Today Yesmail Professional Services hosted a webinar for our clients called Getting into the in-box: Deliverability in 2010. Deliverability continues to be a top concern and challenge for all email marketers, and since it is a constantly changing landscape it... More

Today Yesmail Professional Services hosted a webinar for our clients called Getting into the in-box: Deliverability in 2010. Deliverability continues to be a top concern and challenge for all email marketers, and since it is a constantly changing landscape it is important for us to take the time to update our knowledge and stay on top of emerging trends and opportunities.
 
Jason Warnock, Director of Deliverability and Bob Sybydlo, Deliverability Analyst shared some great information about the state of deliverability including compliance, legal and technical challenges all senders face.
 
They helped our clients understand how ISP actions can impact deliverability, what Yesmail does every day to help our client's get their email delivered, and what steps senders need to take to ensure their email gets into the in-box.
 
Key topics covered included:

• Email authentication
• Campaign volume monitoring
• Abuse and hard bounce metric tracking
• How to combat mail stream pollution
• Standard bulking and blocking challenges
• Creative content blocking

It was a great event. If you would like a copy of the presentation, please email me.
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Develop original contentMake sure you show value to your customers by providing original, useful, or at least fun and entertaining content via your feed(s).  Sales announcements, store openings, new items, causes supported, service outings and restorations - all of these... More

Develop original content
Make sure you show value to your customers by providing original, useful, or at least fun and entertaining content via your feed(s).  Sales announcements, store openings, new items, causes supported, service outings and restorations - all of these are great, proactive ways to communicate with your followers.  Remember to be brief (obey the 140 character limit!) but not too brief.  Leave the "gr8" abbreviations for SMS whenever possible.
 
Include links to relevant content
140 characters isn't much space to work with, but you can and should include relevant links to website content in your Tweets. To save space you can shorten URLS and track clicks for free using services like bit.ly
 
Track response
Twitter response tracking is limited, but you do have some important success metrics you can monitor.
 
Yesmail Enterprise will help you track:

• What you tweeted
• When you tweeted
• How many were following you when you tweeted

Additionally, you can track:

• Follower trends - are the number of followers increasing with your marketing efforts? Increases and decreases in follower trends can also be tied to engagement and relevancy of your content.
• Clicks - how many clicks are you getting on the links in your Tweets? How many clicks do you get on email content promoting Twitter?
• Conversion - if you have revenue tracking codes as part of your URLs you can track website visits and revenue generated by your Tweets.

With patience, perseverance, and an open mind, you can make Twitter a core component of your marketing strategy and improve the results of your email initiatives as well.

Catch up on Part 1 to learn more about how Yesmail Enterprise allows you to centralize the management of a single marketing campaign across many channels. Less

This week we announced our new Twitter Campaign Management feature available in Yesmail Enterprise. This is exciting news for marketers, because now you can save time by centralizing the management, coordination, and analysis of a single marketing campaign across many... More

This week we announced our new Twitter Campaign Management feature available in Yesmail Enterprise. This is exciting news for marketers, because now you can save time by centralizing the management, coordination, and analysis of a single marketing campaign across many channels (email + social + mobile) within one tool.

It only takes three simple steps to execute your Twitter campaigns in Enterprise:

1. You set up your account
2. Create your content (up to 140 characters)
3. Schedule and send

Not sure where to get started? Twitter crosses many of the boundaries of social, email, and SMS and requires its own approach to be truly successful.  Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you develop your Twitter marketing strategy.

Promote Twitter in your emails and on your website
Make sure your customers know how to find you and what benefits they will get from following you on Twitter. Will you send special discounts or give them early notice of new products or sales? Will you keep your followers updated on the latest events?

Dick's Sporting Goods sent their email subscribers an invitation to follow them on Twitter with a nice Free Shipping incentive.  The message did a good job creating visibility and outlining the benefits for followers.

Integrate Twitter with your email program
Twitter can be used to announce special sales and promotions, or to create viral buzz for new marketing campaigns. With Twitter Campaign Management you can schedule tweets as teasers or chasers for email campaigns, or send out special "twitter only" deals. Your  Twitter strategy should complement your other marketing channels, not be a stand alone.

Buy.com's Tweet 'n Seek campaign is a great example of a multi-channel strategy.  They promoted a "social scavenger hunt' via email and website banners. Clues were tweeted to followers, and then the community posted their answers on Buy.com's Facebook page.

One Twitter feed may not be enough
If you have a large company, several customer-facing departments, or varied products or services, you may need more than one Twitter feed.  Don't try to cram several disparate message streams into one account if you don't have to; create individual feeds for specific topics or customers to drive more value to the end user. For example, you could set up one Twitter feed for Customer Service, and a second Twitter feed for Marketing.

