The Online Marketing ROI Tour is the first-ever collaborative workshop between MarketingSherpa and sister companies MarketingExperiments and InTouch. This workshop focuses on helping your company get more from your online marketing spend. Topics include social media, conversion optimization and marketing/sales alignment.

Before you dismiss this as just another conference, consider the two factors make this conference stand out, with information that goes beyond theoretical to practical:

1) Practical Case Studies: MarketingSherpa has over 900 case studies on what works – and doesn’t work – in marketing. Each workshop session will include proven samples, results, and how-tos.

2) Primary Research: MarketingExperiments has conducted over $10 million in experiments and tests with real businesses and organizations. You’ll learn the principles and methodologies that have been proven to work.

The cost for the event is $499, but as a reader of this email marketing blog, you’ll sign up for only $399…a savings of $100! 

Plus you have three dates and cities to choose from:

• San Francisco on May 13
• Boston on June 9
• Toronto on June 10

See the agenda, register and save $100 today.

Marco Marini, our CEO, and Michael Kelly, our Director of Strategic Alliances, will present the in-depth and groundbreaking information released earlier this year in our email marketing whitepaper “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.” Presented Wednesday, September 16 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the webinar is useful whether you’re shopping for a new email service provider or want to compare your current ESP to other email vendors.

As an email marketing vendor that represents a multitude of email service providers, ClickMail Marketing is in the unique and objective position to help you take a critical look at the over 100 ESPs out there, ensuring you find the one that’s the best fit for your company. We do that by covering the 20 factors you need to consider, and helping you determine which factors matter the most for your company to improve its email marketing results. We’ll teach you how to evaluate the ESPs and even provide you with a scoring sheet.

Find out more by clicking here. Especially if a new ESP is on your to-do list for the coming year!

You can also download the email marketing whitepaper either before or after the webinar at our email marketing library: click here.

As an email marketing company with 10 years experience in what works, and what doesn’t, we’ve pulled together some surprisingly simple tips you can follow to help people feel more comfortable about giving you data.

Follow these tips and you’ll help people overcome both the friction they face and the anxiety they feel.

See the latest email marketing newsletter from ClickMail by clicking here.

Since releasing our newest whitepaper this month, “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP,” hundreds of email marketers have downloaded it from our Web site, and wiped us out of our hard copies at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. Now we’re getting recognition from noted email marketing experts too!

In a ClickZ blog post by Bill McCloskey titled “Is Your E-Mail Getting Delivered on Prime or Subprime IP Addresses?”, ClickMail Marketing’s newest email marketing whitepaper is held out as a useful tool for improving deliverability. In his blog, Bill points out the importance of email deliverability calling out a few key points from our whitepaper, but also the importance of IP reputation to deliverability.

Read the ClickZ blog post about our newest email marketing whitepaper. And download the whitepaper, complete with a useful checklist for comparing the 20 critical factors among differing email service providers.

Starting this week, ClickMail CEO Marco Marini is blogging semimonthly for the Email Experience Council’s (EEC’s) blog, joining other leaders of the email marketing industry as one of the voices of email. Look for slightly longer content here from us in the EEC blog, as we delve a little into email marketing tools and best practices than we do in our own email marketing blog.

It’s one more way for this email solutions provider to provide useful, practical content to help you maximize your email marketing ROI!

See the EEC email marketing blog by clicking here.

“It still amazes me that a family will go to the mall, fill out to win a free car (including giving up the email address), and yet they constantly complain of spam. I think that email lead generation is the next best thing since sliced bread, but you must make it clear in your email how your prospects address was collected. I know that this can be hard if you have several campaigns to collect email addresses, but the comfort level of your prospect is in direct relation to their conversion rate. It is always a balancing act. Thanks for the great article.”

