Posts Tagged ‘eMail Marketing’

5 Things to Think about Before Hitting the Send Button

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

There are a variety of different emails that I send out through LoopFuse OneView on a monthly basis. With a freemium offering of our product, the volume of inbound leads we receive has increased substantially making it more important to nurture these prospects through email marketing. I have emails that have been created and built into leadflows so that my existing database of users feel the LoopFuse love and we continue to educate them on the best practices within the product. In addition, there are prospects that we reach out to through email marketing to help educate them on marketing automation and the benefits of utilizing such a tool.

No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.

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Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide to Email Deliverability

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Email Deliverability is a hot-topic today as marketers seek to fine-tune their outbound messaging and engage customers with mass email campaigns and lead nurturing programs. Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should know the basics of email deliverability, as it will have a direct impact on the success or failure of their marketing programs and ROI.

The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.

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Webinar: Launching your first email campaign and viewing analytics

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Live Webinar: Thursday September 16th, 2010 11am PDT/2pm EDT

Join us for the launch of our new webinar series “Light the Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse to grow your business.

First on the agenda: Launching your first email campaign and viewing analytics

How will this help grow my business?

Email marketing is an effective way to nurture your existing database of prospects. By continuing to email relevant content about your product or service you are reminding them of the value you can bring to their business. Email marketing can help you start turning your most valued prospects into paying customers.

You will learn how to:

• Create and send great looking email campaigns.
• Personalize emails using CRM contact information.
• Schedule email marketing campaigns for delivery.
• Track and Analyze email response metrics.
• Track email activity in your CRM

Click here to register for the webinar.

Get FUSED!

7 Must-Follow Marketing Automation Blogs

Monday, September 13th, 2010

For the benefit of our readers, we have assembled a list of our most-read blogs that provide marketing automation best practice advice, tips, tricks, and industry news. We normally follow these blogs actively and believe them to be the most important and up-to-date group of expert bloggers covering  the field of marketing automation:

  • LeadSloth : Covers all aspects of marketing automation (including best practice advice, tips, tricks, webinars, and news) with the most up-to-the-minute and non-biased reporting in the space. Follow LeadSloth on Twitter for the most up-to-date events announced in the marketing automation space: @leadsloth
  • Customer Experience Matrix : Managed by David Raab, this blog’s focus is mostly centered around industry news within marketing automation and complementary spaces like web analytics, email marketing, and SEO. David has covered the industry for a long time and is possibly the most knowledgeable (and objective) blogger in the field.
  • Marketing Consiglierie : Allinio’s corporate blog is filled with marketing events/conference news, and general best practice help and advice for those starting out. Allinio is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations maximize their marketing automation investments.
  • Marketing Interactions : Ardath Albee does a great job of providing nuggets of wisdom in every blog post. Aside from marketing automation topics, this blog covers social marketing, sales process, email marketing and content-writing.
  • Digital Body Language : Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, is a visionary in the space of demand generation and marketing automation. Ths blog updates very frequently with great advice for all levels of marketing automation users.
  • The Funnelholic : Covering online marketing, b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead nurturing and general marketing automation trends and events. Insightful and regularly updated.
  • DemandGen Report : You may have to wade through the vendor-sponsored content, which is often hard to distinguish from the regular editorials, but this site provides well-written and informative articles, covering industry news from all the vendors in the space.
Marketing Consigli

LoopFuse OneView 3.27 Released!

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Enhancements in this Release:

New Email Campaign User Interface

In this release, we have completely redesigned our Email Campaign user-interface, adding new features in the process. The entire user-interface was redesigned from the ground up, in an effort to improve usability, deliverability, minimize test cycles, and provide eye-popping real-time analytics on your awesome email creations.  Enhanced usability and testing capabilities makes it easier than ever for you to test your email content rendering as you are working on it. Real-time email campaign analytics means you no longer have to wait to measure results of your awesome creation.

