email marketing

Once you’ve produced a well-researched conference programme and have all your speakers and topics in place, it’s time to start the email marketing.

 Read more

If you’re asking this question I would bet you have just started out on the email marketing road. You are probably looking at a campaign report and wondering what a hard and soft bounce is and whether it matters. A bounce is a bounce is a bounce right? Wrong.

 Read more

We were asked recently to talk to an audience of event marketers all about email marketing. How can you best use email as a platform for driving event registrations. You can see the slides below which might tell you some of the story, otherwise get in touch and we’ll happily answer any questions you have on email marketing best practice.

Have you come across BrightTalk before?

They are a webinar platform where you can find great content on anything from B2B lead generation, to social media and a vast array of other marketing topics. They send me a weekly email promoting recent and upcoming webinars that match my interests around marketing and lead generation. If you haven’t checked out BrightTalk yet I strongly suggest you do.

In fact you could start by registering for one or more of the webinars listed below.

Future:

Make the most of unconverted web enquiries through LinkedIn
Webcast: Jul 04 2012 3:30 pm
Channel: B2B Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/452/49701

Establishing Your Demand Funnel: Having a Process from Click to Close
Webcast: Jul 24 2012 7:00 pm
Channel: Media and Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/43/50943

The Future of Webinars and Videos in B2B Marketing
Webcast: Sep 13 2012 11:00 am LIVE VIDEO
Channel: Media and Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/43/50627

Last week

How Email can help you to grow your Community
Webcast: Jun 28 2012 10:00 am
Channel: Media and Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/43/46303

Successful Community Management
Webcast: Jun 28 2012 12:00 pm
Channel: Media and Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/43/49717

Automated lead nurturing: This time it’s personal!
Webcast: Jun 28 2012 3:30 pm
Channel: B2B Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/452/49169

Are Online Communities Profitable?
Webcast: Jun 28 2012 6:00 pm
Channel: Media and Marketing
Attend: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/43/46307

I blogged recently about email marketing, listing some critical factors for successful campaigns. One of those factors was segmentation, which is a word often used by marketers, but frequently not put into practice.

I won’t name and shame, but many times I have heard smart marketers wanting to send a product specific email campaign to ‘all emailable contacts’. The word spam springs to mind.

But of course email is not the only tactic where segmentation is required to drive up marketing effectiveness. In fact this applies to any outbound marketing, whether communication related, or indeed product, price, place… you get the idea. Effective segmentation applies across the marketing piste.

There’s a nice blog from Andrew Dalglish over at Circle Research that introduces this in more detail for B2B segmentation in the SME market. Andrew introduces a four step framework: Narrow, Segment, Profile, Apply, and relates this to Sage, a leading IT brand. You could do a lot worse than taking on board his ideas here.

At the very basic level Andrew suggests narrowing your criteria to focus on one customer segment – SMEs in his example. The clever part is taking that segment and profiling it further by behaviours such as consumption patterns, or motivation and preferences.

Another approach might be to segment your customer base around a particular product and align to where they are in the sales funnel / buying cycle.

For example, prospective clients for an IT system at the ‘awareness’ stage are likely to be more responsive to communications with broad product comparisons, than those at ‘action’ stage – who are more likely to respond to detailed technical specifications.

Of course, you need to be careful not to put the cart before the horse here. I’m assuming you will have identified a market need for your product or service in the first instance i.e. the very first phase in any segmentation exercise.

Effective segmentation should actually be the easy part. Crafting the product, setting the price point, getting the distribution and communications channels aligned to your segment, those surely are the more challenging parts.

We received an enquiry for email marketing recently and as part of our proposal pulled together some email marketing critical success factors too. I’ve summarised a few of these below.

 Read more

If you’re running email marketing campaigns, you’ll often see in performance reports the terms hard and soft bounce.

 Read more

It goes without saying that email is one of the most popular customer communication and marketing channels at the moment. Even with the explosion in social media, email is still without a doubt a very important and impactful channel for b2c and b2b marketers.

 Read more

Email marketing is one of the subjects that is continually in the marketing spotlight. Done well it can reap huge rewards, done poorly and you can end up being labelled as a spammer. I’ve previously written about 8 top tips for improving your response rates, but when scanning the internet for more interesting hints and tips, I found a great post by an internet marketer called Gobala Krishnan.

 Read more

It’s high time I posted up my first post of the year, particularly given today is the last day of January. Really where did this month go..? I usually start the year with a post about kicking the year off but this year I’d like to just post up a list of really interesting resources I’ve found for small business recently.

 Read more