Top 10 Email Marketing Tips & Advice of 2012

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.

 

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