Responsys

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.

PROBLEM: Onlineshoes.com, an online retailer of women's, men's and kids' shoes and apparel, wanted to capture lost sales from consumers who either abandoned items in a shopping cart or browsed the site without making a purchase.

When it comes to cross-channel marketing, PETCO is at the top of its game. The specialty pet products retailer sells its merchandise in more than 1,000 brick-and-mortar stores across the country and an e-commerce website, regularly using its online channel to bring customers into its stores and vice versa. But the buck stops in the e-commerce department.

This year's economic retreat actually stands to help Gaiam, a product and information services company with a heavy emphasis on sustainability, position itself for greater growth in the near future.

Tired of reading about what a tough year it’s been for so many businesses across the board? Frustrated with your own results? Scared about the economy? Whether or not you’re struggling as much as others, here’s a little tonic: our annual best-of feature, in which we’ve pulled what we believe to be the 50 best and most implementable tips of the year from Catalog Success magazine as well as our weekly e-newsletter, Tactics & Tips. There’s nothing fancy here. Each paragraph is taken from a particular story that’s referenced, so you can turn or click back to reread the full story or act on

As e-mail continues to grow as a viable channel for multichannel marketers, its impact on the overall customer experience must continuously be addressed. Just like any other touchpoint the customer has with a company, e-mail creates an experience, says Scott Olrich, chief marketing officer at Responsys. In a recent whitepaper from this on-demand marketing solutions provider entitled “Email Marketing’s New Rules of Engagement: The customer experience moves front and center,” Responsys offers several tips on how to optimize e-mail marketing campaigns, creating a positive experience for customers. Here are some of the whitepaper’s most notable pointers. 1. Have e-mails automated to customer life events.

Forty-four percent of marketers include an element of personalization in every e-mail campaign they develop, according to research released jointly last week by Mintel International Group, Responsys, Vertis Communications and Winterberry Group. However, 80 percent of those marketers modify only the salutation and a few basic content elements, the report revealed. The firms, which represent the direct mail, e-mail, integrated communication, market research and consulting sectors, also offered the following data: * 66 percent of direct mail is personalized, which remains relatively unchanged over the past three years; * 71 percent of consumers read direct mail from retailers, more than any other vertical market; and * 21

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to boost response from your opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns, you’re not alone. Many multichannel marketers are chanting the same mantra — and with good reason. E-mail click-to-purchase conversion rates and number of orders per e-mail delivered by retailers and catalogers continues to increase, according to DoubleClick’s Q3 2004 E-mail Trend Report. But other e-mail marketing statistics are less encouraging. For instance, revenue per e-mail delivered is declining, as is median order size. Moreover, open rates for offers made by retail and catalog companies were the lowest among those categories tracked by DoubleClick — 30.8

If your opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns could use a kick-start, try segmenting customer groups and then sending targeted messages based on their preferences, say officials at Responsys, an e-mail service provider based in Redwood City, Calif. They recommend that if you want to effectively communicate with your e-mail customers throughout their buying lifecycles, take the following actions. 1. “Keep the initial opt-in form with required information short and ask [customers] for preferences iteratively,” notes Responsys in its white paper”Making the Most of Each Customer Contact.” Include an optional secondary page on which customers can offer additional data about themselves, including interests, hobbies and how often

Spam is in the eye of the beholder. This adage offered by Anne Holland, publisher of MarketingSherpa.com, encapsulates the current discussions about e-mail appending. Most of the debates center around privacy as it relates to recipients’ permission. Some experts propose that the existence of a business relationship in one channel (e.g., direct mail) doesn’t justify marketers’ contact through another (e.g., online) when the customer hasn’t given his or her specific permission. “Until [customers] grant permission to send that e-mail, you shouldn’t assume you have it,” says Margie Arbon, director of operations for Mail Abuse Prevention System, a non-profit organization that works with Internet service