What’s Working in Marketing

2009 was a turbulent year, to say the least. Manufacturing and high tech took a good hit. Not quite as dramatic as 2001, but painful nonetheless. For marketers, this turbulence means more attention is being paid to tighter and tighter budgets. The pressure is on to make each dollar, each click, each conversion targeted and [...]

We are big fans of building internal e-mail lists, and often recommend this strategy with our clients. Homegrown email lists  trump any bought list of any kind, and we continually see good business opportunities come out of well managed, consistent email newsletter programs.  Even our own, “What’s Working in Marketing” e-newsletter has been a big [...]

We’re still recovering from the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in Boston last week. It was the 4th annual event and, I think, the best ever. We had a great group of speakers from the automation industry, and engaged senior-level attendees from marketing and sales. It was 3 days of interesting conversations and idea exchange. [...]

A quick add-on to Juliann’s post about the test e-mail open and click-through rates. The Epsilon study breaks down rates by industries. General financial services e-mails were opened most frequently, followed by general business products and services (that would include the technology markets). Click-through rates in January through March 2009 were highest for consumer packaged [...]

Epsilon recently released a study about the use and success of email campaigns, and the news was looking good. In fact, I received this information in an email from the MediaPost’s Center of Media Research.   If you are not employing an e-mail based campaign yet in your marketing plans, we encourage you to seriously [...]

We’ve been talking about marketing budgets of late.  Seems to be a top of mind concern which is not surprising.  There are ways to be smart with your budget moving into the spring.  And those who are patient will have the last laugh because finally, you have the chance to be really noticed, because many [...]

I was talking with a friend the other day on the phone when he received an email message from a vendor he works with and he immediately reacted with “Yea right, that’s NOT what I need right now.”  It got me thinking about the messages we are sending to our customers and subscriber lists and [...]

Marketing professionals across the globe are facing budget challenges, with the added pressure to grow business in this tough economic climate.  You can bet there is buzz going around, because new technologies are throwing curve balls to the best laid plans.  Last budget planning period, typically August – October looks dramatically different from today in [...]

One of the things we talk about frequently to our clients is managing the overall “touch” plan for your outbound campaigns.  We find that many companies do not keep track of how many times they are touching a customer at any given point in time. In smaller companies it’s not such a huge problem, but [...]

We get this question from clients all the time — What are the typical numbers for e-mail open rates and click throughs? Typically, we look for open rates in the 30+% range and click-throughs in the 5-20% range. The way to make that happen? Always look for ways to improve performance: content that better addresses [...]