eCommerce Analytics

eMarketer has an interview up with Bill Nussey of Silverpop in which he warns against badgering customers with email marketing that is too frequent or irrelevant to their interests.  The phrase he used is to describe this more tailored, moderate approach to email marketing is “keeping it in the green zone”.

The phrase resonated with me — perhaps because the “green zone” is how we visually depict customers who are likely to respond favorably to given email content in our new product.  

Read The Email Marketing Green Zone »

I often feel that email is the neglected step child of retail marketing. We’ve all seen the news articles and blog posts that tout sexier marketing trends like Twitter and mobile marketing. Many retailers have already jumped on the social media and company blog bandwagon and will spend months planning and implementing these changes on their website. Yet, I so often run into marketers that are willing to throw together a weekly sales email in an hour and blast the same message to their entire customer list.  Why? Well, my guess is they are underestimating the “response” they get from email. Catalogers are quick to argue that offline communications drive online purchases, but how is online communication driving offline sales?

Read Why Getting Email Marketing Right is so Important »

I read a great blog post yesterday on why aligning your SEO and targeted email strategy is important to reducing your cost of new customer acquisition. Julie Batten’s Using Search and E-mail to Acquire Customers post at Clickz has some great info in it. I pulled out the following quotes that I thought were particularly interesting:

Read Importance of Coordinating Search and Targeted Email »

Last week in Weather Marketing we talked about ways to use freely available temperature and precipitation data to make sure you’re not marketing parkas to your customers in Texas. The rub was that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dosn’t exactly make the data available in the friendliest of formats. 

We’ve put our data manipulation skills to work and reworked the data in a way that will make it easy to import into a database table or append to your customer file. The following files provide the average annual and seasonal temperature (in Fahrenheit) and precipitation (in inches) for each state and for the US as a whole. It also lists standard deviation for each value in case you want to go super-nerdy on your analysis.

Have at it in the format of your choice!

Comma separated value: temp_and_precip_by_state.csv

Excel 2007: temp_and_precip_by_state.xlsx

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 »

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 »

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 »

Though Kevin Hillstrom believes that the low variable cost is the real factor in the “killer ROI” that email affords multi-channel retailers, I would also mention that it’s low variable cost also contributes to the low amount of effort that retailers put into their email marketing. That is, retailers don’t put the money they should behind email because they view the low variable cost - and low marginal cost - as a license to spam. The way this manifests itself in the marketplace is that spending on email optimization technology trudges behind other technological spending like, say, search engine optimization (SE0).

Read Targeted Email Campaigns Only Way to Recapture Email ROI »

Earlier this month Tim Parry argued the merits of micro-segmentation in a Multichannel Merchant article called Divide and Conquer.  The gist is that the more you can sub-divide your segments, the better you can target your message to each group resulting in higher response rates.

Read How many Customer Segments are Too Many? »

Last week, I presented some recent survey results compiled by InternetRetailer.com and eMarketer (Better than average?) that may help online retailers gauge how they compare to the “typical” online retailer. As part of my blog entry, I talked about increased competition in email marketing and the challenge of staying in front of customers as the inbox gets more crowded. InternetRetailer.com just followed up on their survey with an article detailing the steps email marketers should take to better reach their customers. I think they make some really good points, so wanted to share the article (Survey: Too much and not enough) and talk about their findings.

Read Segmentation Analysis: The First Step To Surviving Increased Competition »