Month: November 2008

More marketers have been including games in their email this season, trying to distract us into playing when we all need to be in Q4 work-mode. The game-playing happens, truth be told, and it can be a good thing. With so many retailers trying to reach shoppers through the same...

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions: eec Report: 2008 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study Sign-Up Best Practices, Trends and Examples from the Top Online Retailers Silverpop: SPAM: What Consumers Really Think Survey finds growing anger; advice for avoiding recipients' wrath....

More heartbreaking news from a study that drills into a critical aspect of email marketing: the unsubscribe process. Apparently, some very smart marketers are not giving the unsubscribe the attention it needs as a valid part of their customers' holistic email brand experience. Return Path's new study Keeping the Subscriber...

Sponsored by: The Direct Marketing Association's Email Experience Council signed up to receive promotional emails from 120 of the top online retailers tracked via the Retail Email Blog. Findings indicate a trend toward richer subscription processes. One highlight of the report shows that the percentage of retailers using only a...

Dear Zappos: If you are listening—and I know you are (Twitter, Google Alerts, some other cool way)—please help me understand the following: I've heard a rumor that you are working on revamping your email marketing strategy. I'm not sure when the unveiling is scheduled for public consumption, but my guess...

It's harder than ever to convince consumers and business professionals to part with their dollars and euros and yen—a global recession, tightening belts and everyone afraid of layoffs and the possibility of more bad news. The only number that hasn't gone down lately is our quarterly forecast number—and for many...

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions: eec: Top Ten Takeaways from the Email Compliance Seminar Email Compliance: The Foundation of Reputation and Deliverability Listrak: 221 Email Marketing Do's and Don'ts Best Practices Reference Guide Vidi Emi: Holiday Guide 2008 Six...

You've swept your customers off their feet with a dazzling email creative and message. To help you give them somewhere equally stunning to land, we at the eec Email Design Roundtable have added a Landing Page Checklist to our Email Checklist Series. With so many details to think about, our...

It's a much debated number, but common marketing research (read: marketing urban legend) says the average person is exposed to 3,000 ads every day. Yet, while even most marketers complain about the shear volume of ads, we continue to add to the problem. Consumers and business people, however, aren't just...

The answer… 84% –> Organic – Capitalizing on sign-up opportunities across all of my channels 9% –> Acquisition – Growing by renting lists, using co-registration, etc. 6% –> Viral – Empowering subscribers to share my emails via forward to a friend, social networks, etc. Thanks to everyone who participated in...

With pink emails filling our inboxes throughout Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the merits of cause-related marketing have come more prominently onto the Smith-Harmon radar. We wondered how well it really works, and MediaPost came through for us by publishing an article on this very topic. MediaPost reports that cause-related marketing...

The Email Experience Council is now accepting entries for its annual People's Choice Award: Best in Email, which recognizes an individual or company that has created an email campaign or program that demonstrates the full power of email marketing. Chosen by the members of the eec, the winner provides further...