Answer: Most e-mail newsletters today look pretty much the same, so how can you distinguish yours from your competitors’? By using behavioral targeting to learn more about what customers want and giving it to them. B-to-b e-mailers work with shorter customer lists and often longer sales cycles than their b-to-c counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they should be tempted to oversaturate their most valuable customers with a deluge of nontargeted email. Behaviorally targeted messages provide better response and can even be credited with shortening sales cycles.

The easiest way to obtain behavioral targeting data is through Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

If your e-mail list includes customers and prospects with Yahoo.com addresses, it’s possible they didn’t see messages you sent in February and March. The company, according to a March 11 blog post, made changes to its inbound mail service in an effort to block spam—a move that ended up blocking both spam and legitimate e-mails from bulk senders.
The snafu is a good reminder to marketers that they must constantly monitor their deliverability. Here are some tips that to help boost and maintain deliverability rates: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel.
Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

E-mail marketing managers love to include quick surveys in their e-newsletters—so much so that they risk overdoing it.

Melissa Read, VP-research and innovation at Spunlogic, an Atlanta-based full-service digital marketing agency, believes managers send surveys too often, causing respondents to burn out on the novelty of providing feedback. Eventually, she said, they’ll stop responding.

“Surveys should only go out when you want to understand something about the business respondents,” Read said. Otherwise, “it will become the survey who cried wolf and the next time you really want to know something, respondents won’t be as interested in telling you.”

Paring down the number of surveys is a good start, she said. Read offers these other helpful tips... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: I am always amazed at the still-prevailing idea that list size trumps list quality. Don’t get me wrong: Volume is good. Every record in your e-mail address list has an inherent value that can be reduced to a dollar amount. This leads us to the idea that your database should be viewed as capital and should be treated just like any other useful marketing asset. So why, then, do so many marketers mix bad data into their lists?

A bad e-mail address can have a dramatic impact on your ability to market with e-mail. Bad e-mails come in the form of addresses from third parties (list renters, etc.), complainers who have not been removed from your list and dormant addresses—e-mail addresses of people who have not opened your e-mail in more than 90 days. ISPs view all with equal disdain. While it is not illegal to send to these “bad” e-mail addresses, doing so is a sure way to increase complaints and damage your sender reputation. It’s also a good way to waste money.

So how do you build your list and maintain quality data? Consider these tips: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out today what your marketing plan should look like in six months? Crystal balls don’t exactly grow on trees, so we’ve asked two industry experts—Jordan Ayan, president of SubscriberMail, and Joel Book, director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget—to weigh in on what’s coming in 2008. Here’s what they said.

1) More CRM integration, especially with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
2) Increased use of automated tools.
3) Closer alignment of marketing elements.
4) Using rich video with e-mail marketing.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Addressing e-mail received while out of the office for extended periods of time can be one of the most frustrating phenomena in business today.

People subscribe to receive e-mail communications that are relevant and useful to them in their day-to-day jobs, but when those messages stack up in the in-box for whatever reason, the recipients don’t reap the benefits of those communications. And what do they do with all of those messages? They sort by “from name,” highlight and delete.

And depending on the volume, they may potentially be annoyed with the organization that sent the e-mail, which could be detrimental to future interaction. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Permission-based b-to-b e-mail lists are the highest-priced list category for the third straight year, according to the Fall 2007 List Price Index released by Worldata, a list management company.
The average price of permission-based b-to-b e-mail lists is $275 per thousand in the current quarter, down $2 from the fourth quarter of 2006. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Many companies aren’t coordinating their various departments’ e-mail marketing efforts, according to a Jupiter Research report released last month, “Maturation of E-mail: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization.”

Some 24% of executives surveyed said six or more departments manage their e-mail messaging activities separately. Almost half the executives questioned (44%) said they believed their e-mail would be more effective if it were managed from a central platform. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

When designing your holiday greetings, a well-planned e-card can effectively enhance your public image and may even result in added business in the new year.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when developing your holiday e-card.

1. Tie in your product or service with a holiday theme.
2. Take advantage of what the e-card format has to offer.
3. Make your message viral.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Small and midsize businesses are increasing their use of Web 2.0 tools as information sources, providing greater opportunities to marketers that are trying to reach this audience, according to a new study from market research company Bredin Business Information.

