Defining—and Engaging—the Unengaged Subscriber
How are you treating the unengaged subscribers on your email list? These inactive subscribers are still on your list so potentially have value. But they obviously aren’t responding to your email marketing the way you’d like. What can you do? First off, let’s define an unengaged subscriber, otherwise known as email non-responders. What is an email non-responder? In short, it a recipient who is not opening your email, or someone who is not clicking any of the links inside the email. Couple that with the factor of time. Over what period of time are they not opening or clicking? For some brands, 12-18 months is the appropriate window of time to measure this. To me, to [...]
Realize the Value of Relevance to Get More Email Opens
Think of the last time you didn't read your email for a day or so. When you did check, your inbox was probably filled with both opt-in messages as well as some junk email. Let's focus on those emails you opted in to receive, the ones from brands you had explicitly given permission to send you content. From the email marketer's perspective, when trying to get more email opens, there are multiple things you need to consider. The First & Second Things in Your Email Box Affects Email Opens: When you look at your inbox, the first thing you see is who sent the email message and next is the email subject line. Based on those two [...]
The Importance of the Welcome Email
As an email marketer, you need to pay close attention when sending a welcome email. Remember, the welcome series is the first email content your email subscribers will have with your business. Making sure that interaction is relevant and meaningful is critical to the lifetime value of that subscriber. Pro Tip: To make sure your welcome email is effective, ask yourself: Does the first email come right away? Does it say thank you for subscribing? Does it use the subscriber’s first name? Does it look nice? Does it render properly across browsers and/or mobile devices? Do you believe the message builds trust? Does it make your new subscriber feel good about your organization and validate their [...]
What Makes a SOC 2 Audit Successful?
What happens after you receive your SOC 2 audit report? You’ve just used many resources – maybe even some that you were strapped to allocate – to go through a gap analysis, remediate the findings, and then begin the Type I and/or Type 2 audit. It’s a massive project that you should be proud to finish…but what now? What makes a SOC 2 audit successful? How do you make the most out of your compliance for service organizations? Let’s look at four ways to prove that your SOC 2 audit was successful using one of our client’s SOC 2 audit journeys as an example. iPost’s SOC 2 Compliance Journey iPost is a flexible and dynamic marketing [...]
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Expert Level Email Marketing Execution [Like You’re in a Spy Novel]
Spending a few weeks on vacation and reading my fill of spy novels makes me reflect on my years in the online business. Spy novels and movies feature cool gadgets that work exactly when you need them, with the ability to adapt to any situation. Sounds like a perfect metaphor for online advertising/marketing. After poring through eight of Vince Flynn’s books in two weeks, I found a few themes that I think are really important for effective email marketing campaigns and online advertising in general. Every aspect of a successful spy operation has three key traits. There is an amazing amount of intelligence informing every decision. The speed at which decisions are made is near real-time. [...]
Managing Data: Making sense of features that help
iPost wrote a Whitepaper “Email Marketing Maturity Model: From Bait Shop to Revolutionary” recently striving to help marketers think about the relative stages of maturity for an email marketer. One of the most important considerations when looking at your maturity is how you look at creating actionable segments and ultimately how you operate within those data sets. Below are a few not so often talked about segmentation types that can help your email marketing program: Active Segments include: Master and Control Segments: Creating a master record is critical for understanding the underlying growth and churn tactics, yet it's critical that when creating these master accounts, you create a series of control segments within your core audience [...]
From Automation to Journeys — 5 Key Tips
Most every digital marketing professional has basic automated email journeys in place, usually a welcome series. But the time has come for these email marketing automation programs to grow in maturity, to evolve from email automation to well-thought-out email journeys. Why? One reason: customer experience. Customer experience is the new competitive advantage We’re entering a new age, one in which customer experience will be the key competitive differentiator for those who send emails. And brands have some work to do to master the customer experience because they are falling short. According to an article at Forbes.com, almost all companies (89%) say they are competing based on customer experience. But are they really when 80% think they [...]
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Post-Promotion Email Marketing
For months now, you’ve been hearing all the hype leading up to the big shopping spree that now envelops the Thanksgiving weekend, like a fog rolling in off the bay to surround the buildings of San Francisco. And you might think your work here is through because your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails were done and sent out in a timely fashion, generating some serious revenue as a result. But just as the feasting of Thanksgiving can stay with you as leftovers that need to be cleverly concocted into new meals, so too should your Black Friday and Cyber Mondays have some follow-up. You can build on and even sustain that holiday weekend momentum with [...]
Restaurant Email Marketing
The Dangers of Stale Restaurant Email Marketing—and How to Make It Fresh Again Would you eat stale bread? Old fish? Over-cooked vegetables? Not by choice, right? Nor would your restaurant serve up such sub-standard food to their customers. But you might be serving up stale, sub-standard emails—through no fault of your own. To make sure your restaurant email marketing strategies match the quality of your restaurant chain’s food or table service, let’s take a look at how customer email technology has changed in recent years. A Fresh Approach to Restaurant Email Marketing You already know email marketing is unique among other marketing tools. It delivers a higher ROI for one thing, and it acts like a [...]
How to Create a Powerful Behavioral Targeting Email Strategy
Email marketing is becoming more difficult to do. Social media marketing, video marketing, and content marketing are competing with email to capture attention. But, for most digital marketers, email is still the bread and butter of their online business. That said, those who adapt to a more modern behavior based email marketing strategy will separate themselves from the competition. Improve Your Marketing - Behavioral Email Examples Are you still email marketing the old way? You narrow down your focus to a product you want to showcase and push that out to everyone on your list? FAIL. Sorry, Charlie, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Your open, click, and conversion rates will all suffer if this [...]
The All-in-One Marketing Cloud vs. Integrated Best-in-Breed Solution
Are you considering a marketing cloud solution? One that combines all kinds of disparate technologies and features into one package? Many companies are going that route. And it might be that it’s a good solution for you…and it might be that it’s not. A bundled solution has its downsides, as you’ll see below. And there’s a lot to be said for one customized exactly to your needs. The marketing cloud as a bundled solution A marketing cloud solution typically bundles together a variety of technologies onto one platform for you—technologies such as CRM, eCommerce, social media marketing, analytics, and possibly more. When you want your marketing solution offered to you as a total package in one [...]
How a Relational Database Can Help Stop Email From Falling Flat
Do you know where your email marketing is headed? Ideally, it’s headed down the path of hyper-personalized, one-to-one marketing. But hyper-personalized is only going to happen if your ESP supports a relational database. Relational vs. flat file systems Although many marketers have recognized the benefits of relational databases for several years now, surprisingly few email service providers (ESPs) support them—although iPost does. If you’re planning to take your segmentation to a new level this year, or to increase the sophistication of your email marketing, you need to know how a relational database differs from the usual flat-file one—and how critical this might turn out to be when choosing your new Email Service Provider. So… what’s the difference? [...]
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