Tactics like “Share Within Your Network (SWYN)” have emerged as critical success factors for reaching and communicating with customers. A new special report from Retail TouchPoints, titled the “Marketer’s Guide to Email Strategies,” offers a compilation of industry-related trend pieces from email marketers, analysts and vendor executives.
The Guide features key action items to capitalize on email campaigns to fuel social media strategies. Industry insiders point to the growing synergy between email and social, as 60% of marketers polled are effectively planning and executing on social media, according to Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Guide.
The Marketer’s Guide to Email Strategies features input from industry experts including Brooks Bell, ReturnPath’s Stephanie Miller, Bronto’s Sally Lowery and Silverpop’s Adam Needles. The Guide’s content offers email marketers a heads up on how email is changing and how to optimize deliverability and rendering. Email communication is critical, as prospective buyers and consumers were inundated with upwards of 247 million emails per day in 2009.
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The Guide offers cutting edge content focused on various areas of email marketing, including the hottest trends for email strategy and messaging, contributed content from industry insiders on testing tactics, optimizing deliverability and using social media to enhance email campaigns.
To give email marketers an overview of some of the trending topics in email marketing strategies, we’ve compiled 5 Email Trends, with insight from leading email analysts and vendors.
1. Ditch the Batch & Blast Strategy -Traditional tactics are moving toward a targeted approach, where email marketers can speak to customers throughout sales cycle, taking segmentation to a new level. More email marketers are abandoning the traditional batch blast strategy and taking a more segmented approach to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of email campaigns.
2. Get Social – It’s no secret that social media is an imperative and integral part of any marketing strategy, and email offers an enhanced capability for marketers to offer sharing features within email messages. From a multi-channel marketing perspective, marketers need to be equipped with the tools to integrate sharing into emails to drive cross-channel demand. Email marketers have to integrate with social networking sites and tools for a multi channel marketing approach.
3. Select & Segment Sharply – Consumer segments have evolved online at a different rates. Surprisingly, the 55-65 age group is now engaging in email marketing, which means that marketers are tasked with creating campaigns that are specific to their needs. Marketers should ask themselves how they engage with various age groups to optimize response. Teens, for instance, respond better to text messaging, so perhaps it means sending email campaigns via SMS.
4. Smarter by going smaller – To serve various segments efficiently, remember that more emails doesn’t necessarily mean more revenue. That mentality, combined with blast batch, is now trending outward and urging email marketers to respond better to email recipients based on a targeted approach.
5. Integration – Now more than ever, integration is becoming an important component for an overall email marketing strategy. ESPs are learning how to integrate with an e-commerce platform, product review platform and analytics to offer marketers high-level data on recipients. Integration enables smarter marketing with trigger- based campaigns.
For more industry insight on these and other key email trends, as well as a detailed directory of Email Service Providers, download the “Marketer’s Guide to Email Strategies.”
