Email & Text Marketing

June 14, 2011 • Charles Nicholls

There is a very strong link between website conversions and email. A recent study by my firm showed that once traffic has gotten as far as the shopping cart email was the largest source of ecommerce conversions, ranking above a direct entry and search. This is a useful reminder that the...

June 9, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Sending timely and relevant communications to your email file is a necessity in driving qualified traffic to your site. Simply increasing your traffic numbers may be the first step, but ...

May 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...

April 29, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

With increased use of social media, many marketing professionals wonder if email will remain relevant. The question for ecommerce retailers then becomes where should they focus their efforts, and should they abandon email for social media? comScore, the tracking and analysis firm, publ...

April 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

For email marketing, the practice of "batch and blast" is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start ...

April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff

Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...

February 24, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Email is a proven marketing channel for many online retailers. It's relatively easy to implement, and inexpensive. Return on investment tends to be high when marketing to your opt-in subscriber file or to visitors on your website. But can email be used to prospect and acquire new custom...

February 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That's one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future. But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedi...

January 11, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Email marketing is vital for many ecommerce merchants. What does 2011 hold for email marketing? Below are seven key email marketing tactics businesses should be planning for the upcoming year. Relevancy Craft email messages with increased personalization, through segmentation and tar...

December 22, 2010 • PEC Staff

“Ask an Expert” is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about email distribution providers that allow purchased ...

December 8, 2010 • Matt Ferner

Ecommerce merchants have several options to hide or obscure that email address from spam bot programs and still make it accessible and user-friendly for customers. Below is a listing of some of the more popular methods and simple step-by-step instructions on how to employ them, each one progressively more hidden, or "obfuscated.

December 7, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

In the natural progression of most email programs, there comes a time when an ecommerce site is ready to tackle the power of triggered emails. Although a challenge to set up, they can be a crucial element in your overall marketing communications strategy, and for good reason. Triggered ...

November 18, 2010 • PEC Staff

Remarketing is an advertising concept to bring back consumers who have visited ecommerce sites and left without purchasing. In general, the remarketing services fall into two camps. We discussed the first remarketing camp, targeted banner ads, in “Remarketing 101, Part 1: Targeted Banne...

November 3, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

Frequency is always an important topic for email marketing. As marketers, we are afraid to overload our customers. We often forget that email is a channel that requires consumers' permission before communicating with them. As consumers, we don’t opt in to viewing Staples television com...

October 7, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

Transactional emails, by definition, are sent automatically after a customer places an order. Every transactional email is an opportunity to connect with your customer at a point where he or she is fully engaged. But how can you optimize transactional emails to encourage customer inte...

September 29, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

September 22, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Social media has breathed new life into email marketing. And email provides a "push" element to update social network friends, Fans and followers. Email service providers (ESPs) are leading this renewed vitality and interest with the integration of email with social media. In this art...

September 8, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

I am the email marketing manager for S&S Worldwide, a large retailer of crafts and school supplies. Over the years, I have encountered many "email best practices." But like Snap Bracelets, Cabbage Patch Kids and Atari, trends change. And email best practices, I've learned, do not ap...

August 16, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

Editor's Note: We welcome as our new email-marketing contributor. She's marketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a direct marketer of arts and crafts, sporting goods and educational supplies. She is responsible for the planning and implementation of S&S's email marketing programs,...

July 19, 2010 • PEC Staff

If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketi...

June 23, 2010 • PEC Staff

Roughly one-third of all email recipients use Microsoft Outlook. But that program famously distorts HTML-formatted emails when other email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, and Thunderbird, render the same email messages differently. The result is that email marketers, such as ecommerce ...

June 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social marketing is one of the most important new trends in online retail promotion. It is effective, builds customer relationships, and offers a better return on investment than some other marketing techniques. But often, online merchants don't realize that they are already engaged in ...

June 10, 2010 • Janine Popick

Ecommerce merchants from all industries are utilizing email as a valuable retail sales channel. However, some merchants may be confused about how to optimize their emails for the dozens of different email programs now available, as well as the plethora of mobile devices that their custo...

April 29, 2010 • Ankush Agarwal

According to a study by Return Path, 20 percent of email in the United States and Canada is still not making it to the inbox. That may seem like a small percentage, but it is actually a huge number that can adversely affect your campaign if you are among the email marketers whose messag...

April 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In 2009, there were approximately 90 trillion emails sent, or about 13,200 emails for every one of the world's 6.8 billion residents. This is according to data from web monitoring firm Pingdom and the U.S. Census Bureau. Narrowed to likely email recipients, this staggering data indica...

March 24, 2010 • Ankush Agarwal

Buying email subscriber lists is seemingly the quickest way to build your email list. But acquired lists frequently present problems that merchants should weigh carefully. First and foremost, the email list you plan to acquire must be obtained from a reputable company. There are many c...

January 26, 2010 • Kate Monteith

Spammers were exploiting social networking sites and phishing was one of the top crimes around the globe in 2009, according to a study released by email service provider, ReturnPath. In a retrospective list of the top ten email trends for 2009, ReturnPath puts the proliferation of unwan...

November 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

GetResponse, an email marketing solution, announced a new application programming interface (API) aimed at helping small-to-medium sized businesses integrate their platforms with the company's email marketing tools. The new GetResponse Developer Zone includes some 30 API hooks that ma...

October 12, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

An online merchant’s customer email list is typically a crucial part of his or her marketing plan. And Constant Contact is a leader in the email marketing field. Eric Groves is the senior vice president, global market development for Constant Contact. He’s written a new book entitled Th...

July 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

GetResponse 6.0 is an easy-to-use email campaign management tool that makes customizing HTML newsletters and email promotions relatively simple. It will also automatically update a blog or Twitter account with newsletter content. GetResponse has an impressive design and a number of fe...