E-Commerce & Online Marketing Blog

Check back on a regular basis for the latest best practice and thought-leadership updates.

Is Your Email Marketing Socially ‘Inept’?

A recent study has reportedly shown that ‘offering at least three social options leads to 55% higher click-through rates’ in your email marketing. It sounds great on the face of it: include a sim...

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Better Email Marketing & Blogging Costs Just 10 Pounds

"Be prepared." The boy scouts have a good motto, but it's not like they own the copyright. It’s a concept every business should take to heart when it comes to planning their online marketing, whatev...

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Is Your Email Marketing Content Out Of Touch With Customers?

Economic forecasters have been talking about a slow but sure recovery lately, but in reality, many customers are still feeling the pinch in their wallets. Your email marketing needs to use the kind o...

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Eliminate Bad Decisions From Your Email Marketing

Have you ever thought before sending out an email, ‘Is this subject line interesting enough? Should that button be red or green? Will it make a difference if I use my own name or the company’s nam...

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Transactional Emails: A Little ‘Thank You’ Goes A Long Way

Many businesses think of email primarily as a marketing channel, with transactional emails such as purchase receipts and delivery notifications coming a close second. But what about the ‘thank youâ€...

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Are You Wasting the Potential of Your Email Marketing?

Are you draining the vitality out of your email marketing channel by sending relentless promotional emails? Get more value from your email marketing by using it to send transactional, informational an...

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Email Marketing: Long Term Commitments Beat 'One-Night' Mail Shots

The larger, costlier purchases in life tend to be made less frequently, and if you are one of those businesses that sells cars, homes or any other ‘big decision’ purchase, the likelihood of sendin...

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Email Marketers: Make A List And Check It Twice

In the run up to Christmas, many preparations must be made to ensure your Christmas email marketing campaigns are a success. With so many tactics and best practices to keep track of, we thought it use...

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Use Transactional Emails To Drive Sales On Your Web Site

Email marketing and e-commerce, birds of a feather. It doesn’t quite rhyme, but stand these two channels next to each other and you realise how well they work together. Historically, transactiona...

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The First Email Is Always the Hardest...

...when in fact, it should be the softest. Unless you've already been sending direct mail to prospects and existing customers, it's unlikely that the first email of your campaign will be expected. Eve...

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Full House! A Winning Email Marketing Combination

Sometimes we like to take practical examples of email marketing strategy in action, just to demonstrate to readers how effective email marketing can be at driving responses. We recently helped one of ...

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How Not To Forward to a Friend - Email Address Harvesting

While social media networks are being likened to the air we breathe, one company has been crossing the boundaries of 'forward to a friend' on social media networks as a means of email list growth. Em...

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Managing the 80/20 Split in Your Email List

It’s not always easy being an email marketer (or any marketer for that matter!) when you’re facing an 80/20 split in your mailing list. What does this mean? An 80/20 split is the average breakdow...

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Email and Twitter, Birds of a Feather

It appears that email marketing and the micro-blogging service, Twitter have more in common than you’d expect, as both appear to be lending themselves very well to B2B and B2C communications. Twitte...

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Hidden Behaviours & High Returns On Investment

A recent report into email marketing trends and benchmarks has discovered that the open rates of received emails increased by 11% in the first quarter of 2009, and that click-through rates within thos...

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Plug The Black Holes In Your Mailing List

As many as one in five email marketing messages fail to reach recipients’ inboxes, a recent report has suggested. While 3.3% of those emails simply get routed to a ‘Spam’ or ‘Junk’ folder,...

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Engaged Customers Will ‘Click’ With Your Email Marketing

In a recent two-part blog post, Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports gave marketers some useful hints and tips for indentifying the most engaged subscribers on their email marketing lists. He se...

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Email Marketing To Grow 11% by 2014

Some recent growth forecasts on interactive and digital advertising from Forrester Research have earmarked email marketing for continued growth between now and 2014, at the expense of traditional medi...

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The Value of Customer-Approved Emails

There are people in life that we feel we know and trust, and when they tell us they think the food over at Restaurant X is the best they’ve ever tasted, or the service at their local garage is sec...

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Has Social Media Outdone Traditional News?

