What is the preferred (and most effective) form of permissions-based marketing? Drumroll please… Email marketing wins again. In fact, it’s been winning for a long time and it doesn’t look as though this will change any time soon. Exact Target put out the 14th edition of their annual “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” survey series and the data in favor of email marketing is pretty overwhelming. After asking 1500 online consumers (ages 15 and up) their preferred mode of marketing messages, 77% chose email for their top spot. Direct mail (9%) and text messaging (5%) got the next spots, with social Read More

I recently received two automated emails from Dreamhost and CloudFlare that reveal the power of a well structured message. We’ve used Dreamhost in the past but have switched most of our hosting to Voxel dot Net and we’re currently trialling CloudFlare. Here are the subject lines of the two emails: Both are good automated transactional emails that seek further engagement with the company in question. The content, however, varied significantly. CloudFlare was a bit sad that I had switched my DNS to another location and “opted out” of their service. When the company noticed this, it reached out via email Read More

Browsing around the Google Currents app on my new Galaxy Nexus toy/phone, I saw an article from TechCrunch that caught my eye: Google has been experimenting with a possible role with email subscription management. Google, of course, is the king of experimental projects. The Internet is littered with dozens of Google projects that made a brief appearance in our Internet world, only to be discontinued. And there are certainly hundreds of projects that didn’t even become public. This particular experiment isn’t a surprise but it’s still notable. It shows Google is taking a more holistic view of online marketing and Read More

When Rick first asked me to use my marketing skills and write a newsletter to our clients and future clients, I was up for the challenge. What I wasn’t ready for was using MailChimp as the medium for the newsletter. When I asked about what I needed to do to create a newsletter in Mail Chimp, he looked at me with a smile and said – figure it out! So, after I laughed to cover up my anxiety, I logged into MailChimp and tried to familiarize myself with what exactly Mail Chimp was. I have used another email marketing tool Read More