Archive for: February 2012

Blackberry PlayBook email finally here with software update

Feb. 29 Email Clients, Email Marketing News 5 comments

RIM’s Blackberry PlayBook has finally received a software update to handle email the way Blackberry smartphones do. Last week the update was released, so now users of the PlayBook don’t need to tether the device to a Blackberry anymore. They can now use the PlayBook email directly on the device.

The tablet is powered by the new Blackberry tablet OS based on QNX, which is planned to be released on a Blackberry smartphone later this year as well. Being the single device now sporting the QNX-based OS, it doesn’t have many apps available. However, as part of the software update it is now possible to run Android-based apps on the PlayBook: a big plus as the Android Market has a lot more apps available. Read more

LiveIntent launches LiveCertified Affiliate Program for ESPs

Feb. 28 Email Marketing News 5 comments

LiveIntent has announced a new partnership program called LiveCertified which helps ESPs and data partners keep track of email ad serving and generation with the latest technologies. Current LiveCertified ESP partners include MailChimp, SilverPop, Adestra, Email Predict and BrightWave.

A quote from the press release:

ESPs in the program can now offer their customers a simple way to include real-time ads in their emails without additional add-ons or development. ESP integration with LiveCertified offers publishers a way to offset the costs of sending email to customers, while helping advertisers and brands reach consumers where they spend the most time: their email inbox.

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Email Marketing Insight: advanced email marketing means total integration

Feb. 27 Email Marketing, Email Marketing Insight 14 comments

Remember the Email Marketing Insight post ‘How are your basic email marketing skills?‘. I posed that advanced email marketing was all about automation, and high-end about total integration. But looking back to that post I’m actually inclined to say that that total integration part already starts at advanced email marketing.

Here’s why. Imagine having a small email campaign running on your email marketing platform. It’s got some forms, some notification emails and such. The results and effectiveness of that campaign however often do not show up in your webshop platform or your CRM tool. There’s no connection, no integration between the systems: they are silos of data.

What if something goes wrong with the campaign? What if you get odd signups, notification emails are not sent or there’s no followup by your sales people? The only way to keep track of all that efficiently is by having one central point of reporting: a dashboard in your webshop or CRM platform. That way, everything from a simple email campaign as the above example all the way trough to customer lifecycle management campaigns (aka drip campaigns) can be monitored and managed.

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Fluent: save your inbox with workflow-style email stream

Feb. 22 Email Clients, Email Marketing News 9 comments

Three former Google employees from Sydney, Australia have been working on a solution called Fluent for the inbox overload many people are facing these days.

Key features include:

- New service displays email as a “stream” like Facebook
- Shows attachments like photos as a slide show
-Multiple account support for a single login
- Allows instant searching through emails as you type

The team consists of Cameron Adams,  Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann. After Google halted development on Google Wave, Adams and Prasanna quit (with Bekmann following later) to work on Fluent.

One of the key goals of the new email handling platform is to have people take action on messages received right away, instead of reading into all the details. This should make working with email about 20% more efficient.

Here’s what the interface looks like:

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MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways 2012

Feb. 16 Email Marketing 11 comments

The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 edition was held last week in Las Vegas and boy, did they have a blast. I wasn’t there myself, but by keeping track of all the livetweets on Twitter with hashtags #sherpaemail and #emailsummit I’ve been able to create a new Email Summit takeaways post.

Just like the event takeaways post from last year I’ll be grouping the takeaways and sort them on topic alphabetically for your convenience.

Here they are:

Automation / Campaign management

Rachael Darmanin: Automated emails that are extremely personal is the ultimate combination.

Content

Jim Ducharme: ”When done right, content is the greatest sales tool in the world.”

Greg Hyer: The rights of a content marketer are much greater than he who produces no content.

Ryan Amirault: Use your content and push them down the funnel.

Justine Jordan: Money talks. Developing content about costs (even in general terms) can drive a ton of traffic from keyword searches.

Three Deep Email: Content is the most important thing in marketing. It must be done right.

Daniel Burstein: ”Use conversational tone and reference past actions taken”.

Martin Lieberman: The job of a headline is to get you to read the first paragraph. Not to close the sale.

Conversion

Martin Lieberman: ”Conversion is a process, not an event, and it starts early on.”

Ashley Aboud: Find the correlation to who buys and who doesnt. Know your tipping point focus marketing on it.

Ashley Abboud: Spend marketing money on those that spend money on you.

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