Email marketing strategy
Learn how to approach your email promotions and newsletters so you've the best chance of success. Best practices flow from a good strategy...
Latest from the blog
Proof the relationship matters
More evidence and discussion regarding the growing importance of a respectful sender-recipient relationship in securing future success for your email program.
FutureWatch: what's coming our way?
Identifies a few trends in email use and technology, and suggests how this might impact email marketing.
Popular articles:
The importance of context
A review of how there are different contexts for your email and how an understanding of each leads to better planning and strategy.
Where to focus in the future
Looks at what makes a future-proof email marketing program.
It's your other emails that count more
The emails that make the most impact -- especially on your brand -- are not your marketing ones. It's the others you need to worry about.
Email marketing is not pig farming
A reminder of the need to abandon the spreadsheet now and then and take a look at your email program from the perspective of the folk who actually get the emails.
The real challenge for email marketing
Article says that growing competition means all the best practices stuff won't be enough - you need to do much more than that...
A creed for email marketing
An overview of what email marketing is fundamentally all about, with links to the top reference sites and people who "get it."
What football teaches us about email marketing
Uses football as a metaphor for email marketing, drawing out six strategic lessons for email marketers from an understanding of the world's favorite sport.
Other articles:
Think outside the inbox
Examines email role (or not) in reaching the younger MySpace generation.
Considerations for a changing landscape
Various suggestions on how you might adapt your email marketing to meet the challenges of Web 2.0 and new communication habits and technologies.
A question for the email evangelists
Suggests defending email from accusations that it's dying is a waste of time. There are more important questions to answer.
Email's future: user and usage shifts
Explains how email and other forms of communication address different communication needs and situations. Sometimes competing, more often complementing each other.
Email is dead. Long live email.
Short list of posts and articles defending email against the naysayers who say new communication media will replace it.
Email's role in the multichannel environment
Looks at the position of email marketing in a multichannel retail environment and examines how it might change in the future.
Is email facing extinction?
Examines the fate of email in a world where younger people favor different types of communication.
Email: the generations
Looks at how email use changes between different age groups and what this might imply for marketers.
The customer experience
Explains how your brand and messaging approach needs to reflect and account for the customer's broader email experience.
No cents
Argues you should transfer more offline communications to email as postal prices spiral upwards. See here for an extended commentary on the suggestion.
Integrating with direct mail
A collection of expert opinions on how best to integrate email with direct mail campaigns.
How to develop an email marketing strategy | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Details the steps involved in developing a strategy. Part 1 covers qualitative goals and an analysis of your current situation. Part 2 looks at doing a competitive analysis and determining your target audience. Part 3 reviews the type of emails you might send. Part 4 considers content and frequency. Part 5 examines your template and quantitative goals. Part 6 considers budgets and ROI.
Email as just-in-time information
Shows how it can help to think of email as delivering information that meets the current needs of the recipient, in the context of a particular business objective. Which is more than just sending a coupon and hoping...
Provide value, not discounts?
A reminder that short-term improvements in sales are not the way to fully exploit the potential of email as a retention marketing vehicle.
Investment strategies
Identifies four email marketing areas worthy of more time, money and energy in the future. Covers advanced techniques, integration and internal support.
Kill your email list
A super look at how you should be approaching the whole business of email marketing and list management.
Simplify
Author suggests we're losing a little control over email marketing programs and need to regroup and simplify before tackling more complex approaches.
Understanding address value
Suggests truly understanding the value of an email address to your organization is the starting point around which to build your efforts.
Dialogue Redux
Discusses email marketing as a dialogue, highlighting the different stages in your relationship with a new subscriber.
An email audit
A series of articles authored by various luminaries from around the email marketing world. The theme running through the collection is to encourage you to take a step back and review your email marketing strategy and execution.
Fine Tuning Your Email Strategy
Suggest how we can do more to realize the benefits of email marketing, covering segmentation, frequency and timing.
More strategy tips... Page 1