Stay tuned next week for Part 2 and learn about developing original content, including relevant links, and using Yesmail Enterprise to track responses.
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We are proud to announce that we have won the Gold Marketing Sherpa Award for Best Dynamic Content or Personalized Email for the Microsoft Enhanced Hotmail and Messenger Launch. Background: Microsoft recently launched enhanced mobile versions of its Windows Live... More

We are proud to announce that we have won the Gold Marketing Sherpa Award for Best Dynamic Content or Personalized Email for the Microsoft Enhanced Hotmail and Messenger Launch.
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We are proud to announce that we have won the Silver Marketing Shepa Award for Best Opt-In or List Growth Message (B2C) for the My Coke Rewards Community Invite. Every quarter, My Coke Rewards reaches out to a select few... More

We are proud to announce that we have won the Silver Marketing Shepa Award for Best Opt-In or List Growth Message (B2C) for the My Coke Rewards Community Invite.

Every quarter, My Coke Rewards reaches out to a select few of its members to join the My Coke Rewards community.  Community members have a chance to regularly share ideas, opinions, and other feedback with the My Coke Rewards team to make the program better for all members.  As noted in the email, "community members' feedback this year helped give mycokerewards.com a bold new design that's faster to use and easier to get around," among other great ideas and recommendations.

Other recent creative awards and recognitions include:

• 2009 Creative Media Awards - Best Email: Hewlett-Packard's "HP Monster Sale"; Finalist Coca-Cola / Vault Double Points
• 2009 Internet Advertising Competition Award - Best Computer Retailer Email message: "HP Mini 1000 campaign"
• 2009 Ad: Tech Awards Finalists - HP Mini 1000: The Perfect Mobile Companion & HP Voodoo Monthly Newsletter

Congratulations to our Creative Services team! They continue to deliver break-out email design that drives engagement and delivers results.

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On Thursday, Yesmail Professional Services hosted a webinar for our clients called Getting Started with SMS. This was our first opportunity to talk with clients about our new Enterprise SMS campaign management features and share high level best practices information... More

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The best computing solutions are patterned after biology - they have the ability to quickly adapt and learn in response to stimulus. Similarly, some of the most intriguing musical performances have the same qualities More

Like all biological life forms, they have the innate ability to quickly adapt to their surroundings in response to stimulus.  To adapt, but also learn and evolve.

By comparison, the best computing solutions are patterned after biology - they have the ability to quickly adapt and learn in response to stimulus.  Similarly, some of the most intriguing musical performances have the same qualities.

Take for example, the song "Quadrant 4", from Billy Cobham's Spectrum album. (Go to iTunes and download it, then continue.)  The song is based on one of the most familiar, basic patterns in music: the blues.  Yet the four musicians take this most basic of formats, blues in 4/4 time (four beats to a measure), and twist it into something entirely new - largely in response to each other - all at breakneck speed.

The first minute is an improvised keyboard and drums segment.  The ambidextrous drummer, Billy Cobham, plays like a speeding locomotive: both feet and hands churning away with mind-boggling speed and precision.  At the 0:57 second mark, you'll hear him and the keyboardist playfully mimic each other as they head into the main section of the song.

At the 2:50 mark, you'll hear a perfect example of adaptation in response to stimulus - the guitarist goes off on a rhythmic and melodic tangent, and the drummer instantly adapts in a very complex 6-second game of "follow the leader".   Not something you could exactly predict, or maybe even understand, but the result? "Wow."

In the end, what they did was take a familiar structure (4/4 blues), adapt it in real time, and create something deeply personalized and compelling on the spot.

An elite few interactive marketing software solutions have this same ability: to take something basic and familiar (an email marketing message, website, microsite, social media communication, etc.), receive real-time campaign feedback stimulus, and then adapt, learn and continually evolve it - all in real time, at breakneck speed.  Yesmail has such a solution, one that has received a patent for its universal ability to dynamically adapt and learn as it personalizes interactive media channel content. Examples of this real-time "situational awareness" stimuli that can be received from the targeted audience are:

- What time is it where the email or webpage is being opened?
- Where is the viewer of the email or webpage when it is being opened?
- What is the weather like at that location?

Those are just a few examples of how this solution - similar to our musician friends - can create something highly personalized, relevant and compelling on the spot.

You'll be hearing a lot more about this innovation in the weeks to come.  I'm pretty sure it will make you say, "Wow." Less

Yesmail is proud to announce the birth of a sparkling new website: cokeusa.com!  This website was developed by Yesmail and our partner R2integrated.Coke USA provides The Coca-Cola Company with an excellent opportunity to communicate directly with key decision makers... More

Yesmail is proud to announce the birth of a sparkling new website: cokeusa.com!  This website was developed by Yesmail and our partner R2integrated.

