eCommerce Analytics

It is a wintry, slushy mess in Boston today. Rivers of ice cold water line every street and each passing car sprays pedestrians unfortunate enough to have to walk to work.

I am one of these pedestrians. Worse, as a Boston transplant, I am woefully ill-equipped to stay dry. At this moment my feet and legs are soaked and I have never been more willing to part with money for a good pair of boots.  Really, I’m ready to buy right now. It’s urgent.

Read Weather Marketing »

I talked last time about how variable pricing is a great way to maintain your margins on sale items and I gave three general steps on how to perform variable pricing with email marketing. The gist is that each of your customers has a different value for your products and the key is to figure out how to get them each to pay closer to what they are actually willing to pay. The main takeaway is that you should give different sale discounts to different segments of your customers based on their behavior patterns - and the patterns of other customers like them - concerning discounted items. Today, I’ll take a look at the main arguments that companies have when it concerns variable pricing.

Read Variable Pricing-Based Email Marketing: 25% Less Customers Can Make you 22% More Profit »

The one thing that any consultant will tell you is to start with the notion that profit = revenue - cost, and then go from there. The idea is that profit is the goal and that minimizing cost and/or maximizing revenue is the way to the goal. Typically, a firm must concentrate on one or another at a time to really be effective. What I’ve heard recently, however, with the economy in doubt, is a desperation-type chatter where firms want to concentrate on both at once and be effective at both. Well, the best action that I know that gets close to doing both, is database-based price discrimination.

Read How to Make Variable Pricing Work with Email Marketing »

We pontificated Monday on what we perceived as the reluctance of the big Email Service Providers to hop aboard the SMS marketing train.  We pointed to ExactTarget as a prime example.  Boy, are our faces red.

Read Our Bad: ExactTarget in the SMS Biz After All »

One of the questions that we ponder daily at the Istobe HQ is why oh why email service providers (ESPs) like ExactTarget haven’t really jumped on the SMS marketing bandwagon. After all, it seems as though SMS marketing would logically be the next email and that the ESPs would be uniquely positioned to capitalize on this new market by leveraging their customer base to help establish the new marketing channel. Alas, it still hasn’t happened for major players like ExactTarget. Just the opposite. It seems that ExactTarget is actually trying to downplay the effectiveness of newer technologies (witness their new white paper that claims “Email Works Better than Social Networks”). But there are other ESPs out there that aren’t just trying to milk their lead in the email space and are instead embracing technological changes that are already afoot. Let’s take a look at two companies who are taking the ESP model and moving it into SMS marketing.
Read The Beginning of SSPs: SMS Finally Getting the Email Treatment »

Lets face it, the barrage of emails during the holiday season ends up developing an impenetrable amount of noise for most email users.  According to my quick sentiment analysis (Twitter and Facebook) I would say that increased, non-targeted emailing has developed a new season that is not being taken too favorably. Being opportunistic I would like to offer a new term for the season: Spamidays.   Following suit with economists I would declare that Spamidays has already begun and, unlike our recession, has a definable end date, probably the second week of January.

What data supports my thoughts?  Your inbox is probably the biggest indicator but here are a couple of supportive tweets (selected out of about 2,000 from the last 2 days):

Have other Gmail user noticed an increase in SPAM in the last few days? 153 in a day is way more than what I usually get! Holiday SPAMMING?
CrazyKinux [Reply] [Profile] - 20:31

Holiday catalog spam & junk mail is piling up. You can practically feel the desperation of the retailers this year…so much paper & email.
crystallyn [Reply] [Profile] - 10:12

Ah, the holiday season. Filling everyone’s electronic in box with extra-special spam.
textualdeviant [Reply] [Profile] - 10:30

Interesting sentiment.   Last year year’s Spam Report also confirms an ever increasing tidal wave of email over the holiday season:

‘Tis the season to be jolly, but this month’s spam levels brought little cheer to anti-spam analysts.  Overall spam levels continued to increase, accounting for nearly three out of four emails in November. To put that growth trend into perspective, in May 2007 spam accounted for approximately 64 percent of all email traffic.  Symantect 2007 Spam Report

So I have labeled the obvious but how can you ensure your email campaigns are construed as valuable and assistive and not viewed as a contributor to Spamidays?: Read Spamidays are here. Don’t be a contributor. »

With so many reports out there talking about why retailers are going to be taking such a hit this year, I thought it might be worthwhile to focus on the positive. The down economy has opened up several opportunities for retailers to try out new and interesting ways of reaching their customers.  I wanted to share a few of these with you.

• Read Surviving the Holidays: 5 Marketing Tips for Retailers »

Have we really dissected email marketing so thoroughly that we’re talking about best practices for “From” fields? In a word, yes.

Monday, Dharmesh Shah posted 8 email marketing tips distilled from an interview with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman in The Boston Globe.  I agree wholeheartedly with 7/8ths of her tips, but #7 tripped me up a bit:

7. Two things that get your email opened: #1:  “From” and #2 “Subject”. 

Read Email “From” Field: Calling Card or Attention Grabber? »

First things first, no matter who you support, I hope all of you have either gone out to vote today, or are planning to go out to vote. Although I’m usually not this dedicated, I woke up at 6:30 this morning to try and make it to the polls by 7. I was hoping I might be able to get their before the crowds, but by the time I got there at 6:55, the line was already two blocks long. I’ve voted at the same polling station for over 10 years now, and I have to admit that I’ve never seen such an incredible turn out for any election thus far. It took me about an hour to make it through, which was actually less than what I originally thought, but glad I beat the long lines I know will be there later this evening.

Read Obama Leading in the Polls? Perhaps it’s Due to Better Marketing »

Being a Boston-area, MIT-based company, Istobe always pulls for other Boston-area, MIT-based companies. And this goes double for companies in the customer analytics and targeted email realms. Such is the case with Constant Contact, one of the email service provider (ESP) titans out there. And now we get a new survey from Constant Contact that echoes our ramblings at Istobe. email marketing is becoming more and more important for small businesses as the economy stumbles into the Christmas season.

Read Constant Contact Survey Shows Small Businesses Will Rely on Email Marketing this Holiday Season »