Tim is absolutely correct. It’s a matter of perception. For some psychological reason, consumers guard their inboxes, but willingly give out their email addresses in exchange for something, like the chance to win a car. Maybe they just haven’t made the connection yet. And that means we as responsible email marketers have to make the connection for them.
Again and again we see our email marketing clients overly concerned with the quantity of their lists, i.e. getting more names, and not concerned with the quality. And part of what makes a list quality oriented is being considerate of the subscribers, and making sure you’re building trust with them, not breaking it down.

It’s already a struggle to get email into the inbox, why risk a low open rate or being reported as spam because you weren’t careful in your list building? If people don’t remember signing up for your email and they get email marketing from you, you’re building ill will, not good will. And ill will won’t get you any click throughs or conversions, only headaches (see above statement about being reported as spam!).

Heed Tim’s advice the best you can: Make sure you stay cognizant of just how you collected that email address in the first place, then help your subscriber stay aware too.

Chad White has a great article on leveraging email marketing to get more from social media to engage customers and start conversations that lead to conversions.

We preach relevance a lot in this email marketing blog. And relevance is a key part of Chad’s message. As he says, it’s not enough anymore to just sell pet care products. You must offer pet care advice and tips, and give your customers an opportunity to contribute their own thoughts and ideas.

That’s social media. And email marketing can both start that conversation and keep it going. An email newsletter can offer advice and link back to a site where customers can contribute, for example. Chad offers great examples in his article, but we’re taking it one step farther to remind you that you can drive customers to these Web 2.0 tools using email marketing, and you can also use them to grow your in-house email list.

• Blogging, where people can comment but you can also solicit email signups
• Facebook, where people can because fans or members and post comments…and where you can also solicit email signups
• Forums (or wikis), where customers can post entire articles or comment, and you can (you guess it), solicit email signups

Even Twitter can be used to get people to subscribe to your emails!

Web 2.0, social media, social networking: We have a few names for these new marketing tools, but they all have one thing in common no matter what we call them. They can all be integrated into your email marketing program to deepen your conservations, strengthen your relationships, and increase your conversions. Maybe we should stop thinking of them as different, and simply consider them additional email marketing tools?

Click here to read Chad’s article

But when you’re ready to get really serious about adhering to email marketing best practices, seven tips in an email marketing blog post isn’t quite detailed enough to help. So go to the Email Experience Council’s (EEC) Web site where you can buy one of five different in-depth email marketing checklists. For $49 each, these checklists are an affordable investment that will likely improve your email marketing ROI enough to recoup your small costs right away. The five checklists available are:

• Creative A/B Testing Checklist

• Landing Page Checklist

• Welcome Email Checklist

• Email Design

• Code QA Testing

Created by EEC Member Roundtables, you can bet these checklists are current, usable and applicable. They were put together by people like you: email marketers striving to make the most of every advantage to optimize their email marketing ROI. Learn from their experiences and expertise.

Click here to view detailed list of the email marketing checklists.

• A top tier ESP, such as BlueHornet, Silverpop or ExactTarget
• A subject line test tool
• A rendering test tool like Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer
• An email designer or email design team that can design emails effective even with image blockers on, who know email HTML vs. HTML used for the Web, and the limitations of email clients such as Outlook 2007
• An email copywriter or email copywriting team that understands best practices for copywriting emails and landing pages
• Web analytics
• An email marketing consultant or vendor/partner like ClickMail Marketing, to help you stay compliant, aware of best practices, and current with email marketing trends
• An email testing strategy to learn, over time, what your audience responds to (e.g. subject line, email copywriting, email design layout, timing, etc.)

If your email marketing toolbox is missing any of these items, start looking around now to make your toolbox as complete as can be. Because the better your tools and the more complete your toolbox, the higher your email marketing ROI. And in the end, isn’t the ROI what you’re striving to create?

Looking around as the year came to a close, we as an email marketing vendor saw all kinds of advice online about tips for improving your email marketing. So we decided to take a different approach: We put together a list of the email marketing mistakes we most often see, and addressed those instead. Because sometimes you need to fix what’s broken before you start taking on new email marketing tools and tips!