Email Marketing Tips: Effective Copy and Subject Lines
Great post on Writing effective email copy by folks at Campaign Monitor.
50 All-Time Great Retail Subject Lines by VerticalResponse should be bookmarked.
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December 1, 2009
March 11, 2009
Customers Squeeze Tropicana: Lessons in Rebranding
Sometimes the rebranding and redesigning of products, web sites and logos are disliked, and even hated by customers. In the past we heard horror stories of eBay’s homepage redesign, or Coke’s introduction of New Coke. I recently saw the newly redesigned Tropicana at the store, and personally it really looked some generic store brand product, and it did not stand out from the competitors (since there are gazillion different products in this category). Recently the company announced that Tropicana will be going back to the old design for their packaging after hearing from many disgruntled customers of their dislike of this new design… I guess this must have been a very expensive exercise for the company.
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December 18, 2008
Marketing strategy for surviving the recession
September 5, 2007
ZAG WEEK: Marty Neumeier coming to Philly
Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG and The Brand Gap, will conduct a three-day branding workshop in Philadelphia on September 18-20, 2007. For schedule and registration visit: www.zagweek.com
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July 25, 2007
Email Publishing Tools
Based on the feedback from my recent presentation, some folks wanted to know which email publishing tools I recommend. Also, some of the companies I listed in my presentation changed names or have dissapeared for some odd reasons.
So here is the updated list:
All of these companies offere different pricing and features. If you are in the process of selecting one of these tools, then you should be looking for a solution that at minimum offers these features:
- Detailed Performance Reporting
- Customized Templates
- Point-and-click editing
- Subscriber Management
- List Segmentation
- HTML/Plain Text Delivery
- Campaign Scheduling
If you have other email publishing tools that you would like to recommend based on your experience, feel free to comment and leave a link to their site.
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February 2, 2007
Super Bowl Ads
Since most of us in the U.S. will be watching the Super Bowl game this Sunday, we pay as much attention to the ads throughout the game as to the game itself. Why? Because, when companies spend $2.6 million for a 30-second ad marketing their product or service, it has to be good….
Speaking of Super Bowl Ads….NY Times has an interactive presentation of all previous Superbowl ads that you can watch with some interesting facts about the ads. YouTube also setup a site for this year’s Super bowl ads.
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September 3, 2006
Weekly Round-up
Famster
You wanna put your family on the web? Famster is here to help. You can setup a secure web site for your family to share calendars, photos, notes, blog and much more for free. Easy to use and setup.
Pickle Juice (aka new Gatorade competitor)
Yes, pickle juice has all the good stuff you need to hydrate yourself after a heavy workout.
World Usability Day
On November 14, 2006 usability professionals world wide celebrate the World Usability Day. Find out how you can get involved.
YaleShmale
Interesting approach to market a university…
Eboogle
Ebay and Google signed a deal this week to work together on text-based and click-to-call advertising online.
Writely is back
Writely is now back and accepts new accounts. Writely is simple and one the best word processing applications online. FYI: Writely was recently acquired by Google.
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January 30, 2006
Email Newsletter Publishing
Some of us receive three to four different types of newsletters in our inboxes everyday. I get at least three newsletters a day. Some of these emails are from Dell, Borders, Banana Republic, L.L. Bean, Circuit City or from magazines and news sites. These emails I receive are nicely designed and offer an easy way to unsubscribe from the list and comply with CAN SPAM Act.
Most of these newsletters and emails are published through some sort of online email marketing tool or desktop software.
If you are looking to setup one of these tools for your organization or business, at minimum you should look for these three components:
- Subscriber/List Management
- Click Through Statistics and Analysis
- Email Template/Design Management
Subscriber Management
Efficient and flexible subscriber management features are key to successful email campaigns and newsletters. With your email marketing tool, you should be able to import and export subscribers in text, Microsoft Excel and other text delimited formats. Some of the email publishers help to identify emails with wrong format, or incomplete email addresses. This is useful especially if you are importing 3,000-5,000 emails into your email list. Also, make sure you can group your list by different categories, which can help you to segment your audience. Let’s say you have an email list that combines all customers from Pennsylvania (PA) and New Jersey(NJ). Through your email publisher you shoud be able to separate and create a group for PA and NJ emails. In the future if you want to market geographically to a particular state or region you can send it to a particular group instead of everyone on your list. You should be able to segment your list by different categories that fits your organization’s target market.
Click Through Statistics
To track all the customer activity that happens after you send out your email newsletter, make sure your email newsletter offers a report on ‘click through’ rates for the links that you have placed on the email message. By looking at the number of users who interact with your newsletter, you can see how effective it is and which topics or links really work.
Email Template/Design Management
Some of us don’t know how to design an HTML email, which is perfectly normal and this is where the newsletter’s email template management comes in. If you have an email template within your newsletter program, you can easily manage the design and the layout of your newsletter. If you can afford to have a web designer create the design for you, that’s all good and you won’t use this feature that much. If you don’t have a designer in your staff then make sure your newsletter has templates that you can modify and use to launch your campaigns.
Email Newsletter & Marketing Tools
Below is a list of newsletter applications that I recommend using if you decide to deploy an email newsletter for your organization:
- MailChimp
- Topica
- Emma
- Campaign Monitor
- Microsoft List Builder
- Aerial Software – Email Marketing Director
- Get Active
- IntelliContact
Email Newsletter Best Practices and Tips
- Email Marketing Tips for creating email marketing campaigns
- Nielsen’s Alertbox: Design of Email Newsletters
- Email Marketing Etiquette: The Good, the Bad, and the Clueless
- How To Market Your Business With Email
- HTML Email Design Tips by MailChimp (in pdf format)
- The Basics Of Email Marketing
- How to Beat the Spam Filters
- Ten Steps To Improving Your Email Copy
If you have any other email marketing tools that you recommend, you can share it by commenting on this post.
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December 14, 2005
Defining Cute
What is cute? How does cuteness effect design and marketing of products today? Why do Disney characters have big eyes? To find answers, head over to Speak Up, where Marian lays it all out for you in her post – The Aesthetics of Cute. Very funny…