If anyone was in doubt about social media’s ability to circulate news faster than traditional media, the untimely passing of Michael Jackson will serve as a startling example: reports of Jacksonâ€...

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Research Shows More People Access Email Via Mobile Phones

The number of people using mobile devices to access their email accounts is slowly rising, research shows. Email has traditionally displayed very badly on mobile phones on account of phones' small ...

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Stop Dreaming Of The Perfect Email Marketing - Start Writing It

When composing your email marketing messages, our guess is you probably have the following scenario in mind: recipients will receive and open the email, read it from top to bottom, love it and then ex...

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Optimise Your Registration Forms and Increase Conversion Rates

Whatever you want people to register for – an email marketing newsletter; a white paper or an online forum – the registration form can persuade or dissuade the site visitor from fulfilling the des...

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Are Abandoned Basket Emails Helpful or Harassment?

Whether to re-market to visitors who have abandoned shopping baskets on your web site is a sensitive issue. As this recent article in the New York Times pointed out, a shop assistant wouldn't follow y...

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Get Creative & Improve Email Click-Through Rates

Your email marketing will experience diminishing returns if you use the same format for writing promotional emails as you do business correspondence. Your list will become fatigued as more subscribers...

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Expand Your Subscriber Base: Share to Social Networks

If list-building feels like a Herculean task to you, try turning to your existing subscribers for help. They can do most of the leg-work by sharing the content on their favourite social networks. All ...

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Generic Emails Equal Generic Performance

From now on we’d like to impose a ban on the word ‘generic’ – because when it comes to email marketing, there should be nothing generic about your campaigns; messages can be targeted to recipi...

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Email Marketing vs. Direct Mail: A Tortoise & Hare Fable Revisited

Taking some artistic license with the original fable (which I hope you’re all familiar with) imagine for a second that the tortoise and the hare are racing for the same team. No matter which one win...

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Grow Your Email Marketing List: Ingenious Ideas for Data Capture

A strong email marketing campaign thrives on high-quality data, which is why we always recommend including data capture elements on your web site. Even if it doesn’t have transactional capabilities,...

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Email Marketing: Making It Personal

In a recent survey, Internet Retailer asked survey respondents what their adoption of email marketing tactics was like in comparison to other forms of marketing. A lot of the signs were good: 51.6% s...

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Email Marketing to Customers With More (or Less) Money

"In a down economy, it is a wise strategy to find potential customers who actually have money." – from, What Do The Rich Look Like Online? As business statements go, this is hardly a revelation: af...

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Does Anyone Care About B2B Email Newsletters?

B2C companies – compared to B2B companies, you have it made when it comes to composing email marketing newsletters. More often than not, the target market is broader, new content is easier to create...

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Email Etiquette 101: BCC & Contact Privacy

The way your business chooses to communicate with people can be a sensitive issue, and the consequences of getting it wrong can be as bad as: Damaged reputation Lost contact confidence Forfeit of po...

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Discontented? 5 Quick-Fix Ideas for Email Marketing Content

The success of email marketing depends heavily on the quality of your content. It has to be targeted and relevant to consumers when they ask themselves, ‘What’s in it for me?’ If you’re havi...

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Why Multi-Channel Consumers Are Best For Your Business

Consumers who interact with businesses using multiple channels tend to spend more on average than those who interact via a single channel. It’s not surprising when you think about: after all, there ...

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Will My New Web Content Capture Visitors?

A recent case study posted on the MarketingSherpa website has demonstrated how companies can use new content combined with data capture on their websites as part of a targeted lead generation strategy...

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In Search of Email Marketing: Lead Generation Tactics

Advertising spend forecasts don’t really make for great reading at the moment: a global decline of 6.9% is predicted for 2009, with any recovery unlikely to happen before 2010. But the one channel f...

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Email Marketing: As 'New' as Social Media

Here we were, thinking email marketing was one of the more senior proponents of online advertising when we heard 45% of marketers see it as a ‘new marketing automation solution’. It was almost as ...

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How Unsubscribers Could Save Your Campaigns

Once you’ve had a contact on your email marketing list for more than a few months, it can be tough letting them go – after all, you’ve spent time and money building your list; losing a subscribe...

