Online marketing solutions

The holidays’ season sure looks far away, but planning an effective email campaign can take a long time, and you better start right now, so you’ll have time to review the plan and take it into action. Bronto gives us a full checklist for holidays email campaigns:

• Review last year’s holiday season – So you’ll know what worked and what went wrong
• Develop your strategy and goals for the season – Decide what you want to communicate to your customers and how
• Build out your communication strategy – segment your list to types of customers and build a special message designed especially for their needs
• Establish a calendar for your communications – decide when will you want to send out your email campaigns
• Plan your pre-holiday messaging & preference push – don’t give it all in one time. Prepare your customers to your special offers
• Stand out from the crowd – don’t forget to differentiate yourself from the crowd
• TEST!!! – as simple as that
• Don’t forget to optimize your landing pages – your email campaigns are just the first step. The next step is to convert those clicks to purchases
• Think post-holiday - your branding doesn’t end with the upcoming holiday season. plan ahead

Video is the new buzz word at the email marketing world, and everyone who uses email campaigns as part of his marketing campaign is expected to upgrade himself to video email marketing. But how would you do it? Email marketing reports lists eight best practices for using video in email marketing campaigns:

1. Use video as a means, not an end
2. Find the right video/copy balance
3. Don’t forget video analytics
4. Keep it short and sweet
5. Don’t disguise the video link
6. Design for failure
7. Test your options
8. Be aware of production and bandwidth costs

Spam volumes increased  by 400 percent compare to February 2009, to 94.6 percent of all emails, thus reached its highest pick ever, according to August 2009 Threat Forecast & Report, by MX Logic. According to the report, spam volumes increased by 27 percent since June, and the hottest spam topic among email campaigns is still health-related spam.

Lots of email marketers prefer to send their email campaigns in plain text format, because they know that from a security standpoint, plain text email is better. Justin Premick from AWeber, explains how to create a plain text email campaign that the recipient will be able to read:

1. Set maximum character width
2. Make headers easily visible and scannable
3. Separate content between paragraphs
4. Include a conclusion or signoff

Only 30% of online retailers give the option to sign up to an email newsletter during the checkout process on their site, according to a study by Dotcommerce. An online retailer which doesn’t take advantage of his checkout process to enlarge its mailing list acts as if it doesn’t want any new subscribers to their email campaigns. The study also found that only 5% of follow-up marketing emails sent to new customers are personalized or targeted towards the individual.

Gmail, by Google, has become the third most visited email service in the US, according to Comscore. Between July 2008 and July 2009, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the U.S. increased from 25.3 million to 36.9 million. By that, Google had overtaken AOL place. Comscore predicts that Gmail will surpass Windows Live Hotmail in about seven months. Think about that with your upcoming email campaigns…

Sending a birthday greeting card is a good way to keep in touch with your customers, and give them the feeling that you have a real relationship. Alex Williams, at Return on Subscriber, explains how to do it right:

1. Be clear with your message, right at the subject line.
2. You don’t have to give them a present
3. If you are sending a coupon, make sure that it is only able to be used once
4. Make sure that you are sending the email campaign on the right date
5. Don’t make too much jokes

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Email marketers constantly strive to get their email campaigns to their subscribers Inbox, without getting blocked. Sonia Simone, at copyblogger, gives a few good advices that will help you with that

1. Use Autoresponders - you’ll know that your new email subscribers are always well taken care of
2. Use a personal message – so you can create a personal relationship
3. Ask them to white list you
4. Make sure you are reading your subscribers replies
5. Pay attention to spam triggers, but don’t obsess

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Sending email campaigns to customers all over the world? Make sure your campaigns are segmented by country and/or region, so you won’t embarrass yourself by chit-chatting about the snow, while the sun shines happily at your customer window. Simon Bowker explains at Brand Republic, the dangerousness of unsegmented international email campaigns.

Twitter had become the most linked social media site from email campaigns, passing even the respectable Facebook, according to data collected by Email Data Source. During 2009, the number of campaigns with Twitter links has grown to 41,399 and 41,052 for Facebook. In June, Twitter was linked to in 9,506 campaigns and Facebook was linked to in 8,636 campaigns.