The third review in¬†our Email Service Provider Round-up¬†is Listrak. Listrak was named¬† “favorable” by the¬† Jupiter report for Top ESP 4th quarter 2007 and that coupled with its list of features put them as an ideal candidate for our project.
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As part of our ESP Round-up we evaluated six Email Service Providers. The fact that StreamSend made it to the evaluation stage is proof that print advertising does work. I saw a full page ad in BtoB Marketing Magazine and was impressed enough with the ad that I looked into them further and ultimately decided to add them to the evaluation stage. During our evaluation StreamSend started off at a disadvantage because they have a new user interface StreamSend 2.0 but at the time of our review, it didn’t have key features such as triggered event capabilities. So we were only able to evaluate their previous version as it had the features that were part of our requirements. Continue reading
People have many different preferences on how they consume content, so it is important as an eMarketer that you give them options.
As an example this blog has an RSS Feed that is syndicated by FeedBurner, you can subscribe to it via RSS or email. I also have a Design and Development website, www.HolsumStudios.com that is powered by a Joomla CMS. Wanting to give visitors to Holsum Studios the opportunity to view these articles and take part in the blog I developed a Joomla Module for FeedBurner’s BuzzBlast. Continue reading
How well does your website perform based on the visitor’s language preferences? Is there a large portion of your traffic that is not being well served because of a language barrier? Do you have multiple language support on your website and want to know if it is effective?
Web analytics can answer all of those questions, and it can show you how effective your marketing efforts are by visitor language.
I will be using Google Analytics, but you can use most analytics tools to easily look at visits and purchases by the language setting of the visitor’s browsers. Continue reading
Lyris HQ is an online Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tool, but this review will focus primarily on their Email Service offering (Email Labs) that is bundled in Lyris HQ. Email Labs is a robust solution that combines all of the Email Marketing features you would want in a modern email Marketing solution such as personalizations, dynamic list segmentation, triggered events and more. Continue reading
Criteria for evaluating the ESPs.Now that we have our ESP selected we need to create a way to fairly evaluate the ESPs against one another. We have chosen five areas of Email Marketing to evaluate:
Which features are critical to your marketing team will vary from the list we have here but many of them will match:
When it comes to tracking your marketing efforts it is important to consider the number of ways prospects will come into contact with your marketing collateral. The idea (sometimes known as multi-touch marketing) is that most of your prospects will not convert the first time they come into contact with your products/service, but are likely to be exposed to multiple messages via the corporate website, a banner ad, word of mouth et cetera.
Tracking multiple touches in Google Analytics is easy and they offer many ways at refining the data to get a clear picture of the different mediums prospects are using to visit your site, with one exception, the conversion. Google has decided that the last touch, the source that turns a prospect into a customer (or achieves a goal) is the touch that should get credit for the conversion. Which works out pretty good in most cases except it doesn’t factor in human behavior and the use of Search Engines.
The problem: Continue reading
I watch our company’s current Adwords account very closely and yesterday I was surprised to see that all of our campaigns had stopped running. Drilling down into the ad groups, each of the keywords were “inactive” for search. Our maximum CPC is usually set to $.40 per click, but Adwords was recommending that we increase my Maximum CPC to $10.00 per click!
I spoke with a Google Adword’s support specialist and she explained that it was my quality score that had affected the Maximum CPC. I assured her that our ads were well targeted, but she was insistent on trying to “enlighten” me how Google Adwords quality score works. By the end of the phone call she had agreed to have a technical team member look into it further, but I would have to increase my Maxiumum CPC if I wanted my ads to appear.
This morning I checked our Adwords campaigns and they were back up and running without any changes. A few hours later I received this email from Google: Continue reading
When looking for an Email Service Provider it is important for your organization to develop criteria to identify ESP worth evaluating. This will help your organization create a “short list” of Service Providers who match your company’s needs.
Almost every ESP bases their pricing on your email volume, so it is important to identify how much email will your organization will send on a monthly basis when your email marketing system is fully implemented.
Organizations will differ on how often they send emails to their various lists, but this is an example of an average Organization’s send volume by contact type: Continue reading