I’m starting to cringe every time I hear the phrase, “We could segment our audience based on that data”.

People hear that phrase and eyes light up and heads bob in agreement. In meetings with the CMO/SVP, the phrase is carefully proffered as a goal about to be fulfilled, and the CMO/SVP solemnly nods and pats everyone on the back for having done a good job.

What utterly useless, well-intentioned bunk.

The 3Q 2015 Email Trends and Benchmark Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth taking a look at – reading it 3 things struck me.

Coupons are a good way to attract shoppers back to your website during the festive season and January sales. Coupons are known to drive loyalty, and consequently revenue.

As well as old‐style individual and mass coupons, you can use a lot of tricks to preferentially target loyal customers. For example:

A compendium of OI Blog articles on everything you need to know to get started with Drip Marketing.

I say automation, you think robotic, right?

No wonder. Experienced marketers and consumers alike receive corporate-heavy copy in their messages nowadays. Dry, humorless, stiff, computerized. Or the pendulum swings the other way with over-the-top witticisms and personality that tries too hard. Canned humor gets nowhere.

To strike a balance between robotic and over-friendly in your drip marketing campaigns is difficult, especially trying to let your usual brand voice have a weigh in, too. It isn’t impossible, though.

There are a few strategies that will help you craft conversational, concise copy that doesn’t sound like it came from a machine.

In a past Only Influencers article Automated Marketing: Drip vs. Nurture, the author argues that there are drip campaigns and there are nurture campaigns.

I wouldn’t necessarily argue that point, but I would take a different perspective.

There are a lot of opinions flying around about drip marketing campaigns. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people don’t know how to use it well.

If you’re like most e-commerce and other online merchants, you depend on regular (and often frequent) promotional campaigns to drive sales. These campaigns are loaded with offers, incentives, and immediate calls to action. But is the prospect really ready to buy? Do you have a relationship? Does your prospect trust you enough to buy from you? Drip email campaigns (also called nurturing campaigns) are the tool every online marketer needs to develop that relationship and trust with prospects that will ultimately result in more sales conversions and greater client loyalty over time.

DRIP campaigns have been shown to improve open, click-through and conversion rates, as well as deliver higher revenue per sale than business-as usual campaigns. They are also somewhat ‘set it and forget it’ – meaning you set them up once and they require minimal maintenance and time from your team to keep them running.

It’s August here and the Bay Area is going through one of its rare heat waves. Over the weekend, temps reached over 100 at our house, which normally never sees anything warmer than 80. Despite the summer heat, and the calendar, and the complaints of Christmas coming earlier every year, it really is time for us to start talking about holiday email delivery. 

As consumers, we cringe at the inexorable tidal wave of holiday ads headed our way. As marketers, we contribute to it. For email marketers, there’s an opportunity to elevate beyond sending five copies of the same catalogue to the guy who bought one item from your store four years ago. There’s a reason that email consistently drives the highest ROI of all direct marketing channels.

If yours is a retail or e-tail business revving up your holiday email marketing engines, this advice is not for you (but good luck and Godspeed!)

If on the other hand you’re in the same camp as non-retailers, your email running the risk of being stampeded by the crushing annual blow of “buy now” retail promotional messages to consumer inboxes from September through December, read on.

Well, it’s past that time of year again. Yes, past. Many companies start planning for the holiday season back in March, so if you’re just starting now…..hurry. Even if you’ve started, begin thinking now about what you can do to juice things up, and survive the holiday rush. Because let’s all admit it, volume will go up and consumers will go crazy. How do you be a hero, try something new and survive the hectic holiday period? Let’s take a look at the things you can do to save yourself and your team.

If you haven’t started your U.S. holiday campaign planning, it’s time to get cracking. To help you move things along, I’ve outlined the major online selling opportunities and created a handy calendar to help you get organized for the busy season. There are 14 important dates to build campaigns around.

Anyone have current figures on email reading on their PC vs. tablet vs. mobile?  I realize this is a basic question, so if there's some standing public research you can point me to, that'd be awesome, too.

Everything You Every Wanted to Know about Mobile Email: A Compendium of the World's Best Free Resources for Learning about Mobile Email Marketing

Article by Tracey Gordon, VP Client Services, and Paul Gordon, co-founder, Bubblebox.

The elusive millennial demographic has been hot on every digital marketer’s lips for years now. Heck, we even wrote an article about how to engage this so-called “highly influential” cohort. It seemed as if every brand worth their salt had joined the great race to target, capture and retain their piece of the “the selfie generation,” while swiftly pushing the parent demographic—the boomers— under the rug. I thought it might be interesting to write something to counter all of this millennial fervor—a think piece on how to engage the oft-ignored “boomer consumer.” But the more I read about demographic marketing, the more conflicting the findings seemed to be, and the more I realized that there really isn’t a consensus definition of any generation in our modern times. So I got to thinking: is demographic marketing dead?

If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You're probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails for engagement. Even if you think they have a point, that's not your decision to make. Your job is to move the needle on sales while still sending out the constant hail of promotions.

"You probably know by now that segmentation improves email marketing performance significantly, so if you’re still operating primarily in “batch and blast” mode it’s time to start slicing and dicing your subscriber file. Marketers that practice list segmentation see better open and click-through rates, fewer unsubscribes and better deliverability."

With almost 122,500,453,020 emails sent every hour in India, email is alive and here to stay for long. While marketers across the globe are embracing advanced personalization in email, India is leaving no stone unturned to win the email game.