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 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...
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Email Marketing
4 Tips for Improving Your Email Conversion Rate
June 9, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Sending timely and relevant communications to your email file is a necessity in driving qualified traffic to your site. Simply increasing your traffic numbers may be the first step, but ...
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Email Marketing
Creating Content for Email Newsletters
May 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...
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Email Marketing
Email Versus Social Media: 3 Key Points
April 29, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
With increased use of social media, many marketing professionals wonder if email will remain relevant. The question for ecommerce retailers then becomes where should they focus their efforts, and should they abandon email for social media? comScore, the tracking and analysis firm, publ...
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Email Marketing
Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments
April 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
For email marketing, the practice of "batch and blast" is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start ...
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Email Marketing
Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email
April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff
Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...
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Email Marketing
Using Email for Customer Acquisition
February 24, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a proven marketing channel for many online retailers. It's relatively easy to implement, and inexpensive. Return on investment tends to be high when marketing to your opt-in subscriber file or to visitors on your website. But can email be used to prospect and acquire new custom...
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Email Marketing
7 Tips to Grow Your Email Subscriber List
February 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That's one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future. But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedi...
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Email Marketing
7 Email-Marketing Tactics for 2011
January 11, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email marketing is vital for many ecommerce merchants. What does 2011 hold for email marketing? Below are seven key email marketing tactics businesses should be planning for the upcoming year. Relevancy Craft email messages with increased personalization, through segmentation and tar...
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Email Marketing
Ask an Expert: Which Email Providers Allow Purchased Lists?
December 22, 2010 • 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 email distribution providers that allow purchased ...
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Email Marketing
How to Hide Email Addresses From Spam Bots
December 8, 2010 • Matt Ferner
Ecommerce merchants have several options to hide or obscure that email address from spam bot programs and still make it accessible and user-friendly for customers. Below is a listing of some of the more popular methods and simple step-by-step instructions on how to employ them, each one progressively more hidden, or "obfuscated.
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Email Marketing
The Power of Triggered Emails; 6 Examples
December 7, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
In the natural progression of most email programs, there comes a time when an ecommerce site is ready to tackle the power of triggered emails. Although a challenge to set up, they can be a crucial element in your overall marketing communications strategy, and for good reason. Triggered ...
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Email Marketing
Remarketing 101, Part 2: Targeted Emails
November 18, 2010 • PEC Staff
Remarketing is an advertising concept to bring back consumers who have visited ecommerce sites and left without purchasing. In general, the remarketing services fall into two camps. We discussed the first remarketing camp, targeted banner ads, in “Remarketing 101, Part 1: Targeted Banne...
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Email Marketing
Optimizing Your Email Frequency: A 5-Step Plan
November 3, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
Frequency is always an important topic for email marketing. As marketers, we are afraid to overload our customers. We often forget that email is a channel that requires consumers' permission before communicating with them. As consumers, we don’t opt in to viewing Staples television com...
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Email Marketing
5 Keys to Transactional Emails; The Yankee Candle Example
October 7, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
Transactional emails, by definition, are sent automatically after a customer places an order. Every transactional email is an opportunity to connect with your customer at a point where he or she is fully engaged. But how can you optimize transactional emails to encourage customer inte...
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Email Marketing
Conversion Tip: Sync Email Timing to Visitor Habits
September 29, 2010 • Charles Nicholls
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Email Marketing
Email Providers Embrace Social Media: 4 Examples
September 22, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Social media has breathed new life into email marketing. And email provides a "push" element to update social network friends, Fans and followers. Email service providers (ESPs) are leading this renewed vitality and interest with the integration of email with social media. In this art...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 ‘Best Practices’ to Ignore
September 8, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
I am the email marketing manager for S&S Worldwide, a large retailer of crafts and school supplies. Over the years, I have encountered many "email best practices." But like Snap Bracelets, Cabbage Patch Kids and Atari, trends change. And email best practices, I've learned, do not ap...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: The Three-Part Plan
August 16, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
Editor's Note: We welcome as our new email-marketing contributor. She's marketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a direct marketer of arts and crafts, sporting goods and educational supplies. She is responsible for the planning and implementation of S&S's email marketing programs,...
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Email Marketing
Tools to Combine Email Marketing with Social Media
July 19, 2010 • PEC Staff
If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketi...
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Email Marketing
Tips for Formatting HTML Emails in Microsoft Outlook
June 23, 2010 • PEC Staff
Roughly one-third of all email recipients use Microsoft Outlook. But that program famously distorts HTML-formatted emails when other email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, and Thunderbird, render the same email messages differently. The result is that email marketers, such as ecommerce ...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing Has Always Been Social
June 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social marketing is one of the most important new trends in online retail promotion. It is effective, builds customer relationships, and offers a better return on investment than some other marketing techniques. But often, online merchants don't realize that they are already engaged in ...