firm’s client base, which included more than 100 mid-size catalog marketers. Following are some that are worth keeping in front of you. * Increase your advertising effectiveness by improving headlines, copy and destination landing pages. Include a value proposition, promotions, deferred billing and a buy now button. * In e-mail, separately test segmentation, frequency, time of day/day of week, subject line, “From” address, format, offers, deadlines, length, landing pages and hold out panels in order to see true
Small changes to the creative elements of e-mail messages can boost customer response by 50 percent or more, according to a study recently released by e-mail solutions provider Silverpop. For instance, business-to-business e-mails with the company or brand name in the subject line experienced an average open rate of 32 percent, compared to just 20 percent for messages without branded subject lines. Following are other data Silverpop found it its analysis of 612 e-mails sent by 430 companies. * Business-to-consumer e-mails with the brand or company name in the subject line received open rates of 29 percent on average; * B-to-C e-mails without the
Among the myriad e-mail creative tips Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered during a session at the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, he brought out several key copywriting pointers for marketers. Here are several of them. * Tell your message recipient what to do. “Don’t just say what a wonderful company and offer you have; tell them what to do,” Gordon Lewis pointed out. People respond to a command. * “Don’t get diarrhea of the fingertips,” he advised in regard to overly complex e-mail copy containing long, technical words. “We tend to show off our gigantic vocabularies.” * Specifics out-pull generalizations, he said,
In a series of workshop sessions during the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, creative and copywriting guru Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered numerous tips about design and marketing in e-mail messages. Below are some of the most noteworthy pointers. * Look for a rationale that matches what you’re saying and to whom you’re saying it. Sometimes sticking in graphics when your recipients’ computers won’t accept those graphics is a problem, Gordon Lewis said. * Test this oddity: Move “click here” up in your text, he suggests. You’ll usually increase response. “That’s due to an ancient rule of salesmanship: When your prospect
Successful e-mail customer retention efforts depend on delivering relevance through a sophisticated segmentation and targeting strategy, writes Dave Chaffey in his new book, “Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing Your Results From Integrated E-marketing,” (Butterworth-Heinemann). Chaffey identifies five such segmentation strategies that can be layered on top of one another to achieve effective targeting. * Customer lifecycle groups: Customers on your site naturally pass through multiple stages as their relationship with you evolves, and each stage can require a different type of communication, Chaffey writes. First time visitors to your site, for instance, might benefit from messages thanking them for stopping by, while customers who’ve purchased
When it comes to integrating creative between the three primary marketing channels – catalog, Web and retail – much has been said about presenting a consistent image across all channels. But doing so isn’t always so easy. As Carol Worthington-Levy, partner and director at San Rafael, Calif.-based consultancy LENSER, pointed during a session at the recent New England Mail Order Association conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., multichannel marketers should enroll their creative people in “taking a role in the actual selling process.” She offered the following points and tips to marketers looking for ways to achieve multichannel consistency: Leverage your branding across all media that sells
In the rapidly evolving world of multichannel marketing, the print catalog’s role isn’t only changing on the consumer side. Consider how business postcard printer Modern Postcard, which for years provided its postcards to many business-to-business (B-to-B) marketers, has evolved into a cataloger: In mid-September, the Carlsbad, Calif.-based Modern Postcard rolled out a 24-page, 10.375-inch-by-8-inch B-to-B catalog that mailed to about 200,000 prospects (80 percent) and existing customers (20 percent). “We felt that our product and service offerings were amenable to the catalog channel, and we saw the creation of a catalog as a unique means for us to differentiate ourselves, elevate our brand and continue
An average of 19.2 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes between January 2006 and June 2006. But that’s down from 21 percent blocked during the same time last year, according to a report from e-mail solutions company Return Path. Looking at past e-mail delivery numbers, the trend appears to be reversing itself: * 20.7 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes in all of 2005; * 22 percent was blocked in 2004; * 18.7 percent was blocked in 2003; and * 15 percent was blocked in 2002; Other data revealed by the report: * In the first half
