Don’t-Go-It-Alone eMarketing Blog

Email continues to be the "Great Organizer" for users

According to a new survey published by Merkle, 71% of online consumers spent 20 minutes or more weekly exchanging email with friends and family in 2009, the same level recorded in the previous year.

With plenty of speculation that social networking sites were going to trample email out of the picture, some of the numbers in the report are truly powerful examples of how important email communication is in the average online user’s day-to-day. In fact, with the increased usage of Mobile Email and with most users linking their social networking updates to their personal emails—social networking is actually “breeding” a new brand of “Hyper Email Checkers”!

Here are some other great findings from the study:

– Nearly two-thirds (63%) of social networking consumers use the same email account for their social networking alerts and messages as they do for the majority of their permission, or opt-in email.

– Over 42% of social networking consumers are “hyper email checkers”– those who check their personal email account at least four times daily –compared with 27% of those not socially networked.

– 48% of social networking consumers spend 45+ minutes weekly with personal email, compared with 40% of those not socially networked.

and Mobile users with internet on their phone are even more likely to check their emails constantly:

– 50% of mobile email consumers are “hyper email checkers” too–compared with 32% of traditional email users.

FYI – Data was collected through Merkle’s annual “View from the Inbox” study, an online survey of 3,281 US adults age 18+ conducted during fall 2009.

Image was adapted from an original image by: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A poem for My Love on Valentine’s Day:

Shall I compare thee to a great email list-growth strategy?
You bet!

The two of you “art” fairly similar, I must say.
Our love and my list both started out small, like the darling buds of May.

Then over time, as our love organically grew,
So did my lists-in quality and quantity too!

Like a good little prospect, I subscribed to your love,
And just like the email capture on my website, it fit like a glove.

So on the horizon, what do I see?
Well, more chances to grow us all social-ly,
We can take dance classes, or have dinner with friends,
While my lists will use Twitter as a means to an ends.

Remember my love, thy eternal beauty doth brightly gleam.
And like my list growth strategies, the ROI on your love is Supreme.

Ok, so maybe you’d get backhanded if you actually delivered this sonnet to your True Love this Valentine’s Day– but after you read  ”Why Growing Great Lists is just like Growing Great Love” you might actually agree that the two share some pretty stark  similarities. Could it be that growing any good relationship–whether it’s two people “feeling sparks fly” for the first time or a web visitor signing up for a newsletter for the first time-always begins with a few simple steps?

With 2009 about to draw to an end, we here at List Engage just wanted to take a moment to congratulate our clients, friends, and fellow businesses on growing and thriving through the unprecedented economic climate of 2009– and to wish everyone a happy and healthy 2010!

With businesses looking to expand their eMarketing and social media budgets in 2010 — on everything from email marketing design and services to developing niche followers on Twitter — List Engage has something to offer any business, big or small. Why not make one of your resolutions to join us on the cutting edge of eMarketing success in 2010!

Ho ho hoooo nooooo! It’s too late. You’ve already hit send, and your seemingly perfect Happy Holidays email is now going to be the laughing stock of your clients’ Christmas parties. Let’s face it: email mistakes happen, but they happen a lot less to experienced senders who follow specific steps and check their final product meticulously before they send it out. Although you may be forgiven for your big email mishap, it’s better to just avoid it all together.

This year we wanted to spread our Holiday cheer by helping you send a cleaner, crisper, error-free email, to all of your clients, prospects, and friends. All you have to do is follow these simple steps:

The 5 Best ways to Avoid Email Blunders this Holiday Season

From all of us at List Engage:

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes in the New Year!

2009 has been a dark year for marketing budgets. As the economy tanked, so did every big company’s dreams of plastering market campaigns across every medium available.

Fortunately for e-marketers, email and social media marketing budgets defied the odds, and most actually grew in ‘09.

Take a look at the Marketing Sherpa chart, to see the average email marketing budget decreases versus increases across 8 financial sectors.

To read the entire article, go here.

It turns out, that when consumers want to share something they’ve found online with their friends or family– like an article link, or a video– an overwhelming amount of people still use email as their primary form of sharing. According to the latest survey from Marketing Sherpa, while social media is gaining some ground, the latter still dominates as a sharing tool.

In email’s defense, there are plenty of reasons to use it over social networking sites: privacy, certainty of delivery,  no length restrictions… to name a few. In the words of Marketing Sherpa, “When we look at media use over the last 15 years, we see a pattern of aggregation and adoption rather than replacement. Some media suffer in the exchange, but none are eliminated entirely. More commonly, their uses become more refined.”

So, while we may find a Facebook status update good for conveying a one-liner, or Twitter for “tweeting” our location it’s a lot less likely that social media will replace email for getting in touch with Nana, keeping updated on your bank’s latest policies, or interacting with potential clients.

To read the complete Marketing Sherpa study, click here.

As List Engage rolls out the new ShareThis feature for all of our email marketing clients, the social networking world just got a whole lot closer. Now, with the click of a button you can instantly connect your emails to your social networks– and simultaneouly sync all that time, money, and effort you’ve invested in your email campaigns into your social networking efforts as well! And with the 2010 media buying budget looking to have email marketing and social media neck-in-neck on ad spending– now’s the time to make your marketing dollars work overtime.

Keep Reading…

To learn more, specifically about ShareThis and our other Social Forward features, click here.

Recently, Seattle based outdoor clothing retailer Filson came to ListEngage with a challenge—create an email marketing campaign that reached their valued customer’s inboxes with a time sensitive offer and in turn help them increase their campaign performance and sales. They wanted to see positive results, and ListEngage delivered!

By following best practices in email design and rendering, smart list segmenting techniques and moving away from an all-image based email to a combination of images and text seen above the fold ListEngage was able to achieve a much higher success rate than average email marketing campaigns. The campaign generated much better open and click-through rates and even reported “higher than expected sales” – the ultimate dream for any online retailer and what every e-marketing company should strive for when helping clients with their online marketing efforts.

To learn more about Filson, or to sign up for their exclusive offers and events click here.

To learn more about ListEngage and our “Don’t Go It Alone” philosophy or to sign-up for our newsletter click here.

When creating and designing emails, it is often difficult to determine what makes for the “best” note to be viewed in several different email clients: While Gmail and Yahoo may render the email perfectly, Outlook might align images left or perhaps display the font type incorrectly. Meanwhile, while you’re viewing your *perfect* newsletter in Internet Explorer with a big smile on your face, it might be rendering completely backwards in Firefox!

Although you never know for certain until you click send (or you make this your vocation, like us!), there are some “tried and true” practice for email design and rendering which will certainly help eliminate some of the guesswork and “aftermath” headaches of email marketing– and we’ve outlined the Top Ten in our most recent newsletter..

Take a look for the Top 5 Best Rendering and Design Tips, or dowload the Whitepaper here.

Clients often come to us for advice on how to engage their customers more, create relationships, and ultimately turn their “leads” into conversions.

We offer this sage advice: Create! Automate! Engage!

When it comes to email marketing, you can spend all the time in the world blasting out blanketing emails and flooding customers’ inboxes with little to no result, or you can get smart: send automated, targeted messages to the right people at the right times in your sales cycle.

The newsletter attached here offers our “Automated Drip Marketing” approach to email marketing, and we think you’ll find it extremely valuable.

Not only will you waste less time with “batch and blast” messages to all your clientele (and save yourself some resentful unsubscribe responses as well!), but you and your recipients will find much more value in the info you provide in the first place.

So skip the SPAM and treat your customers to something savory; they’re sure to digest your message much better when they know you made it especially for them.

Check out this month’s newsletter for more information on drip marketing >> click here