Coke USA provides The Coca-Cola Company with an excellent opportunity to communicate directly with key decision makers at home in a refreshing new way. The website speaks to an audience thirsty for an online experience with content that resonates with practicality, pertinence, and accessibility: not mere marketing and promotion. In this way, Coca-Cola can strike a unique relationship with consumers, increasing loyalty through the gift of inspiration, entertainment, and education.

By combining Yesmail's fresh content strategy that serves up relevant, useful, engaging, and inspiring articles and tips with R2integrated's beautiful, intuitive, and fluidly functional build, we created an experience specifically designed to connect with decision makers: a site that speaks directly to a consumer with a friendly style and respect for their busy lives.  

Check out the new website and let us know what you think! Less

We are thrilled to announce that Yesmail has added another creative design award to our growing list of industry recognitions. HP and Yesmail have won the Creative Media Award for Best Email for the HP Monster Sale campaign. More

We are thrilled to announce that Yesmail has added another creative design award to our growing list of industry recognitions.
 
HP and Yesmail have won the Creative Media Award for Best Email for the HP Monster Sale campaign. View the Creative Media Awards 2009 Winners.

In spring 2009, HP partnered with DreamWorks to launch a huge sale utilizing branding and themes from the Monsters vs. Aliens movie.  The objective of the campaign was to leverage the excitement surrounding the March 27th movie launch and generate incremental direct sales for HP.
 
The campaign consisted of 4 email messages launched over 10 days - March 30th through April 9th, 2009.  Each message leveraged key characters from the movie.  More than 12 million subscribers were targeted, with each subscriber receiving all of the messages in the 4-part series.  View all 4 email messages.
 
The Monster Sale campaign delivered outstanding results. Revenue per message sent was 80% higher than average compared to other messages launched during the quarter!  Click Rates were also strong at 37% higher than typical messages delivered over the same timeframe.  The significant increase in Click Rates indicates subscribers found the creative appealing and were interested and engaged in the content.  Final revenue numbers tallied from the Monster Sale indicated it was one of the most successful HP campaigns in 2009 to date.
 
In addition to winning this award, Yesmail also had two other finalists in the Creative Media Awards email category: Coca-cola "Try Vault Promotions" and Microsoft "Enhanced Hotmail and Messenger Launch".
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It's interesting in marketing, how everyone is an expert and a critic commenting and critiquing at will.  Given vastly diverse company structure, budget and priority - could you ever expect a "one-size fits all strategy" or ever be so bold... More

It's interesting in marketing, how everyone is an expert and a critic commenting and critiquing at will.  Given vastly diverse company structure, budget and priority - could you ever expect a "one-size fits all strategy" or ever be so bold as to espouse "my way is the right way?" 

Absolutely not.

At Yesmail although our specialty is email marketing, we obviously face the same challenges of every other business on the planet; lead generation, brand perception, product awareness.  We leverage the same programs as everyone else, creating and executing our own marketing mix that makes sense for us. All on a budget, all executed based on company priority.

Like many other companies, today we are focusing our time on search engine optimization of our sites, paid search, online advertising and experimenting with social media.  A much smaller portion of the budget is dedicated to the execution of traditional lead generation programs that range from industry events, email marketing (of course), and webinars, to network-driven cost-per-lead (CPL) programs.  Through all of these activities one of the main goals is to grow our marketing database of prospects.  We do this by offering topical content that we hope readers will find useful - and here's the standard practice of which many differing opinions collide - we collect basic contact and qualification information, thereby opting them in.  Why? Because then at least we have a somewhat qualified prospect to try and start a conversation with...   and Yada yada yada.

So, the question for people on this blog post is, do you (those of you that are marketers) go out of your way target numerous criteria within a publisher-rented  acquisition list? Do you suppress competitive domains ?  And if the answer is yes, then why?  If it doesn't save you even a buck when it's not a CPM-based mailing - is it worth it?  Or do you believe in the theory of casting a broader net to start and then build you targeted campaigns on subsequent mailings?  Answers that I imagine I'd get:

A.    My products/services have only 1 true target - there's no chance of cross-selling or upselling, so I have to narrow the original list
B.    I want to keep the competition away from my stuff (you know they'll find it anyway - right?  Let's not be naïve), and so I suppress their domains
C.    I'm a master of targeting.   Come on, it's just plain standard practice
D.    I don't care what you say - it saves me money

It's just an interesting discussion to have among marketing professionals - discussing best practices.  By the way - the impetus of this post raises a thought provoking discussion based on a flurry of barb-trading between the well known, Ken Magill of Magilla Marketing and eROI a local competitor in the ESP space about the publisher list I rented for an opt-in campaign.  Back to the earlier point; everyone is a critic. Less