Google, Yahoo and Bing have made setting up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns fairly easy and painless. Within hours you can have your ads up and running, and delivering traffic to your website for a small fee per click. Unfortunately, the ease in which a campaign can be set up often convinces business owners that they can throw up some PPC ads and the money will start pouring in. I’ve talked to many businesses that think PPC doesn’t work because they tried it once and never made any money.

Read More…

I decided to do a little liveblogging at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and picked this session: Why email CRM and social media have become the tools of modern B2B marketing where a case study was presented by Genworth Financial.

Joel Book from Exact Target introduced the case study:  Creating brand advocates is as important as creating brand awareness. [I would say more important. An advocate proactively shares the brand experience]. Funny, Google “brand tattoos” to see some serious brand advocate activity.

Read More…

The idea of using video commercials in email dates all the way back to 2006. The VMBiz system was started in Australia, and now is being launched in South Africa upon increase of broadband speeds in the country. The concept has brought about supporters, and dissenters, but what can’t be denied is the growth of the strategy.

The reasoning behind VMBiz can be found in the company’s slogan: “Giving you the power of TV advertising with the ease of email”. It certainly sounds like a solid premise, and one which could potentially grow as online video awareness increases.

Read More…

After a nearly year long dispute over their email practices, Bidz.com has been cleared by the FTC who will no longer be investigating the original claim against Bidz. Bidz.com is an online retailer who specializes in jewelry.
Read More…

When starting out your email marketing campaign, one of the first major decisions you’ll make is how to setup subscribers. There are two avenues which you can take, each with a list of pros and cons. You can decide to make your campaign opt-in (where users sign up for your newsletter), or make it opt-out (where a newsletter is signed up for when someone sets up an account on your site).
Read More…

ClickSquared, a company known for providing email marketing solutionsfully released their latest SaaS platform – Click 3G. The service automates and executes a wide variety of campaigns, most notably email. Click 3G will allow a wide variety of cross-channel marketing solutions, and supports real-time web analytics integration.
Read More…

Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable.

But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several blog posts have foolishly been written about social media “killing” email. As my friend Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (client) says: “How can social media kill email, when you have to have an email address to belong to a social media site?”

Read More…

Email marketing firm Implix has released a study of 1,652,000 emails sent from its emails marketing platform GetResponse between July and December 2009. The study offers a look at email marketing by tracking common performance indicators across 95 countries and six continents.

The study found the average open rate in North America was 10.76 percent. Europe had the best email open rate at 13 percent, more than 60 percent higher than the low score of 8.08 percent in Australia.
Read More…

I was traversing the internet, and came across an interesting article concerning email. The piece was written by Steve Johnson, of Chicago Tribune. He writes of the phenomenon known as ‘joint email accounts’, where couples (married or not) share an email account. It’s quite an amusing article, and it got me thinking about various email accounts in general – the differences in how people use them, and the different ways people view their email accounts in a broad sense.
Read More…

While the exact number of reasons is a little hard to pin down, private equity firm TA Associates provided a whole lot of them this week as it showed that it’s not time to give on the email marketing industry.  TA Associates bought a majority stake in eCircle for about 60 million (or $87 million).

Read More…