Digital + Social

As email marketing has matured, the ability to measure the channel’s performance has evolved substantially. Yet all too often, marketers rely on rudimentary campaign metrics from the batch-and-blast days of the past to judge effectiveness.

Instead of thinking exclusively about how well a particular offer or piece of creative performed, marketers should additionally look to longitudinal metrics—measurements of subscriber engagement over time—to determine whether or not an email program is successful.

One of email’s greatest strengths is its measurability. Marketers regularly evaluate campaigns against standard response metrics such as delivery rates, open rates, click rates and conversions. These are all excellent criteria for how well a particular offer or message resonated with the target audience. Further, those who are willing to test multiple combinations of copy and presentation (from lines, subject lines, content, creative, layout, etc.) can achieve highly optimized rates of response at a campaign level.

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It’s no secret that mobile devices present both opportunities and challenges for email marketers. Consumers love the ability to read their email on the go and marketers love to reach them any place, any time.

Data from social media forums can be a valuable tool to gain insight into what your customers are thinking. But, cautions Dominic Field, U.S. leader of the media sector for Boston Consulting Group’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice, marketers must view it through a filter.

Just as with focus groups, he says, social media commentary runs the risk of being a forum for passionate advocates and detractors.

“We’ve done research showing the vast majority of what you pick up falls under a high spike on the negative side, or a high spike on the positive side,” notes Neal Rich, a marketing specialist project leader in Boston Consulting Group’s Chicago office. “It’s difficult to know how that projects into the real universe of people out in the physical world.”

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere made his midnight ride to warn of the British invasion forces. But while this date is known in greater Boston as “Patriots Day” and the rest of the country as the date of the Boston Marathon, there is another foreign invasion that may later resonate for email marketers: May 5, 2010.

On that date, for the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters were allowed within a domain name. In a press release announcing these changes, Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN, the international authority that manages all domain addresses, noted that more than 50% of Internet users weren’t born using Latin letters. This advance, he added, means they can participate in the Internet in their native language and native scripts.

When most organizations think about integrating social media and email, they focus primarily on including links to their social pages within the email and encouraging recipients to share the email with their friends and colleagues. A third, often overlooked way to leverage the social element within your email marketing is what Matt Caldwell, senior creative director of Yesmail, calls “dispatches”: incorporating content from social media into your email messages.

That an abandoned-cart email can work wonders is a fact, as numerous studies and examples have shown. Yet of the 101 retailers analyzed by the Email Institute and Multichannel Merchant between November 2010 and January 2011, only 30.7% sent a follow-up email in response to an abandoned cart containing at least $100 worth of merchandise. If you’re among the more than two-thirds of retailers that have yet to implement an abandoned-cart email program, here are some tips to get you started

With the full-on race to develop Facebook pages and launch promotions on those sites to build fans, don’t push aside the ol’ tried-and-true brand Web site; home base, Ground Zero for consumers to get an in-depth picture of the brand, discover products, benefits, download coupons, and yes, even access a link to Facebook.

Crate and Barrel, Cabela’s and Wise are examples of brands using their Web home pages as a staging ground for promotions.

Many marketers forget that email can do much more than help you sell your products or services. It can also reduce your customer service and call center costs, as Verizon Wireless found out with its welcome campaign.

Your template is the structure you hang your entire email marketing campaign upon. Therefore it is imperative that it be effective, powerful, flexible, and easily modifiable. Here are the top five signs that your current email template belongs on the cyber scrap heap and should be replaced