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
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 ...
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Email Marketing
Create RSS-to-Email Campaigns with MailChimp
August 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Email is one of the most potent tactics in the ecommerce marketer's toolbox. Recent studies — which I addressed last week — indicate that email is a favorite activity for adult American Internet users. MailChimp, a leading email-marketing service provider, has a terrific feature that a...
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Email Marketing
How to Calculate the Value of an Email Subscriber
August 19, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Many merchants rely on email marketing to drive sales. Increasing the number email subscribers can drive sales even more. By establishing and understanding the value of an email subscriber, merchants can decide how much money and effort to spend growing their lists. This article will...
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Email Marketing
Listrak CEO on Email Versus Social Media; Segmentation Strategies
August 18, 2011 • PEC Staff
Email remains among the most popular marketing vehicles for ecommerce merchants. But the email marketing business is changing, with new auto response tools and customer acquisition strategies — and social media alternatives. To address the use of email for ecommerce merchants, we spoke ...
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Email Marketing
Email and Search Still Top User Activities, Study Shows
August 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio
American adults are more likely to email and search than any other online activities, according to the results of a recently released survey. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has been monitoring online behavior for nearly a decade. Most recently, Pew Internet found that ema...
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Email Marketing
How Email Marketing Can Help SEO
August 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization. The canonical link element, which is often referred to as rel="canonical," (pronounced rel canonical, no "equals") is a way of describing the pref...
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Email Marketing
Email Case Study: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s Frequency, Subject Lines
August 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Online retailers often face decisions regarding their email programs. These include issues like determining ideal frequencies and crafting compelling subject lines. To help address these questions, I’ll be writing a ...
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Email Marketing
How to Reduce Email Unsubscribes; 3 Tips
August 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
When one considers that 93 percent of American online shoppers receive at least one permission-based email each day, it is little wonder that email marketing is a mainstay of Internet promotion and an excellent source of traffic and sales for ecommerce businesses. Sometimes, however, t...
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Email Marketing
Using Surveys to Grow Sales; 4 Tips
July 19, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Ecommerce merchants frequently reach out to new and existing customers. Whether they use methods such as email, paid search, search engine optimization or banner ads, the goal is always the same: to drive qualified traffic back to their sites. Unlike brick and mortar stores, however, th...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing for Mobile Devices: 5 Insights
July 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Between 12 and 19 percent of email marketing messages are now read on mobile, Internet-enabled devices like smartphones or tablets. To continue to get good results from email, marketers should consider mobile user behavior and device capabilities. Last year, eROI, a digital agency, con...
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Email Marketing
4 Tips for Encouraging Email Subscriptions
July 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is one of the most potent promotional tactics available to online retailers when, in fact, those merchants have customers to send emails to. Email can boost site traffic, drive conversions, and help build strong relationships with shoppers. The hard part is getting thos...
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Email Marketing
7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing
June 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A successful ecommerce marketing strategy is an ever-changing blend of techniques and tactics aimed at achieving specific, predetermined goals. If executed well, email marketing is often one of the most ...
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Email Marketing
4 Ways of Capturing More Email Addresses and Increasing Conversion
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...