Changes in this Release:

  • New Email Campaign Wizard: Our new Email Builder Wizard enables marketers and content creators to send and launch email campaigns quickly and easily with a 5-step process.
  • Live Testing: No need to use a “Test List” anymore for your email campaign testing. Simply type in an email address to send a test message to, and we’ll remember it every time you create a new campaign.
  • Enhanced Personalization: Personalize any field in the email headers (Subject, From Name, etc…) using contact information or CRM Lead Owner information.
  • Increased Deliverability: Simply flip a switch, and experience increased deliverability rates for your email campaign, using our new Auto-Authentication Feature.
  • Real-Time Email Campaign Analytics: Get immediate results from your email campaign launch with eye-popping charts and an increased level of detail down to a prospect’s activity across an email campaign.

Using a Prospect’s Latest Data in Email Personalization

This is a significant change in the way we handle email personalization. As of this release, LoopFuse OneView will use the latest contact information to personalize email content. In the past, LoopFuse used the contact information that was associated with a particular list member.

Special thanks to our customers for submitting these and other feature requests via the LoopFuse Community!

Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

And now the fifth way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers.  Below is the excerpt from the white paper:

“5. Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

For most marketers, the challenge with channel proliferation is not a lack of data, but a lack of data integration.  Disparate systems (email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation tools, digital asset management, and CRM) often fail to bring critical information together in one centralized location.  Marketing automation tools should integrate with CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce.com) to deliver a centralized source of multi-channel analytics for one version of the truth in simple, drill down dashboard reporting designed for marketers.

Website Analytics allow organizations to quickly assess website trends with accurate statistics covering a wide-range of metrics. This type of real-time insight is critical to marketers so they can identify areas of improvement and better tune the website to increase message response.  Likewise, marketers can measure response and engagement by incorporating call to action website links in email campaigns.

It’s also important for marketers to track the success of their email campaigns, in real-time, to make adjustments or additions to a campaign based on user response. Marketing automation can provide comprehensive reporting across CRM and marketing tools, so marketers can see a complete picture of recipient activity, email bounces, bad email data, link activity, geographic breakdowns, as well as associated opportunity. Comprehensive reporting allows marketers to adequately judge the effect of marketing campaigns on real dollars.

Job Security Scorecard:

  • Drill down reporting gives marketers the confidence to say “We have that information” instead of “I’m not sure” when the CFO or CEO ask for more granularity on trends in the data.
  • Centralize prospect behavior across marketing channels.  Marketing becomes an offensive asset in the organization. Rapidly adapt to changes in the market and streamline marketing campaign execution.
  • Real-time dashboards standardize key metrics: funnel analysis, call-to-action, click-through rates, the number of qualified opportunities, website performance, and collateral downloads.”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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Email Open-Rates Lie

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Email marketing is an industry that survives based on the ability to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns.  This is accomplished through some technical wizardry that leverages two primary features of HTML-based email : images and hyperlinks.  In order to track if/when an individual email recipient actually opened the email campaign, the recipient’s email client must display images.  Unfortunately, having images enabled in your email client can result in embarrassing situations such as opening what looks like a legitimate email in a business meeting only to find that it is a spam containing pornographic images.  As a result, more and more email client programs (Outlook 2007, Gmail, AOL, Windows Live Mail) come with images disabled by default.  As more email client programs adopt this default setting, email marketers will see fewer and fewer “opens” in their campaign analytics and may even misinterpret the trend as a reflection of their campaign quality when it is simply a byproduct of technical evolution.

It’s all Relative

Does this mean that email marketers should ignore the open-rate statistic when evaluating their campaign performance?  No, but it does mean that the open-rate is only meaningful as a relative measurement of whether your email was compelling enough for people to open.  For example, it’s valid when doing A/B testing to compare whether email subject A or email subject B was more compelling (but, of course, only if the segmentation of groups A & B is completely random).  But it is not valid as a measurement of this year’s total email open-rates versus last year’s.

Nurturing Gone Awry

Another dangerous practice is using “email open” events as conditions inside of your lead nurturing programs (in LoopFuse we refer to these as leadflows).  I have had two new LoopFuse customers propose leadflows which take different paths depending on whether the recipient actually opens a particular email.  However, if the recipient has images disabled there is simply no way for the leadflow to determine the correct path.  This can create a confusing or even frustrating experience for their prospects as a result.  If you want to react to a prospect’s email interactions, a click-through is much more reliable.

In an era of analytics overload, it’s understand exactly what the data is telling you, not just what it says.