What is Email Marketing; and What it Should Be

Lots of people new to the world of online promotion end up asking, what is email marketing? Well, taken from Wikipedia, email marketing is, “A form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience.” OK, that’s great, but I think just about anybody could have figured out the literal definition of what email marketing is.

More important than that is understanding the answer to the question “what is email marketing?” in the real world. We all receive plenty of email marketing messages each and every day, most of them we lump into the SPAM category. They are wastes of time and space, they slow down and infect our computers, they try to sell us enhancement creams or steal our bank account information and of course they give the rest of us a bad name. Read more

Reducing Email List Size with Customer Satisfaction Surveys

One of the best reasons to use customer satisfaction surveys is to actually reduce your email list size. This might sound counterintuitive to you, but if you use your Internet survey software in the right manner than you can produce a far superior list to what you had prior to your efforts. Here’s a quick primer for getting started with customer satisfaction surveys specifically for reducing your email list size. Read more

Contest Finished

Here at Succeed @ Email Marketing we had been running a “Race to 50 New RSS Subscribers” contest. While I received some positive feedback, there were ultimately a few problems in the way I was trying to track the results that made things difficult, as well as a few trouble makers trying to mess with the results.

Therefore, the contest is now finished, at least temporarily. Sometime in the future there is going to be a bigger and better contest, and it’s going to be very exciting for everyone so please stay tuned!

I’m going to keep plugging away at the site, adding more content that helps you all run your email campaigns and once I’ve reached a certain threshold that I’m trying to get to I’ll release the details of the next contest.

A few things I’ve learned that can be applied to running successful email marketing campaigns:

• You can’t force anything - While you can push and market yourself all you want, you can’t force something on people that they just aren’t interested in.
• Some things need time to develop – Just like building up a permission based email marketing list, you can’t expect to show up one morning and have a massive list just waiting to read what you have to say. Things have to develop over a period of time in some instances.
• Rebounding from missed opportunities – After an unsuccessful run, like this attempted contest, it’s important that you bounce back and learn from your mistakes. As mentioned, I’ll do just that and before too long we’ll have a much improved, much more exciting contest running.

Email Marketing Tip OTW – Connecting with Social Media

In this email marketing tip of the week, I want to talk about effectively connecting your email marketing campaign with your social media strategies. The two don’t have to be separate, discontinuous entities and in fact to maximize the success of both, they shouldn’t be. However, just quickly throwing out a link at the bottom of your email mentioning Facebook or Twitter isn’t enough. (Andrew at The Scrappy Email Marketer does a great job at pointing out some corporate blunders in this exact realm.)

In this email marketing tip the point I’d like to drive home is that you can take this on from two approaches. Read more

20% of B2B Email Marketing Messages Never Get Delivered

An alarming 20% of B2B email marketing messages never get delivered, according to a new study put out by Return Path. Even more concerning is that figure is for emails which have permission to be sent. This isn’t spam we’re talking about here, these are legitimate emails that businesses are sending to other businesses and to consumers, that never reach their intended destination.

That means that 1 in 5 of the people on your list never even have a chance to open your message, because it never reaches their inbox at all.

This study also featured some other email marketing statistics that might come as an unwelcome surprise to you and your organization. But like with anything else, and all of the latest email marketing trends, if you learn from the wealth of information that’s available, you can improve your results. Read more

Best Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses

Which companies currently provide the best email marketing software for small businesses? That’s a loaded question, because you have to come to your own conclusion for what “best” really is. Are you focused strictly on cost savings, or is deliverability your number one goal? Are you looking for step by step instructions and guides, or are looking for something with more customization ability?

Consider some of these various factors and then get ready to dive headfirst into picking the best email marketing software for you and your company or organization. All of the best email marketing programs for small businesses should enable you to do the following: Read more

Choosing the Right Questions with Web Survey Tools

When using web survey tools you want to ensure that you are asking the right questions in the right way. Even small mistakes in terms of the usability and intuitiveness of your customer survey software can lead to dramatically worst results than you would otherwise be receiving.

Learn how to ask the right questions, in the right way at the right time and you’ll see far more success. The best way to take full advantage of your web survey tools is by integrating several different types of questions in the same survey to keep things flowing smoothly and to elicit the best responses from your survey takers. Read more

5 Steps to Better Market Research with Satisfaction Survey Software

Satisfaction survey software can help you conduct top notch market research that makes professional statistical companies envious. All of the answers lie at your fingertips with customer service software. Survey results can reveal everything you could ever want, to help improve conversions, to make your customers happier and ultimately to focus your business in the best direction possible for growth and success.

Many small businesses are at a loss when it comes to making improvements in their performance. It’s not necessarily a lack of caring or effort either. More likely, it’s a lack of understanding- understanding where the problems really lie and understanding how to improve on those weak spots. Making good use of the best satisfaction survey software will easily allow you to come to a quick understanding of what you need to do. Read more

5 Tips to See Great Response from Customer Survey Software

If you’re trying to make the most out of your customer survey software then surely you have been looking for a way to maximize the response rates you see. Many marketers assume (incorrectly) that if you create a survey people will automatically complete it, just because you send it to them. Wouldn’t that be nice? The truth is that to see great response rates for your customer satisfaction survey you have to make the process as easy, secure and rewarding as possible. Read more

Customer Satisfaction Survey Software – Keep List Members Happier

Customer satisfaction survey software is the ideal tool to have at your disposal to help keep your list members happier, and we like happy list members, don’t we? Happy list members actually open up our messages and proceed to read them carefully. They buy products and services from us not just once, but repeatedly over time. They tell their friends and colleagues about how great we are, resulting in even more happy list members for our campaigns.

The point being that if you use email survey software in the right way, you’ll see a boatload of great results. Here are a few tips to help you make the most from any customer satisfaction survey software. Read more

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