There are plenty of things to know about email marketing, and you’ll probably just scratch the surface even if you spend
the rest of your career trying to keep up. Hence this Top 10 of 2012 list. We feel these are the 10 things you must commit to if you’re going to succeed.
The
top 10 list was chosen by Google rankings, and are composed of our own
tips with some advice from other top bloggers
as well. If you’re only going to read one email marketing post all
year, this is definitely the one. Email marketing is a major part of
many businesses, so make sure you take a look to see if any
of these articles catches your eye.
How does your email marketing data compare?
A look at recent email marketing data shares statistics on open rates and click-through rates.
Today
we have more data to share on email marketing campaigns throughout 2011
and the first quarter of 2012. The findings
come from more than 1,100 brands, sharing benchmark data related to
their email marketing efforts. These numbers will help you compare your
own email marketing statistics with those of other
brands.
All the statistics shared below come from 2012 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study.
Open rates
The unique open rates for the US, Canada, and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) had a mean of 20.1%; a median of
15.0%; a top quartile of 43.7%; and a bottom quartile of 8.0%.
Email marketing stats: How does your company rate?
Email marketing continues to be a valuable resource online and updated statistics helps email marketers prepare
accordingly.
Every
time I come across stats related to email marketing activity, I get
excited to share them with the community.
Recently I read a benchmark report from Emarsys, which looks at tens
of thousands of email campaigns from over 1,000 companies. They’ve been
updating this report over the past five years, so
there’s comparison data included. Take a look at some of the
findings below.
Bounce rate decreases
Over
the course of the last few years, email marketers have been clearly
paying more attention to improving bounce rates.
As of 2009, the reported average bounce rate was 3.08%. In 2011,
that number dropped to 1.84%. B2C companies have consistently reported
lower bounce rates compared to B2B companies over this time
(1.73% and 2.49%, respectively).
Do you want more website traffic and a larger email marketing list? and learn the strategies successful publishers and
Internet marketers are using.
Simple email marketing tips & advice from top bloggers
Email
marketing isn’t always easy. These days there’s so much junk email that
it can be very hard to get your readers to
open emails, let alone create a connection with them. Below are a
few articles that should help improve your overall email marketing
techniques to hopefully avoid people thinking your emails are
a waste of time.
An insider’s guide to write powerful & simple emails
Many
small businesses struggle with email marketing. Specifically, they
often freak out at the idea of writing an email
marketing campaign, let alone one email to their customers. I want
to share how to get laser-focused on your target audience of your emails
and offer several techniques to write simple and
powerful emails that motivate your audience to act on your email
marketing campaign.
The first thing I want to dispel is a myth that you’ve probably been told over and over again — the myth is that you need
a giant list in order to be successful. This simply isn’t true.
Email marketing focuses on engagement
Email marketing advice helps put actions in perspective.
I’ve
been scouring the Internet for email marketing advice that focuses on
the holistic approach. It’s nice to find a
variety of opinions on an all-encompassing strategy for creating a
database of email subscribers because it’s this information that will
help publishers succeed in the digital age.
One recent article
compared email
marketers to Olympic decathletes. As a fitting topic for this
summer’s Olympic games, the author says, “Top email marketers need to
understand consumer behavior with social media, and how
interplay between social and email can be used to create stronger
email programs and enhanced social experiences.”
Email marketing tips for relationship-building
Are you having trouble gaining customers through email? Here are a few tips and advice from top bloggers on ways to
communicate better through email.
To
me, the hottest and sexiest social network right now is your inbox.
Sure, I love Pinterest as much as the next guy (who
likes Ryan Gosling’s abs), and I think it’s great that Zuck took the
company public, made people angry for wearing a hoodie to Wall Street,
and then got married. You already know I’m down
with Google+. But if you want to know the hottest opportunity in the
world? It’s the inbox. Your inbox.
I’ve talked about this in speeches often, but I realize that I’ve not covered it on my site, so here you go.
Making waves with email marketing
Many people look at “making waves” as a bad thing. It’s used to describe the creation of a disturbance or controversy.
Today however, the only disturbance we’re discussing is the way to make favorable changes to your email marketing program.
Since the majority of email relationships begin at your website, there’s a need to not only have your landing pages
designed with the intent of converting, it’s also important to have pages designed to facilitate the email relationship.
In
this article I will discuss five areas of email marketing that
represent a better user experience. These elements of
email marketing are often website based, and will help email
marketers develop better relationships with their audience members.
Using good journalism to build your email marketing list
With balanced content, audience members will be more apt to sign up for updates through email newsletters.
Google’s Penguin update, which rolled out in late April, brings a major question to mind: How balanced should my content
creation be?
As
we’ve seen, Google is hitting some websites hard, making them lose
significant amounts of search traffic in the
process. And in some of these instances, it doesn’t appear that
black hat SEO is present. It does seem however, that Google is forcing
content creators and digital publishers to go out and do a
better job as a journalist.
For instance, one of the activities being penalized by Google is unnatural linking. This may include an excessive amount
of affiliate links, exact match anchor text links, and cross-linking from your other sites.
These
linking endeavors don’t really scream black hat SEO, but at the same
time, they aren’t journalistically sound. Good
journalists find multiple sources in their marketplace and they
provide strong commentary on the breaking news that others share.
In
the webinar, he said bluntly, “I would rather have an
email subscriber than a Twitter follower.” We’d like to
think it’s because email subscribers respond better to promotions,
but according to Dan’s presentation, email and Twitter are almost equal
in terms of lead generation. Still, our Twitter
followers are often fair weather friends, aren’t they?
Dan reminded businesses that since 88% of people use their work email as their main email address, so email subject lines
can’t be boring. ”You’re competing with baby pictures and invitations to dinner,” he said.
Boring, jargon-y words like “evaluation,” “soon,” “administration,” “liked,” “please,” “minutes” and “enjoyed” were the
most common in top unopened emails.
15 email marketing tips from 3 top email gurus
Looking for some help with email marketing? Here are a few tips that may help you not only get your emails opened, but
might also help capture your readers attention after opening.
The four words that will get your email opened:
“You are not alone” In
two and a half years of sending all kinds of emails to all kinds of lists, the simple phrase “You are not alone” is the
most-opened subject line I’ve ever seen — by far.
Because Aweber counts each email that’s been opened, even if they’re from the same user, that single subject line has had
an average open rate of 90%, and has surpassed the 100% mark several times.
Using video in conjunction with email marketing
Email
marketing is used by 78% of marketers. Similarly, email newsletters are
used by 59% of marketers. These stats were
reported by eMarketer, and they came from a survey from Chief
Marketer, which was released in late April. Out of all the marketing
efforts listed, email marketing and email newsletters were used
the most.
The popularity of email marketing is clear. Marketers and consumers both use the medium. And as opportunities develop,
email marketing takes on new potential.
One
such opportunity is using email to share video content. Since videos
are rarely, if ever, placed directly in emails,
email marketers need to use another way to utilize the growing
popularity behind video. As it currently stands, video is hovering on
mass-market status. eMarketer predicts spending on online video advertising alone will reach $3.12 billion in 2012. This is an increase of 54.7%
since 2011.
http://www.mequoda.com/articles/email-marketing/top-10-email-marketing-tips-advice-of-2012/
