Marketing and sales teams should work together to achieve the best results possible. Dave Mossop, Interactive Media Specialist, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, is no stranger to this concept.
Mossop’s team handles much of the online marketing for the brick-and-click cruise agency’s 2,500+ sales agents. We published an article today describing the team’s effort to support agents with customized marketing via email, a website, and a customer relationship management system.
One interesting tactic we did not mention is the team’s “sell-sheet” emails. Ordinarily, Mossop’s team manage email sent to prospective customers. The emails are customized as if they were sent directly from cruise agents to clients.
However, agents can identify cruises that individual clients might be interested in and send them a sell-sheet email. These emails are integrated into the CRM system agents use regularly.
“With basically one click, type in an email address and they’ll get a copy of what the itinerary is, what the ship looks like, a little about the weather, and it’s personalized with [the agent’s] information as a contact,” Mossop says.
You’ll also notice that the emails are customized with the agent’s contact information. They are just one more way that Mossop’s team uses customized messaging and streamlined processes to help agents save time and sell more.
You can find out more about how Expedia CruiseShipCenters combines email, social media and mobile marketing at MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Summit in January.
The folks at PETCO tested an email registration overlay ad that helped lift subscriptions more than 400%.
Carol Ott, Director, Finance Reporting and Web Analytics, PETCO, and the team used Amadesa’s Customer Experience Suite to A/B test the ad (and other offers) on the homepage since June.
As you can see in the image below (click for a larger one), the overlay offers visitors two rewards for submitting email addresses:
1. Chance to win a $500 gift card
2. A free shipping offer
“We were impressed with the results. We were testing offers that we thought would drop our average order value and were pleasantly surprised when it did not have any effect,” Ott says.
Dan Heimbrock, President and CEO, HyperDrive Interactive, had so many great examples to share about how word-of-mouth and email marketing can work together to create brand advocates that I couldn’t help sharing one.
Heimbrock is presenting a case study at MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Summit, March 15-17, and I had the opportunity to interview him last week about the topic.
He says often the only incentive that people need to become brand advocates is an opportunity to belong to something they care about.
Read more…
The database marketing agency Merkle released their 2009 ‘View from the Inbox’ email marketing report last week. The survey, conducted on behalf of Merkle by Harris Interactive, surveyed 2,505 U.S. adults who check or send email at least once a week.
Judging from the report’s highlights, it looks like consumers are more skeptical and demanding of messages hitting the in-box. However, they’re willing to receive email from a slightly greater number of companies. The report is free if you share your email address.
Here are a few findings:
Read more…
Granted this is just one consumer’s complaint, but it’s something to think about. A consumer named “Rob” recently was quoted in a Consumerist post about how Amazon ruined his wife’s surprise Christmas gift this year by sending email recommendations about the present after he purchased it.
His wife actually saw a subject line referring to the surprise gift (a TomTom GPS) on the couple’s shared Google homepage enabled with an iGoogle email widget showing recent emails.
Read more…
MarketingSherpa has published Case Studies and research data on list segmentation for seven years now. We’ve got data coming out of our ears showing that if you split your list into groups by recent activity and/or demographic and send special campaigns to those groups, your response rates will soar.
Nearly everyone says: “Oh yes. Segmentation is a best practice. But I don’t have the time/money/software/energy to do it. So I’ll keep blasting my entire house list with the exact same creative and timing from now until someday.” Read more…
User-generated content started being a hot topic a couple of years ago. It’s not that marketers are truly ignoring it, but I think it’s fair to say that the buzz has fizzled a bit.
Perhaps this has something to do with an economy that’s been sticking its tongue out at the public for about a year now. Ya think? Read more…
I got a call this week from a charitable organization. Their cause sounded very, very worthy.
But this is what happened. I asked them: If I made a donation, would they email me a receipt? I made it clear that that would be the only way I would contribute. I have had the experience in the past, where if you donate, the organization will email you a receipt. Read more…
Last year, numerous email marketers used Halloween to spike their open and clickthrough rates and drive sales. But the most important thing that industry observers saw in their inboxes was that this mini-season isn’t just for seasonal marketers with tight product niches. Read more…
When you operate a publishing site like MarketingSherpa, you want to be clear to your subscribers about the content available to them. Articles published in our nine weekly newsletters are open access to our hundreds of thousands of readers for seven days before they go into a members-only archive. The barrier date is stated in each email.
Still, results from a survey conducted earlier this year showed that 68% of our readers don’t know how long articles are available before going behind the membership wall. We decided our limited-access policy needed to be clarified. We also wanted to see if adding an expiration date to newsletter subject lines might create a sense of urgency that would boost open and clickthrough rates. Read more…
