The Whitelist

After several months of pitting one blogging platform against the other, we’ve decided on the other one…meaning not the one you’ve subscribed to. We hope this blog is more user friendly for our readers and we hope you enjoy the new blog platform moving forward. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause for you, but please click on this link to subscribe to the RSS feed at our other email marketing blog, so you can continue to get the email marketing insight and information you need to succeed: http://emailwhitelist.clickmailmarketing.com/blog/clickmail-marketing.

ClickMail’s expertise is featured prominently in a story about problems with White House email communications by the Washington DC-based National Journal.  When the Journal needed an expert on email marketing and email best practices, the call went out to ClickMail CEO Marco Marini.

Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

Think August is too early for holiday email marketing to begin? As a consumer and procrastinator, I say yes, but as an email marketer, I know many retailers think it’s just the right time to get top of mind in the customer’s mind.

But even if you aren’t sending out those first “think of us for gifts” type email marketing messages, there’s plenty of prep work you can do right now to make your holiday email marketing campaign more effective so you achieve better email marketing results.
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A year ago, Marco Marini transitioned from VP of Marketing and Operations to CEO of ClickMail Marketing, an email marketing vendor. We decided it’s time you learned a bit more about him…

Marco is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over 15 years of experience in the field. Before helping to found ClickMail, he held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada. Marco’s strengths and experience are varied, including demand generation via direct marketing, email marketing, and database marketing.
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“Free” isn’t a word that plays well in the body of your emails as it can trigger spam filters, but it plays very well when you as an email marketer want to stay up to speed on email best practices and trends! You should attend as many webinars and conferences as your email marketing budget allows, but also look for free educational opportunities as you can as well.
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For retailers using email marketing, Christmas really does begin in July. That’s when we begin planning, preparing for–and hoping for–great email marketing results.

It’s not a new concept. I once read that the idea of Christmas in July came from Victorian times, when women would start making gifts in July, giving them several months to get their projects done. (Makes you wonder what they’d think of our Christmas shopping these days, on the Internet on December 20th, shelling out an extra $25 for rush shipping charges to guarantee delivery by Christmas Eve!) But it translates wonderfully from needlepoint on a pillowcase to email marketing campaigns because they both take planning and time, and the more you have of both, the better your results.
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An often asked question for this email marketing vendor is, how do my email marketing results compare to the average? By this, our email marketing clients typically mean delivery rates, open rates and click throughs, the big triad of email marketing metrics.

It’s not an easy question to answer because it depends on your business, industry and more. But eMarketer’s Monday report on email marketing and click-through rates helps, so take a look and maybe even keep a copy so you can benchmark against these industry standards.
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Your email marketing ROI starts long before you ever send out and track an email marketing campaign. It starts with someone saying “yes” to being on your in-house email list. Because without a list, you don’t have anyone to market to!

Wouldn’t it be great if potential customers just surfed the Web, looking for email newsletters and campaigns to subscribe to? You could just sit back, put your feet up on the desk, and watch your in-house email list grow and grow and grow.
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Social media is all the rage. But email is the enabler. In the world of email marketing, email service providers (ESPs) are integrating social media into their platforms, from ExactTarget’s Social Forward to Silverpop’s Engage and Lyris’ HQ.

ESPs aren’t moving away from email. But they are responding to market demands, as our CEO Marco Marini points out in his article just published in DMNews.
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Despite the hoopla and hype, there’s no way social media is replacing email marketing, as some doomsayers predict. For one thing, you can’t use a social media site like Facebook without an email address how else are you going to sign up and get notifications?

Email solutions provider ExactTarget has already proven people prefer to receive marketing messages via email, not social networking sites.
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