Even a small company can benefit from email messages tailored to a recipient's specific wants and needs. "Using segmentation," says Michael Clark in an article at MarketingProfs, "customers only get notified of new products, specials, and offers based on past buying patterns, knowledge of the customer and what they've clicked ... more

Not all customers are alike, and what appeals to one may not interest another. Therefore, it is important that you connect the message you are sending to your customers' differing interests. Email messages that are segmented, targeted, and relevant to the recipient are much more likely to be opened and acted ... more

Your e-newsletter is an excellent tool for maintaining customer relationships. But it can also generate income if you offer cool ad space in it.  In a recent article at MarketingProfs, Drew Adams explains how to make it more appealing to select advertisers: Make it relevant. Adams offers an example: "For a newsletter ... more

Hyundai took the bull by the horns in this bear market and scored big. It used behavioral segmentation to identify what was keeping prospects from buying and then developed a strategy that made it easier for customers to part with their hard-earned dollars. What can you learn from its example? In ... more

According to Jorge Aguilar and Andrew Pierce, the Hispanic population in the United States will surpass that of their white non-Hispanic compatriots by 2030. And, argue the pair in an article at MarketingProfs, appealing to this rapidly growing segment is not as simple as hiring a Spanish translator. "[M]arketers ... more

A few basic thoughts advertisers should consider for the 2010 Super Bowl: • Who watches the Super Bowl? Approximately 100 million viewers, with more than 40 percent of them women. • Who spends the most money as a consumer? Women spend approximately 85 percent; men spend only 15 percent. • Who focuses more ... more

Today's economy has earnest marketers scrambling for consumer attention. As inboxes become inundated with yet more marketing messages, the bar continues to inch higher for those attempting to stand out from the clutter. Here's how one retailer tweaked its email program to grow revenue, even in this market. more

For IT company CenterBeam, sales is indeed a numbers game, but not in the traditional sense. Rather than trying to engage as many leads as possible, the company's sales force instead nurtures a smaller quantity of well-qualified prospects. more

"The news regarding investment in marketing is not good, with many firms cutting their marketing budgets left and right," reports Neil Anuskiewicz in an article at MarketingProfs. Before taking such drastic steps, you might want to consider his better option: "Instead of taking an axe to your marketing budget … ... more

"A great way to capitalize on the democratic medium of email is to put your burning questions, late-night hunches, and out-of-the-box ideas to the test with an A/B split test," says Megan Walsh in a post at the Email Experience Council blog. Here's some of her advice for using split ... more

Recent buzz about personas has created some confusion. If you've tried to develop and deploy personas, you may have experienced resistance from other departments because they don't grasp the value that personas purportedly provide. The reason may be that personas (in the form of customer profiles) by themselves don't offer ... more

Predicting where your prospects are online is tricky—and often expensive. And it's not always about where they are but also what are the best ways to reach them. How should you decide where to start? The military has utilized a system called CARVER, a mnemonic term for the weighting factors used to ... more

Relationship-marketing firm Babcock & Jenkins didn't tell prospects what it could do, it gave them a taste. Its campaign, launched with a package of brownies from a mystery source, showed how it uses intrigue, personalization, humor, and the soft-sell to establish and advance client relationships. Results: A tasty 50% response ... more

Back in the days of the Model T, Henry Ford could get away with offering customers any color they wanted—as long as it was black. Ridiculous as that mentality sounds to modern ears, you risk sending customers the same message if you don't tailor your email campaigns to their interests, ... more

If you are an email marketer who is doing traditional "batch and blast" email marketing, now's a good time to start segmenting and sending triggered emails. Doing so allows you to send more relevant emails and achieves better response from your subscribers. more

Reaching a niche audience—and only those people—can be tricky. But in a post at his eponymous blog, Seth Godin proposes the inventive approach of piggybacking onto a product that your target market already wants. Say you have a rock band with a quirky sound, and people who like your music also ... more

Research has uncovered quite an interesting effect that guides customer brand choices. They call it the "name letter branding effect." The NLB effect shows that customers are more likely to choose a brand name that has the same letters as their first name than they are other, equally attractive, brands. ... more

You've crossed all your marketing t's and dotted all your best practices i's with a relevant, enticing offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns. You're anxious to see how well the offer performs, but then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address because ... more

If you don't use A/B-split testing to analyze the results of your email campaigns, you probably aren't getting the full picture. According to a whitepaper from L-Soft, "Results can show how your newsletters or email campaigns are performing, why they are performing as they are, and what factors are affecting ... more

It's knowing where prospects are—and how they behave—that's paying off for today's New Media marketers. Their advertising dollars are in hot pursuit of a fragmented audience that now receives thousands of channels of programming over TV, Internet, radio and mobile device. … Enter good ol' Behavioral Targeting. This tried-and-true direct marketing practice ... more

In the luxury brand business, stretching brands too thinly across market segments may gain short-term revenue increases, but it also almost guarantees long-term loss to the shareholders, brand owners, and, well, consumers. So, set your limits for how much you really want to stretch your brand before you open your doors ... more

CASE STUDY - Here's how a unique Major League Soccer sponsorship helped a new beverage product score big in both sales and brand recognition. What's more, here are three lessons you can apply to your own sponsorship efforts. more

JER Envirotech, a manufacturer of environmentally friendly thermoplastic biocomposite materials, needed to stand out in the green manufacturing industry. Its solution: create a white paper to both explain and build credibility for its offerings. Here's how that led to 500 new leads over 60 days. more

Email marketers are perpetually caught in the middle. On the one hand, we are celebrated for being the go-to resource for generating short-term revenue results. On the other hand, the applause dies down when the budget talk comes around and we continue to be handicapped by limited investment and strained ... more

When it chose to enter the saturated inkjet market 20 years late, Eastman Kodak had a few surprises up its sleeve. Still, the company found it also needed a little marketing ingenuity if it was to gain market share. more