Email Marketing

It's still a very important part of the online marketing mix. In fact, email this year has been elevated to a sort of celebrity status. Lots of executive attention due to the low cost and high return. It's the biggest revenue driver in the toolkit. Marketing budgets do not seem to be growing, but the investment continues to be strong with email marketing and search, where the immediate revenue and return is. For email, there isn't so much innovation as preservation Preserving our jobs and our team, growing our database assets, tying the various elements together (even loosely) and maintaining our list hygiene and deliverability budgets. Great conversation in Email Roundtable this week about how old is old, regarding lapsed subscribers. An old colleague used to call these slow boats which would always start a round of singing, the slow boat to China. My personal favorite method: don’t email them, and then every 3 months or so, send an inactive re-engagement campaign. Also, use that re-engagement to recycle copy so the costs are low and subject line test. Be creative and risky with the subject line- and use a lot of subject lines. One client had a 11% response rate on one of his segments, the subject line was the catchiest, wittiest, and most clever. It’s a sandbox, essentially, and the more risks the more surprises.