“We are continue to build our reputation in the email marketing industry as the vendor-agnostic ESP alternative, helping clients to gain more ROI from their email marketing programs,” said ClickMail CEO Marco Marini. “This additional recognition by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal is a welcome validation of the effort we are putting forth and the need clients have for our type of end-to-end email marketing services. Without the clients, we wouldn’t have this explosive growth.”

ClickMail is growing rapidly by bringing the latest in new services and email technology to our clients, who are also benefiting by increased growth and success in their email marketing campaigns. From building an online tool for selecting a new ESP to acquiring the Bay Area’s Strategic Design Group, we have been creating new tools and offering new services that help our clients keep pace in the fast-moving email marketing industry. With over a dozen ESP systems in our portfolio, we offer the nation’s largest selection of ESPs so that we can ensure the best match is made for every client. We also pride ourselves on our excellent support team that works with our clients on fulfilling their specific email marketing needs, from increasing email deliverability to achieving maximum ROI.

Let ClickMail Marketing help you with all of your email marketing needs: contact us today!

The publisher of Email Marketing Reports, Mark has put out another brilliant email marketing video. This time he takes on B2B marketing emails. He pretends to be one, an email newsletter, as he talks “at” you, the viewer/reader. With humor that’s painfully on target, he talks through the major sins B2B email marketing commits on a daily, if not hourly, basis:

• The email arrives 8 months later than expected
• The email isn’t targeted to the recipient
• The email is self-serving
• The email lacks any real personalization
• The email content is irrelevant
• The email is one-sided
• The email offer is unrelated to the recipient

There’s more, and every second is worth your attention. You’ll definitely snicker if not guffaw, and might cringe a little too, if you are in B2B email marketing.

This also might serve as ammunition to get upper management to listen when you’re trying to convince them the email marketing ROI would be higher if the email newsletter were better! So maybe this bit of viral video can be put to good use.

Watch Mark act the part of a B2B email newsletter by clicking here.

After the jump,  her Top Ten list of things to keep in mind:

10.  Know your organizational strengths and limitations;

9.  Get the IT department and your code monkeys to give their input toward the RFP;

8.  Define why you’re looking for a new solution in the first place;

7.  When writing the RFP, ask open-ended questions (‘how’ and what’) rather leading ( ‘can you’ and ‘do you’) questions: make them explain;

6.  Set reasonable expectations: the RFP process typically takes between two and three months. (NB: We can run your RFP process to completion in three weeks);

5.  Thin out the crowd through external research: try to pick only a few likely vendors instead of 2 dozen ESPs across the board;

4.  Be transparent with both vendors and internal staff;

3.  Analyze the quality of the responses;

2.  Share feedback with all participants, the vendor who won the business and why they won, and those that didn’t and why they didn’t;

1.  Learn from the process: you’ll be doing another RFP some time in future!

A new chart from MarketingSherpa shows B2B marketers’ priorities for the coming year…and the challenges they feel they face in pursuing those priorities. Most interesting to us is how every one of these initiatives is related to email marketing. In some ways, you could look at this chart as being about email marketing.

Email marketing ties into—or should tie into—all marketing initiatives. Yes, even the social media shown here. One reason social media ranks so high on the challenges grid and so low on the priority grid might be a lack of understanding about how to tie email marketing to social networking.

And what’s highest on the priority list? “Identifying new audiences and quality lists.” This can definitely apply to email marketing. Read the MarketingSherpa description of the chart at  or just see the chart itself.

And for help with your own priorities and challenges, whether you’re a B2B or B2C email marketer, reach out to ClickMail Marketing for help. As the Purveyor of the largest selection of Email Service Providers, we have insight into countless different way to tackle your 2009 marketing initiatives. Email us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

If your customers’ pain points and concerns have changed, your email marketing must change too, otherwise it will be irrelevant and therefore ineffective. Think about where your audience’s head might be at these days, depending on whether they’re B2C or B2B:

• Maybe they’re older, or their kids are older
• Maybe the election has them focused on different issues
• Has the financial crisis changed their spending habits?
• What about the housing market?
• Have recession fears affected business budgets?
• Did a client company recently go through a merger or acquisition?

As we go through life, what’s important to us changes. Same goes for your customers. A savvy email marketer pays attention to temporary situations too, like the ebb and flow of politics and current events that will affect what your customers are thinking about. It might be a short-term change of focus, but you still need to pay attention or risk getting ignored.

The most effective email marketing is to be relevant. Relevant to the customer and that person’s concerns at the time they get your email. Be current and pertinent and you’ll still be welcome in the inbox. No matter what else is happening in the world.  It will mean less impact on your email marketing ROI.