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Vary Well: Consistency vs. Change in Email Marketing

‘Consistency is key’ is a mantra drummed into every marketer by marketing gurus and for good reason: consistently high-quality content in your email marketing is more likely to gain trust in subsc...

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Postage Increases Cut Into Direct Mail Budgets

The steady decline of postage volumes has led to the second increase in postage stamp prices in just 12 months. As of yesterday (6 April), first and second class stamps were increased by 3 pence each ...

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Email Marketing & Video - A Match Made Online

If you've been wondering how to harness the power of Internet video to create PR, draw visitors to your website and make more sales, our most recent article about using email marketing to promote your...

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Reality Bites: The Recession's Influence on Marketing Messages

If there is one good thing to have come out of the recession, it's the fact marketers have had to re-evaluate how they communicate with their subscribers. Although this reflex action isn't exactly des...

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Reality Bites: The Recession's Influence on Marketing Messages

If there is one good thing to have come out of the recession, it's the fact marketers have had to re-evaluate how they communicate with their subscribers. Although this reflex action isn't exactly des...

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How Fresh Is Your Email Marketing Data?

A recent Marketing Sherpa article got us thinking: 'nothing ever stands still in the world of email marketing'. You might have had contacts on your email list for anything from few days to a few years...

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Tips To Prove Your Email Marketing's Success

According to a recent report, it has been discovered that "... nearly 20% of email marketers have no clue how their email marketing campaigns perform" - a startling figure given that financial directo...

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DIY Email Marketing - 5 Things You Must Do

Like any other channel you choose to build from scratch, a 'do-it-yourself' approach to email marketing is liable to backfire if you don't make the proper checks before hand, as a recent privacy blund...

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More Than 4 out of 5 Directors Support Email Marketing

A poll of 1,000 finance directors across the UK has discovered that more than four out of five support an increased investment in marketing platforms, including email marketing, despite the recession....

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More Than 4 out of 5 Directors Support Email Marketing

A poll of 1,000 finance directors across the UK has discovered that more than four out of five support an increased investment in marketing platforms, including email marketing, despite the recession....

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Preview Panes Are a Window of Opportunity

Imagine the situation: first thing on a Monday morning, hundreds of thousands of people are scrolling through their inboxes to see what they might have missed over the weekend. Your email marketing me...

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Optimise Email Marketing Content To Increase Your Sales

Our new white paper on improving email campaign success, 'Optimise Email Content for Increased Sales in Five Easy Steps' is now available for you to download in our white papers section. In this pap...

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Optimise Email Marketing Content To Increase Your Sales

Our new white paper on improving email campaign success, 'Optimise Email Content for Increased Sales in Five Easy Steps' is now available for you to download in our white papers section. In this pap...

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Email Marketing Has to Be More Engaging Than Ever

Merkle's recent View from the Inbox 2009 study has revealed that 59% spend at least 20 minutes every week with permission-based email marketing. But how many emails have to compete for subscribers' at...

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Hidden Selling Opportunities in Email Marketing

Are you missing a valuable opportunity to sell to subscribers in your email marketing? Quite possibly, because a recent report from Return Path's Professional Services Group has shown 58% of retailers...

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Is It Time To Give Up On Your Prospects?

When is it ever right to give up on a prospect? If you've been sending consistent email marketing campaigns to them for over several months with no response then maybe the best thing would be to cut y...

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Putting Excitement Back Into Email Marketing

"Email is the tightest link ever forged between buyer and seller." So said Engauge Chairman, Stan Rapp at this year's Email Evolution Conference, the highest form of praise any medium can receive in...

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Update: DMA Email Marketing Benchmarking Report

More useful information for marketing managers has been published by the DMA, following on from the figures reported in our last blog post about email marketing strategies in Q2 2008. It appears tha...

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New National Email Benchmarking Report Released

The most recent DMA National Email Benchmarking Report has been published covering data in Q2. of 2008 (April, May and June). Marketing executives wishing to improve their email marketing planning and...

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Right Place, Right Time: Email Marketing Best For Your Message

Recent figures have shown email marketing is still the overall preferred channel as chosen by consumers for receiving communications from businesses. The findings come on the back of a recent study by...

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eMailCampaigner Supports The Big Issue in the North

As part of Doctor Net's Corporate Social Responsibility programme for 2009, eMailCampaigner will be teaming up with The Big Issue in the North to provide a years' worth of free email marketing support...

