Email Marketing

Most ecommerce businesses rely on email marketing as a low-cost sales driver. We’ve addressed a wide array of strategies for email, including improving opens, clicks, and conversions, mastering deliverability, optimizing by device, automation, spam, segmentation, and more.

Email Marketing
Five Steps to Improve Email Deliverability

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...
Email Marketing
The PEC Review: GetResponse’s Email-to-Speech Service

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...
Email Marketing
Think Twice About Buying Email Subscriber Lists

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...
Email Marketing
Email Provider Looks Back on 2009

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...
Email Marketing
Emailer Provider GetResponse Releases Robust API Library

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...
Email Marketing
Quick Query: Constant Contact Author on Effectiveness of Email

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...
Email Marketing
The PeC Review: GetResponse Is A Capable Email Campaign Tool

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...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Optimize the New Subscriber Experience

June 24, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers to an email list. According to the "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" by MarketingSherpa, subscribers click through at a 25 percent higher rate in their first month than in their second, and 67 percent higher in the first month ...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Split Testing Improves Results “Up to 191 Percent”

May 26, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Split testing of email marketing campaigns can improve open rates, click through rates and even purchase conversion rates. More email service providers are offering split test functionality, making it possible to upload two or more versions of a single broadcast and send them to random ...
Email Marketing
PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance

April 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new s...
Email Marketing
The PeC Review: MailChimp is a Full-Featured Email Campaign Manager

January 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp offers a complete email marketing solution that is simple and inexpensive enough for small businesses but powerful enough for fairly large Internet merchants with sales of $5 million per year or more. According to its staff, MailChimp has over 60,000 users. It manages lists...
Email Marketing
Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests

July 28, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot of time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. For these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let’s say a newly launched shoe e-retail...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Avoid This "Deadly" Mistake

April 14, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Over the years, I've seen many ecommerce store owners make one simple but deadly mistake when they get started with email marketing: They send emails to old, obsolete email addresses. Does this sound like you? You started your ecommerce store a few years ago. Even back then, you had t...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Report Card: Delight.com

February 11, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Delight.com sells gifts, fashion accessories and home decor items. It claims to make the online shopping experience quick, fun and simple. But what about its email marketing? Delight.com requested a review from Practical eCommerce of its email marketing activities, which we are please t...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Report Card: Accepted.com

December 10, 2007 • Ben Chestnut

Accepted.com provides admissions consulting and application-essay-editing services that help people get into top business schools, medical schools and graduate schools. It produces a free monthly email newsletter called “Odds ‘N Ends” and the staff of Accepted.com has requested that Pra...
Email Marketing
Words and Phrases that Trigger Some Spam Filters

December 3, 2002 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

I built this list of some 250 words and phrases from two spam filter lists. It is not complete. I have left out porn trigger words. Most spam filters work on a point system, so that the occurrence of just one "spam phrase" probably won't trigger rejection -- except some which the filter considers notorious.
Email Marketing
A Simple Way to Format HTML E-Mail Newsletters

January 1, 2000 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

I hesitate to provide a guide to formatting HTML e-mail for one reason: there's little else about this on the Web, and the article is likely to produce a torrent of phone calls and e-mail inquiring about further details.