Digital + Social

Luke Lawson, Experian CheetahMail UK and United Mail Solutions UK, offers his predictions regarding email marketing for 2011.

Like most everyone in this nation, I

Marketers know they need to play in the social media space. A new survey offers insight into the nature and expectations of consumers using these channels—and how brands can glean information about what motivates their customers.

Men and women use social media differently, according to Empathica, a customer interaction consultancy which specializes in retail clients.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) wanted to be able to create highly personalized transactional emails and lifecycle messaging for each of its seven brands on the fly. What’s more, it wanted to automate the process so that customers could receive the appropriate messages in as close to real-time as possible. Now that it integrated a new email platform, it can.

Email personalization is a great tactic. It’s a powerful tool for grabbing the recipient’s attention, talking to him directly, and showing you value him as a customer. But personalization can go horribly wrong. So before you begin, here are a few things to consider

Despite chatter about social media usurping it, email remains one of the most effective, and cost-effective, tools available to marketers. We asked several experts for their take on how email will continue to evolve and what it means to you.

One strength of email as a marketing tool is its measurability. But if you measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns in a vacuum, relying exclusively on standard medium-specific metrics such as open and clickthrough rates, you could be underestimating their effectiveness.

As an email marketing professional, you obsess about maintaining and growing a database of responsive subscribers, ensuring that your emails make it through the myriad filters to their inboxes, and creating messages that are compelling enough to entice recipients to open them and respond. But you probably don’t worry too much about what happens once those recipients do click through.

As if any were needed, Disney is building buzz for the Dec. 17 release of its new 3-D sci-fi adventure “Tron: Legacy” with a social app that lets users put themselves at the handlebars of a lightcycle from the picture

If you