Kristen Dunleavy says, “Autoresponder emails (sometimes called autoresponder follow up emails or just follow up emails) have a ton of time-saving and business-growing benefits – and yet 75 percent of businesses aren’t using them. What does that mean for you? Add a follow up series to your email marketing strategy today, and BAM! You’re already ahead of the curve. Why are follow ups important? Follow up emails let you schedule an entire series of emails ahead of time for your new subscribers. Unlike broadcast emails, which are one-time emails with time-sensitive content (think emails promoting... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Which words in subject lines significantly increase consumer opens of marketing emails, and which words significantly decrease opens? To find out, Alchemy Worx used the Touchstone platform to analyze data from 21 billion marketing emails sent by 2,500 brands. The research included an examination of thousands of subject lines, word by word, to determine their influence on open rates. The words in subject lines that increase open rates most, on average, are upgrade (+65.7% compared with average open rate), just (+64.8%), content (+59%), go (+55.8%), and wonderful (+55.1%),... [...]

Kristen Dunleavy says, “When’s the last time you updated your blog? Posted on social media? Sent your customers an email? Optimized your website content? If the answer to any of these is, “It’s been a while,” it’s okay. Follow these quick tips to get your content back on track. Email If you haven’t shown your email subscribers some love in a while, you may want to consider a reactivation campaign. People who haven’t heard from you need a little refresher on your business. When you reach out to them again, show your value. Give them some useful tips or a checklist, tell them about... [...]

Jeanne Jennings says, “What’s the argument for using a double opt-in email marketing campaign as opposed to a single opt-in one? Read on to find out. It’s been a long time since the phrase “double opt-in” has crossed my lips, but it came up in not just one but two different conversations in the past few weeks. Both were friends that work in the digital marketing and product development world and they’re really good at what they do. But email isn’t their primary wheelhouse, like it is mine. So it was interesting that both considered double opt-in the way that email marketing... [...]

Todd McCormick says, “If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know I’m a huge Alabama Crimson Tide fan. College football is my true love, but I always tune in to the Super Bowl. As I’m both a sports fan and a marketing expert, watching the big game is practically required. This year’s game was an exciting one, complete with a bad play call, a big brawl, a last-minute win and a poorly timed commercial. Here are some highlights — and the digital marketing lessons we can learn from them: 1) It’s Not Over Until It’s Over The game didn’t pick... [...]

Andrea Carter says, “In his book How to Get PR for Your Startup: Traction, author and expert Murray Newlands offers these words of advice for today’s business owner: “The business that can influence the media will win the trust of the people – simply because consumers typically decide to purchase from brands they trust and are familiar with.” As someone who works in public relations, I confess, this statement gave me goosebumps. If ever there was a case for the value of public relations (PR), Murray nailed it. My own interests aside, Murray’s point is especially relevant to small business... [...]

Ginny Soskey says, “It’s only natural for people to want to compare themselves to others. Benchmarks give you a reference for how well you’re doing — and some indication of how to improve. In marketing, some benchmarks are easier to find than others. If you want to see how many social media followers another company has, you can just visit their profiles. If you want to see how their overall marketing is performing, you can plug in their URL into Marketing Grader and compare their score to yours. If you want to see their most popular blog posts, you can quickly and easily... [...]

Erin Hogg says, “Implementing basic segmentation to personalize emails is a great beginning to achieving relevancy. Finish Line was off to a running start, but how could the marketing team turn that run into a sprint and break away from the competition? Learn how the team took its basic segmentation practices to turn Finish Line into a champion with highly personalized, multichannel messaging, unifying email, on-site and mobile messaging, social media and display ads. This effort earned Finish Line the Email Awards 2015 Best in Show and will be presented at Email Summit 2015 by Aaron Buchanan,... [...]

MarketingExperiments team says, “What actions do you want your visitors to take on your site? What if you could influence those actions more effectively? Although conversion metrics typically receive the majority of marketers’ attention, understanding what behavior motivates the conversion event may be even more important. For some companies, website engagement may be the most effective indicator of conversion potential that you can monitor using analytics. In this 35 minute Web clinic, our research team will reveal three tactics proven to boost engagement on your website. This session will... [...]

David Moth says, “Crafting an effective email subject line is both a skill and an art form. Most companies are sending out marketing messages several times per week so it needs subtlety and creativity to ensure they don’t become repetitive or annoying. This requires intimate knowledge of the company’s tone of voice and the target audience, but we can at least try to broadly identify words that help drive clicks, and words to avoid at all costs. New subject line analysis from Alchemy Worx shows that ‘content’, ‘offer’, ‘benefits’ and ‘premium’ are four of the top five words... [...]