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
7 Email Tips for Ecommerce Merchants in 2014
January 21, 2014 • Carolyn Nye
Email marketing remains crucial to most ecommerce merchants. But email is changing. Consumers increasingly access email from their smartphones. Gmail’s influence on email marketing is growing. And the technology for ...
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Email Marketing
11 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates
January 13, 2014 • Pamella Neely
"Open rate" is one of the most telling email marketing metrics. Open rates determine click rates, conversion rates, and the overall performance of an entire email-marketing program. Even deliverability can be affected by open rate.
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Email Marketing
Gmail to Download Images by Default; Effect on Ecommerce
December 19, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Since Gmail’s new tabbed format launched a few months ago, the response has been both positive and negative — from users as well as email marketers. Last week, Gmail announced ...
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Email Marketing
5 Email Messages to Send Before Christmas
December 11, 2013 • Armando Roggio
The 2013 Christmas shopping season is nearing its end and online retailers want to capture every possible sale before many shoppers go into retail hibernation in the first quarter. To ...
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Email Marketing
5 Examples of Email Marketing on Cyber Monday
December 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online sales soared on Cyber Monday, totaling about $2.29 billion in the United States, up approximately 16 percent, according to an Adobe report. Email promotions likely played a role in ...
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Email Marketing
Email Spam Traps and How to Avoid Them
November 25, 2013 • Pamella Neely
Spam traps regularly catch well-meaning email marketers who would never think of themselves as spammers. Don’t let yourself be one of the marketers who will get stung by a spam trap this year, or in 2014. They can hurt your deliverability statistics badly.
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Email Marketing
Last-minute Email Checklist for Thanksgiving Week
November 25, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
It’s finally here, the busiest shopping week of the year. In this article, I’ll review some last minute email marketing reminders and tips to make this season successful. Manual Abandoned-cart Reminders If ...
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Email Marketing
4 Things Not to Do in Email Marketing
October 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Email is holding strong as the marketing vehicle that often produces the highest return for ecommerce merchants. Email can help to not only increase sales, but also make everyday administration ...
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Email Marketing
Special Characters in Email Subject Lines: Good or Bad?
October 13, 2013 • Pamella Neely
You've probably seen special characters in email subject lines before — those interesting little symbols that show up now and again in your email inbox. They look like this.
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Email Marketing
7 Ideas for Better Ecommerce Marketing Emails
September 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is an excellent way to engage customers and increase both site traffic and sales. Not all email messages, however, are equally effective. In 2012, 44 percent of promotional email ...
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Email Marketing
When Is the Best Time to Send an Email?
September 17, 2013 • Pamella Neely
"When is the best time to send an email?" is one of the most frequently asked questions about email marketing. After all the work of building a list, crafting a message, and designing the email, everybody wants to get the best results possible. Nobody wants to mail at the wrong time.
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing for the Holidays, Part 2: Implementation
September 17, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Editor’s Note: This is “Part 2” of a two-part series on email marketing for the upcoming holiday selling season. “Part 1: Preparation” we published earlier. In “Email Marketing for the Holidays,
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing for the Holidays, Part 1: Preparation
August 26, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Editor’s Note: This is “Part 1” of a two-part series on using email for holiday marketing. “Part 2: Implementation” we published subsequently. Ecommerce merchants are increasingly promoting holiday-specific products earlier, to ...
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Email Marketing
Text Messaging Effective for Retailers
August 9, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Short message service communications — text messaging — may help online retailers deliver better customer service and represent an important marketing opportunity. Worldwide there are more than 4.3 billion SMS-enabled mobile devices and in the U.S. approximately 96 percent of smartphon...
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Email Marketing
How to Write an Email Newsletter in 90 Minutes
July 29, 2013 • Pamella Neely
Writing a newsletter is one of the most difficult marketing stumbling blocks for a small business owner. You know it’s a task worth doing, but every week or month the email newsletter deadline rolls around and you think, “What I am going to say in the newsletter?”
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Email Marketing
New Gmail Tabs Impact Email Marketing, Expert Says
July 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio
MailChimp, a popular email marketing solutions provider, says that the new Gmail tabs that are intended to help users clean up their inboxes have negatively impacted open rates for email marketing campaigns, but that there is no need to panic. Google began introducing its new tabbed Gm...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Ecommerce Merchants
July 23, 2013 • Dale Traxler
In "Email Still an Effective Marketing Tool?," we addressed why email marketing is highly efficient, inexpensive, and easy to measure. This is unlike social media marketing, which for smaller merchants is often difficult to manage and track. I used email marketing extensively in my pr...
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Email Marketing
Using Email to Maintain and Build Site Traffic
July 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
When I managed email marketing for a leading ecommerce site, I would receive calls from our IT department almost every Tuesday, asking if I had sent a large email campaign. The trouble was that we were sending too much traffic to the site at once. This was a good problem to have, but we...
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Email Marketing
Cart-abandonment Email Best Practices
June 25, 2013 • Armando Roggio
An abandoned shopping cart is like a broken promise. For the merchant, there is a lost sale and unclaimed revenue. For the shopper, there is an unfulfilled need or want. Fortunately, a quick series of cart abandonment emails may renew that promise, helping both the customer and the reta...
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Email Marketing
Will Gmail’s New Tab Layout Affect Ecommerce Merchants?
June 17, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Consumers have many options for email services. The top three providers are Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail, which recently changed to Outlook. Occasionally these services make changes that can impact ecommerce email programs. The changes are often dynamic — changing algorithms, rules, and ...
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Email Marketing
Email Still Effective Marketing Tool?
June 5, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan
At a time when social media seems to be the only thing people talk about, email is still an effective ecommerce marketing tool. But merchants will have to alter how they use it if they wish to keep up with changes in how people access email messages. Are People Still Reading Email? Th...
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Email Marketing
Good, Bad Email Design for Ecommerce Merchants
May 20, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Email design has changed over the years. It has evolved from basic text, to beautiful design with great images, to hybrids that balance images and text. With the majority of shoppers previewing or reading emails on their smartphones, many ecommerce merchants wonder what the best practic...
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Email Marketing
Applying Data to Improve your Email Communications
April 19, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
With so much information available about your customers and prospects, how do you apply that information to your email communications? In this article, I'll address steps to apply the right data to improve your email-marketing program. What Data Do You Have? This question is not alwa...
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Email Marketing
5 Tests to Improve your Email Marketing
March 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
For email marketers, there are several key tests that will improve a campaign, and an ongoing program. Here are five basic testing strategies to optimize your email marketing efforts. Subject Line Testing Many marketers believe that a subject line’s purpose is simply to get people to...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 5 Ways to Generate Immediate Sales
February 14, 2013 • Carolyn Nye
Email serves many functions for ecommerce businesses. It's a method of sending order confirmations and shipping notifications. It also delivers valuable content via newsletters. The goal of each function differs widely, depending on your site and the average sales cycle and order value....
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Email Marketing
Making Emails Responsive to Tablets, Smartphones
February 7, 2013 • PEC Staff
In "Optimizing Ecommerce for Tablets and Smartphones," my article last month, I addressed responsive design, the practice of coding a website to automatically adjust to the size of a user's Internet device. This month, I extend that discussion to include outbound emails, so that the ...
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Email Marketing
Using Sales Data to Automate Email Marketing
February 6, 2013 • Jaime Brugueras
Customers are the bloodline of any business. For ecommerce businesses, it’s particularly important to focus on creating recurring, loyal customers. This centers on understanding customer sales and shopping data, and using that information to develop profitable, automated email campaigns...
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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...