Killer Email Industry Stats In case you’ve missed any of these reported recently, all by the Direct Marketing Association’s outstanding research department (link so you can see the details of reports available to purchase): Email marketing in the US alone will account for approximately 71,000 jobs this year, growing at 8-10% annually historically and projected into the future as well The ROI for email marketing is $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-email online marketing is $22.52, less than half As I mentioned here (where a client of ours said her email ROI was 40:1), the biggest problem with email isn’t how effective it is — it’s how much inventory you as a marketer have available in…
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Selecting an ESP
Selecting an ESP Return Path’s Ken Takahashi (formerly of DARTMail fame) wrote a great post today on the Return Path blog — the first in a series — about selecting an ESP. If you are an email marketer who is thinking about selecting an ESP, it’s a great read.
Association Proliferation
Association Proliferation NOTE: I was fortunate enough to be asked to write a monthly column for DMNews. This is the most recent column. By agreement with DMNews, I am linking to them for the bulk of the content, but you can get an idea of what I’m talking about with the first few sentences below. You can be forgiven if you can’t precisely remember the difference between the OPA and the IAB. Or the DMA and the DAC. Or EEC and ESPC. Or WOMMA and OMMA. And, while we are at it, what exactly is a MAAWG? And isn’t OLGA the name of someone you’d go out to dinner with? Gone are the days when a business could belong to…
Another Entrepreneur Blog
Another Entrepreneur Blog My friend Jason Devitt, founder and CEO of mobile application company Vindigo, is contemplating his next career move and has started to blog more actively about entrepreneurship (after a 9-month around-the-world honeymoon which made for a great travel blog). His most recent post is about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, which I thought was great, and he promises more good ones on related topics to come soon.
Winds of Change at the DMA
Winds of Change at the DMA I’ve been an active member of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) for almost seven years now. It’s kind of the Mac Daddy of trade associations in and around our business. The DMA has taken its lumps of late, mostly deservedly so, and I think made some terrible moves, misjudgments, and decisions a few years back. But I’ve continued to be an active member, mostly convinced by new DMA CEO John Greco and COO Ramesh Ratan that there was a new sheriff in town who was going to restore peace and order to the village. John and Ramesh have a deep understanding and deeply held convictions about consumer experience and permission — and about the…
Email Marketing Good and Bad: Case Study Snippets
Email Marketing Good and Bad: Case Study Snippets I had a good meeting this morning with one of our long-time multi-channel retailer clients who is in town for Shop.org’s Annual Summit. Over the course of our conversation, she relayed two things going on in her world of email marketing at the moment that bear repeating (with her permission, of course). First, the good. In a recent study, our retailer hero determined that customers who receive their email newsletters and offers (not even open/click, just receive) spend on average 3x as much on in-store purchases than their non-email counterparts in any given week or for any given campaign. Talk about deriving non-email or non-click value from your email marketing efforts! Second,…
What Convergence Really Means
What Convergence Really Means Rebecca Lieb wrote a great column last week in ClickZ about Advertising Week and how disappointed she was in it. The article is worth a read for many reasons, but there was one quote in particular that stuck out to me as I re-read it tonight. Some people talk about convergence as the coming together of old media and new media. Others talk about digial meeting analog. Still others talk about the melding of cable, telco, Internet, and wireless. A brave few even talk about direct marketing and brand advertising. But Rebecca quoted the head of global advertising for American Express, who really nailed what convergence means in the world of media today — the convergence…
New Deliverability Index is Out
New Deliverability Index is Out Return Path’s semi-annual Sender Score Deliverability Index, which has become a sort of industry standard metric about how much non-spam commercial email is getting snared by ISP filters, is out. You can read Heather Palmer Goff’s posting about it (and download the report and the metrics) on the Return Path blog here.
A Better Way to Shop
A Better Way to Shop I love Zappos.com. It’s rapidly becoming the only place I buy shoes. Their web site experience is ok – not perfect, but pretty good, but their level of service is just unbelievable. They are doing for e-commerce (shoes in particular) what Eos is doing for air travel. They’re always great at free shipping and have always been super responsive and very personal and authentic when it comes to customer service. But today took the cake. I emailed them when I placed an order for new running shoes because I also wanted to buy one of those little “shoe pocket” velcro thingies that straps onto shoelaces and holds keys and money for runners. I didn’t find…
Seth Responds
Seth Responds About an hour after I posted a not so flattering review of Seth Godin’s new book this morning, I got an email from Seth with a couple good points worth responding to here. His main points (other than offering me a refund, which was nice) were that (a) the book itself was very clear about its content — on the book itself (back cover, inside flap, marketing copy), kind of like a ‘live album’ for a recording artist; and (b) if I thought the blog postings were worthwhile, why did I still feel like there was a downward trend in his writing? Ok, so these are fair points. Let me try to clarify. I am 99% sure that…
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down I read new books by two of my favorite authors today: Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin. Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst. Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books. But Darwin is a gem. It goes back…