The study was based on an online survey in August of 338 business executives at companies with fewer than 500 employees. It examined which online tools SMBs use, how they use them to receive business information and the implications for marketers using Web 2.0 tools to reach SMBs. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Most businesses—anywhere from 50% to 80%—use Outlook as their e-mail client. What’s more, a recent survey suggests that nearly 40% of these companies will migrate to Office 2007. If the majority of your marketing e-mail list is business domains, you may need to rethink the design of those marketing e-mails. Otherwise, your potential customers may quite literally not get your message. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: As a b-to-b sender, there are a number of things you can do to help increase your delivery rates. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

When it comes to e-mail marketing, Americans are more sophisticated than almost all their European counterparts. This is significant, according to a new JupiterResearch report, "E-mail Marketing Adoption: Assessing Multinational E-mail Marketing Sophistication," because it may give U.S.-based marketers an edge as they move into international markets.

If you’re thinking of making a move into international waters, there are a few key things you can do to increase your odds of success, said Nate Elliott, senior analyst at JupiterResearch. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: The reliability of bounce data is a legitimate concern that was raised by both mailers and ESPs in a recent Email Experience Council (EEC) survey.

However, this concern cannot become an excuse for e-mail marketers not making good use of the data that are provided, leveraging bounce management systems that allow them to “see” the data, and agreeing on common definitions for the actions to be taken. The EEC survey found these to be significant problems as well. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Companies increasingly are turning to online preference centers as a way to allow b-to-b customers to easily update their e-mail address or get off an e-mail list. That’s important because b-to-b e-mail lists churn at a rate of about 25% a year, according to MarketingSherpa’s e-mail marketing benchmark guide. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: The e-mail industry is full of acronyms and catch phrases. The newest on the scene is “bacn,” which is not to be confused with the pork product commonly served with a side of pancakes. Bacn (www.bacn2.com) is e-mail that recipients want—just not right now. While bacn represents a real issue in the e-mail industry, it has sparked some of the most counterproductive banter I have seen. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Integrating customer data is the greatest challenge for marketers, according to a survey of marketing industry executives by Alterian. The enterprise marketing software company conducted the survey at its Annual Summit last month.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their e-mail marketing channel is integrated with offline channels such as direct mail, according to Alterian, and 12% said it is integrated with online channels such as search, Web sites and RSS. A third (33%) said e-mail is a standalone channel for them. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Your objective should be to restore communication with customers as rapidly as possible. This not only helps your bottom line, it helps you to avoid spam complaints that may result from a long lapse in communication. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Marketers often view e-mail marketing as a form of broadcast marketing: They create an ad, send it out, hope for the best and move on to the next campaign. However, old e-mail campaigns can be very valuable when planning and executing new ones. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

E-mail marketers need to do a much better job managing content, particularly with the proliferation of new devices and formats by which to access e-mail, according to a new report from JupiterResearch. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Adopters of online video in the last year have been reporting stellar jumps in action—with both their Web sites and their newsletters—when using videos to get their messages across. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: It’s always an annoying slowdown on the superhighway of marketing when your reputation suffers a negative impact. Suddenly your deliverability is down, and often you don’t know where to start to fix the problem. Fortunately, there is a simple three-step solution to addressing a... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Most companies worry about lost productivity when considering e-mail security, according to a new report from Aberdeen Group, “The Ins and Outs of Email Vulnerability. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: When customers hit the spam button, they’re rescinding their permission for you to send them e-mail. Of course, that recession can take many forms. They can also unsubscribe or simply delete your e-mail. It’s important that you monitor these indicators individually and collectively... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: The actual CAN-SPAM Act looks daunting and confusing. But when you boil it down, CAN-SPAM really is the bare minimum best practices that any responsible e-mail marketer should be doing anyway. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: With so many business professionals now using mobile devices like the BlackBerry, marketers can’t afford to ignore mobile e-mail. But a successful initiative takes a new approach to thinking about the e-mail channel. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Widgets. Blogs. Social networks. RSS feeds. Wikis. Wireless. The list of applications and services that fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella seems to grow on a daily basis; and as it grows so, too, do the opportunities to market and cross-promote using...Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Many e-mail marketers operate under the misconception that e-mail service is the same as the postal service: They expect their e-mails to be delivered intact and the way they were created.... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Despite their proliferation, e-newsletters require considerable dedicated resources, not the least of which is content. And although they can be ideal companywide communication vehicles, without the ability to segment subscriber files and... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Genalytics, a data analytics software company, announced at the Direct Marketing Association’s DM Days conference in New York last week that it has introduced On-Demand Targeting for b-to-b campaigns. The product is designed to allow marketers to... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Questions and answers from experts on using podcasts, designing newsletters for mobile devices and assuring your broadcasts are not tagged as spam. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.