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.
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 4 Tips for Sending to Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo!
January 17, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
An email is effective only if it is successfully delivered to the recipient. Moreover, getting the email to the inbox, versus the spam or junk folder, increases the chances of the message being read. Deliverability is a crucial element in the overall success of an email program. It ca...
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Email Marketing
Don’t Forget Email Marketing; 13 Reasons
January 11, 2013 • Dale Traxler
With all the focus on social media, it seems that email marketing is almost an afterthought for many companies. Email may not be trendy, but it’s cheap, easy to measure, and easy to target. It's a good place to do testing, it keeps your brand visible, and at the end of the day it delive...
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Email Marketing
Remember a Holiday ‘Thank You’ Email
December 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As the 2012 Christmas shopping season comes to a close, online retailers should take the time to sincerely thank customers and offer appropriate holiday greetings. Email marketing often reaches its peak during the weeks leading up to December 25. Many, if not most, Internet retailers a...
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Email Marketing
3 Common Email Marketing Mistakes
December 18, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
There were some fantastic email campaigns in 2012. And there were some ineffective ones, too. In this article, I'll address three of the top email marketing mistakes from 2012. Sending Emails Too Frequently As an email marketing professional, I subscribe to hundreds of ecommerce em...
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Email Marketing
Transactional Emails: 5 Secrets to Improve
December 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Five relatively simple steps could help online retailers significantly improve transactional emails, and, perhaps, earn additional sales. Transactional or relationship email messages complete, confirm, or provide information about a previously agreed upon transaction. In the ecommerce ...
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Email Marketing
Email, Mobile, On-site Driving 2012 Holiday Sales
December 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Retail holiday sales for 2012 from the first of November through Cyber Monday rose 16 percent year over year to more than $16.3 billion. Email marketing, mobile shopping, and on-site promotions have all played an important role in online sales. The 16 percent boost in early holiday ret...
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Email Marketing
Automated Email Marketing Drives Ecommerce Sales; 4 Tips
November 20, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
Email marketing is becoming increasingly automated. Recent acquisitions by ExactTarget, a leading email service provider, of iGoDigital and Pardot, for $21 million and $95 million respectively, illustrate this trend. iGoDigital is a platform that helps online retailers offer product re...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Planning Your Holiday Calendar
November 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is a powerful driver of holiday sales. But haphazardly sending emails is not the way to optimize campaigns. Taking just a few minutes to think about what an email will contain and when it will be sent should help to improve results. What follows is an example holiday em...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s New Approach
October 22, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
J.C. Penney has received a lot of press for the many changes made by its new CEO, Ron Johnson, who came from Apple. As a J.C. Penney email subscriber, I have noticed its email program has become more engaging. The subject lines are more compelling. The emails contain unique and interest...
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Email Marketing
Ask an Expert: Appropriate to Send Remarketing Emails to Guest Shoppers?
September 27, 2012 • 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 sending remarketing emails to consumers who abandon shopping carts. It comes from Kenny Kelly, general manager of Shops.com, an Okla...
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Email Marketing
5 Holiday Email Marketing Tips
September 20, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
For ecommerce businesses, September is crucial for planning a successful holiday-sales season. For email marketing, starting the planning now will allow more time for last minute changes and time-sensitive promotions. Below, I'll offer five tips to make the most from your holiday email...
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Email Marketing
Email Case Study: Moosejaw Adds Personality to Email Messages
August 2, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
The challenge with an ongoing email program is that people are busy. Unless they have a need for your product or service, they aren’t necessarily going to open your email and purchase from you immediately. To stay relevant and keep email recipients engaged, some retailers are turning to...
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Email Marketing
Sending HTML and Plain Text Email Simultaneously
July 25, 2012 • Web Marketing Today
With so many different smartphones and tablets, it’s important to be able to display your company's emails in the way that the mobile browser is best suited. Some mobile browsers will show your email in its full HTML form. Others will default to just plain text. How do you know which version to send to each recipient? The solution to this problem is to craft an email which has two parts: one that displays your complete graphics and the other made up of nothing more than conventional text, with no images and colors.
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Email Marketing
4 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
July 18, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
For an email-marketing program to be successful, the message must be delivered. In this article, I'll explain email deliverability basics, and offer four tips to make sure your emails hit the inbox of your recipients. 1. Know Your IP Address An IP address is a numerical number for th...