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eMailCampaigner Supports The Big Issue in the North

As part of Doctor Net's Corporate Social Responsibility programme for 2009, eMailCampaigner will be teaming up with The Big Issue in the North to provide a years' worth of free email marketing support...

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eMailCampaigner Attends TFM&A 2009

Doctor Net will once again be exhibiting eMailCampaigner at this years' Technology For Marketing & Advertising show at Earls Court, London alongside its additional on-line marketing services, whic...

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eMailCampaigner Attends TFM&A 2009

Doctor Net will once again be exhibiting eMailCampaigner at this years' Technology For Marketing & Advertising show at Earls Court, London alongside its additional on-line marketing services, whic...

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Marketing Executives Increase Email Marketing Spend

This week, further statistics showing the continued migration of marketing budgets to email marketing have been published by the Center for Media Research. Out of the 3,000 marketing executives surv...

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'Trust Us' - How to Use Email Marketing to Increase Sales

People will only buy from you if they feel they can trust you. Unfortunately, some people are harder to convince than others. But one of email marketing's chief advantages as a marketing channel is ho...

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'Trust Us' - How to Use Email Marketing to Increase Sales

People will only buy from you if they feel they can trust you. Unfortunately, some people are harder to convince than others. But one of email marketing's chief advantages as a marketing channel is ho...

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Email Marketing - Survival of the Quickest?

Less than two days to go before Valentine's Day and if you were hoping to get an email marketing campaign out in time for consumers to take advantage of, time is running out fast - that is unless you'...

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Forrester Predicts 10% Increase in Digital Marketing Spend

The migration of marketing budgets to on-line channels is set to continue according to a recent report from Forrester Research. The report predicted that digital marketing spend will increase by 10% o...

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Forrester Predicts 10% Increase in Digital Marketing Spend

The migration of marketing budgets to on-line channels is set to continue according to a recent report from Forrester Research. The report predicted that digital marketing spend will increase by 10% o...

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Email Marketing For Small Businesses: Database Management

An interesting case study posted on Marketing Sherpa last Friday shows how a group director was able to improve email marketing efficiency at a large firm by centralising her company's email marketing...

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Valentine's Day Email Marketing Tips

Are you after some Valentine's Day email marketing tips? Our most recent article, Email Marketing - Romance Your Contact List This Valentine's Day is now available to view on EzineArticle's website. J...

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Email Marketers Must Repair B2B Data Decay

According to data from on-line business directory Jigsaw, 32% of businesses' email addresses change on an annual basis, compared to only 29% of phone numbers and 16% of postal addresses. This informat...

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Check, Check and Triple-Check Your Email Marketing Campaigns

With more and more marketing campaign mistakes being made embarrassingly public on the web, it's time for marketers to begin addressing accuracy and errors in their email marketing campaigns more seri...

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Impressive Fourth Quarter Report for Email Marketing in 2008

Email marketing has come top of the rankings for return on investment (ROI) and usage by consumer marketers, a recent Marketing Sherpa report has shown. Along with search engine optimisation (SEO) an...

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Business Owners - Don't 'Slash and Burn' in the Recession

It's official: figures released by the Government over the weekend confirm the UK economy is in recession - but another document released recently by Xtreme Information's Insight division is urging bu...

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Business Owners - Don't 'Slash and Burn' in the Recession

It's official: figures released by the Government over the weekend confirm the UK economy is in recession - but another document released recently by Xtreme Information's Insight division is urging bu...

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Key Dates in Your Email Marketing Calendar

Christmas Day and New Year's Day are well and truly behind us now - but there's another important date coming up for email marketing: Valentine's Day. Love it or loathe it, the next national holiday i...

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Key Dates in Your Email Marketing Calendar

Christmas Day and New Year's Day are well and truly behind us now - but there's another important date coming up for email marketing: Valentine's Day. Love it or loathe it, the next national holiday i...

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Greater Moves Towards Email Marketing in 2009

Welcome back to the eMailCampaigner blog. We're feeling refreshed after the Christmas break and ready to further refine our email marketing services for 2009. Looking towards the year ahead, we can e...

