E-Marketing Tips From the Front Lines
E-Newsletters still getting through. Monitoring your rivals’ Web marketing campaigns. Why clickers still call.
from AICPA Custom Media Solutions

Electronic newsletters, those steady old workhorses of the online world, are still pretty effective at getting your message points out to clients and prospects. After examining 1,000 messages in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to business (B2B) sent during the fourth quarter of 2006, the E-Mail Experience Council (EEC) found that e-mail newsletters are the most effective, and most widely-received, forms of online marketing communication. Why?

E-Newsletters have a healthy balance of images and text, according to Internet Marketing Report, and they’re understandable and actionable, even when images are blocked. Also, by sharing ideas, strategies and best practices in your e-newsletters, you can:

• Help existing customers get more value out of their purchases with you
• Demonstrate add-on products and services
• Build trust with prospective clients.

What are your direct competitors doing online?

Ever wonder where your competitors are up to when it comes to placing their ads and moving their brands? www.snipurl.com/news204 offers the latest breakdown of ad placements and types by industry — including the top 25 performers — from Neilsen/NetRatings.

Survey: Users Who Click Ads Also Want to Call, Buy

It may sound counter-intuitive, but many marketers forget to put their company’s phone number on Web pages and e-mail messages. Nielsen/Net Ratings and WebVisible surveyed nearly 3,000 Internet users and found

• 68 percent use the phone number on a vendor’s Web site to contact the company
• Of those, nearly nine in 10 (89%) reported contact a vendor a second time.
• 72 percent who clicked on a sponsored link also called the company
• 70 percent who clicked and called also made a purchase.

Open Rates Are Still a Useful, Legitimate Metric

E-mail open rates — at least measurable e-mail open rates — have been declining for several years, but that doesn’t mean e-mail marketing isn’t working. It also means you shouldn’t ignore your open rates.

Many marketers claim e-mail open rates aren’t viable any more — especially in the corporate arena — because an “open” in the recipient’s preview pane counts as an official open in tracking software. Email Labs data says nearly seven in 10 (69%) at work users always or frequently use the preview pane. On the flip side, many e-mail publishers and marketers don’t get credit for successfully delivered and opened mailings because even though recipients have received their e-mails and read them, corporate spam filters strip out the clear 1x1 pixel that many use to record/track an HTML e-mail.

Compare campaigns

According to a recent study of at-work e-mail recipients by Email Labs, the open percentage rate is not as important as it is as a means of benchmarking one recent e-mail effort from another. Compare numbers from the same list, advises Internet Marketing Report. It doesn’t have to be the same actual people, but a comparable group, say prospects who downloaded your white paper over the past 30 days.

Spot trends

Open rates can also help you spot trends. If you send to the same list with a similar subject line and the open rates noticeably change, they you should check for seasonal variations; you should also check to see if you’ve been blacklisted by an ISP.

Test and measure

Finally let’s say you do an A/B split, using the same offer, but different subject lines and different e-mail content. To measure the impact of the subject line versus the content, test click-rates again the number of messages sent and the number actually opened, says Internet Marketing Report.