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Email Marketing
5 Ways to Freshen Your Email List
June 18, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
Your email-marketing program depends on a quality list. It's easy for a list to stagnate over time. An email database that is left alone, without refreshing, combined with an email marketing program that is not stimulating, will lead to lower open and click rates. In this article, I'l...
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Email Marketing
How to Choose an Email Service Provider
May 10, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
Selecting an email service provider can be a daunting task. With so many potential providers — and a vast range of pricing options and levels of service — how do you know which providers are the best match for your ecommerce business? In this article, I'll address five keys to help yo...
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Email Marketing
5 Unique and Effective Email Offers
April 16, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
The offer in an ecommerce email campaign is key. Coming up with offers that stand out from the competition and get your subscribers' attention, however, can be difficult. A straight dollar-off discount gets boring over time, and email recipients will eventually ignore the same types o...
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Email Marketing
Using Email to Promote Holiday Sales; Pros and Cons
March 15, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
With St. Patrick’s Day near, companies are scrambling to deliver emails to promote green-themed products, or events around the holiday. With all the buzz, it brings up a interesting question: When does it make sense for ecommerce merchants to embrace a holiday or event and incorporate i...
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Email Marketing
3 Tips for Better Email Subscription Forms
March 14, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Email subscription forms should be simple and direct, encouraging site visitors to become opt-in participants in email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is one of the best ways that ecommerce businesses have to engage shoppers, introduce new products, and make more sales. But these ...
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Email Marketing
5 Steps to Effective Email Calls to Action
February 17, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
In email marketing, subject lines get recipients to open the email. The "from" line gives credibility and builds brand awareness. The creative message invokes the desire to know more, buy a product, or sign up for a webinar. But one of the most important and overlooked elements to email...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Ways to Increase Relevancy
January 19, 2012 • Carolyn Nye
An email marketing message needs to be relevant to its recipients to achieve maximum results. Relevancy can be a simple as inserting the recipient's name in the subject line or salutation. But it can be much more dynamic than that, too. It can include recommendations based on past pur...
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Email Marketing
Segmenting Email Lists for 2012
January 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization. Email segmentation is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so that each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing ...
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Email Marketing
4 Mobile Email-Marketing Tips
December 20, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
There are many mobile devices that consumers can choose from: basic feature phones, smartphones, tablets, e-readers and more. Consumers have their own preferences as to what combination of devices to use and whether to use them on cellular connections, Wi-Fi networks, or both. For ecomm...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Recovering from Content Mistakes
December 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The email send button and the content of the message it represents are powerful marketing tools that launch a message directly to thousands of potential customers at once. But when there is a mistake in the email message — a broken link, misspelled word, an incorrect date — an emergenc...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: How to Prevent, Manage Dormant Lists
November 30, 2011 • PEC Staff
Email marketing remains critical for many ecommerce merchants. But for those merchants with established ecommerce sites — and older email lists — maintaining healthy email open rates and click-through rates can be a challenge. We spoke recently with an email-marketing expert on how, ex...
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Email Marketing
Email Case Study: Toys“R”Us Gears Up for Cyber Monday
November 15, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
For online retailers, the days before and after Thanksgiving can determine a successful holiday season. Toys“R”Us, the large U.S.-based toy retailer, uses email marketing extensively during the holidays. I'll analyze Toys“R”Us's email strategies in this article — to help other merchants...
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Email Marketing
Writing Excellent Email Subject Lines
October 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A well written email subject line can increase open rates and, potentially, increase conversions. An email with a poorly written subject will probably get deleted. Subject line composition is as important to an email-marketing program as earning subscribers and providing great content ...
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Email Marketing
Email Case Study: Allrecipes.com Makes Daily Frequency Work
October 17, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
For many ecommerce sites, sending marketing emails every day may be scary, fearing that recipients will unsubscribe based on the number of emails they are receiving. However, sending daily emails ...
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Email Marketing
Email Case Study: Travelzoo’s Value and Simplicity
September 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email campaigns can be extraordinarily complex. There are dozens of elements within any campaign that may affect overall results. These elements include subject lines, creative text, calls to action, product offers, timing, frequency, and audience considerations. Email marketers try to ...
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Email Marketing
3 Tips to Boost Email Conversion Rates
August 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
According to published reports, some 92 percent of American adults use email. Many of them are subscribers to one or more email newsletters or product alerts. So it is little ...