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Retail Email Index at Highest Point Year to Date

As Christmas draws closer and retailers compete more aggressively for consumers' attention, some of the biggest names in on-line retail have been sending an average of 3 promotional emails a week to c...

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6 out of 10 Organisations to Increase Email Marketing Spend in 2009

E-consultancy have followed up 2007's Customer Engagement Report with a 2008 edition published last week. Containing the results of a survey of over 1,000 organisations, it brings us up to date with t...

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Inefficient Marketers Aren't Making the Most out of Email ROI

Email marketing has become well-known for its robust Return On Investment (ROI) in recent months but it shouldn't be taken for granted: more goes into ROI than a low-cost per send. Recent figures hav...

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New Landing Page Check-list Available from EEC

For those of you who've had trouble creating conversion-driving landing pages in the past, the Email Experience Council (EEC) has come to the rescue with an informative and educational 'Landing Page' ...

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Google and WPP Invest in Digital Marketing Research

Search engine kingpins, Google have teamed up with the WPP's Marketing Research Awards Program to promote research into on-line media, and how it influences today's consumer behaviours, attitudes and ...

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Surge in Email Marketing in Christmas Run-Up

With approximately 8 weeks to go before Christmas Day, retailers are busy preparing their email advertising and sales strategies to go on the offensive. Since recent figures show that the non-food ret...

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Over 80% of Businesses to Continue Using Email Marketing

The eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in Washington D.C. is only halfway through it's five day programme and has already turned heads with the findings of a recent poll. It has been revealed that...

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Give Email Campaigns Some 'Credit'

It comes as little surprise that the financial sector is trimming its expenditure, what with all the recent news of nationalisations and bail-outs. This pessimistic outlook is reflected in the most re...

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Christmas Comes Early at eMailCampaigner

With just 13 weeks left until Christmas (we say 'just' but you know how quickly it comes around) now is a good time to start planning your festive email campaigns. After all, it can be a logistical ni...

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Spend on Email Marketing Continues to Grow

According to a recent report on E-consultancy's website, email marketing spend will grow by 24% over the rest of the year. This will take spend to a total value of £274 million, making email campaign...

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Keeping Contact Lists Clean is Essential for Good ISP Relations

Last month, the DMA published a report highlighting the growing importance of list hygiene in maximising return on investment in email marketing. It seems that failure rates for acquisition and retent...

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Longer Subject Lines Make a BIG Difference

It's one of Life's great questions: is bigger better? We're referring to the length of your subject lines of course. The DMA have published findings in their July Newsletter that contrary to popular ...

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Our Link Analysis Tool Creates 'Hotspots'

Contrary to what the weather seems to be thinking, it is now officially summer and people across the country are preparing for their holidays, jetting off to hotspots across the globe. We're thinking ...

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Information-Rich Emails Get Results

This month at eMailCampaigner we've been thinking about the Pareto principle: a versatile 80/20 ratio that can be applied to many things in life - including email marketing content. 'Content as King...

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Financial Hardship Encourages Technological Innovation

As the financial year comes to a close, we find ourselves in the midst of a credit crunch. Forecasters are warning of a rough ride for the UK's economy ahead. How long the crunch will last and whether...

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New Modular Template Editing System Goes On-Line

Last month we mentioned the upcoming launch of a new easy-to-use modular system. Well, we are pleased to announce that the upgrade is now available account-wide to all our clients. eMailCampaigner: M...

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The Latest eMailCampaigner Launched at TFM&A

Our team took a trip down to Earl's Court, London this month where we exhibited at the Technology for Marketing & Advertising Trade Show 2008. It was great to see the event so well-attended and we...

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New Year's Resolutions for eMailCampaigner

First things first, a Happy New Year to everyone! We hope you've enjoyed the Christmas Holidays and set yourself some realistic New Year's Resolutions. Ours at eMailCampaigner is to help our clients g...

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New Autoresponder System for eMailCampaigner

Our autoresponder system is having an overhaul this month. Our team have designed a new system that will be more flexible and work with a wider variety of triggers in future releases. We'll be going l...

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New Site Launched

The new eMailCampaigner site was launched today! The content will build over the next few weeks and we're planning to turn the site into one of the leading resources for email marketing on the web. Wa...

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