Ben & Jerry’s seemingly knee-jerk decision to drop email marketing made waves across the marketing industry last week. As it turns out the rumours were hugely exaggerated and far from cutting email communication altogether, the ice-cream giant had simply switched off its monthly newsletter to UK fans in favour of social media. According to the company’s PR Director, Sean Greenwood, it would still be using email to inform subscribers of special events and opportunities and – like any savvy marketing department – sees absolute merit in combining traditional and new channels effectively to make maximum impact. Still, the reaction that...

Guest blog by Dan Binns, account director, Epsilon International B2B and B2C marketing aren’t as different as many might think, so why is it that so many B2B marketers choose to focus on making their email campaigns information-heavy instead of more visually compelling? Whilst corporate marketers take a different approach than their consumer counterparts to the email channel, this shouldn’t limit their creative  tactics. Consumer marketing is conventionally more sophisticated in its approach, but this is rather a reflection of the services and products being sold. The canny B2B marketer will cherry-pick and adapt consumer tactics that best translate to...

YES – you must have an introduction before you can communicate effectively by email By Ed Weatherall, managing director, Concep We all complain that our inboxes are busy and that we get too many emails. We spend our time deleting emails rather than opening them. A few years ago I remember people saying even if someone didn’t open your email, the fact they saw your brand name had a positive brand impact. I feel this is no longer the case. If recipients do not recognise a sender or feel they have not asked for an email they are a) unlikely...

Zina Manda, director of Mardev, shares her advice on making your lead generation strategy a success and impressing the financial director Credit crunch marketing has seen a considerable move in budget over the last 12 months from traditional advertising to lead generation. There are however a large number of lead generation channels and vast array of possible outcomes. How can you ensure that you are generating genuine value for your company from this type of activity? Defining a leadA marketing-defined lead may recognise a click through on an email, a download of a white paper or registration for a webinar as...

By Peter McCormick, UK GM and co-founder of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing firm ExactTarget In all of the talk on social media and its influence on email marketing, it occurred to me that email marketers consistently commit an antisocial sin. Worse still, it is a sin often taught as ‘best practice’ in order to decrease the hassle of managing a large number of responses to marketing email messages. I am writing of the dreaded ‘no-reply@’ email address. Consider this near perfect email from Dropbox. The subject line ‘Come back to Dropbox!’ makes it clear why I received the message. True,...

By Marc Munier, Commercial Director at Pure360 I don’t know about you but I tend to get the feeling that a lot of marketing and branding messages are a little “Me, Me, Me”? A lot of consumers and B2B purchasers are getting turned off by this approach and in order to maintain effective communication with our target market we need to develop what we do from traditional marketing to dialogue marketing. ‘Dialogue marketing’ is the future, we can no longer rely on “tradigital” to achieve our goals – which is using old style thinking in new media channels so blasting...

I hope I am starting or at least being a part of something, a revolution of sorts. On the 20th October this year I tweeted “People who complain about receiving too many emails. Opt Out from the ones you don't read, instead of deleting them” http://twitter.com/edweatherall/status/5020730534 I also then started telling people at events “ http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/blogs/in-business-blog/make-more-time-your-life-unsubscribe-spam “ Today I got a tweet about a Return Path blog http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/346771/how-to-improve-the-unsubscribe-process-yes-this-is-something-to-think-about Too often people sit with their BlackBerry or iPhone in hand saying “I hate email as it rules my life, I get so many messages”, to which I respond, “Opt Out it's your inbox, or get...

By Adam Sharp, director, Clevertouch I recently visited a highly successful UK based IT company, a leader in their field with over 150 blue chip clients, including Microsoft, Debenhams, bmi, and Avis among them. We were discussing their sales pipeline and marketing funnel and how to make it more larger and more efficient. Their challenge was that, despite their 10 year history in their UK marketplace and a great reputation amongst their existing customers, they still found it hard to get in front of IT Directors and CIOs and they themselves considered their own awareness as a thought leader much lower...

The growth of online and web 2.0 has had an interesting side effect in marketing terms; that traditional forms of marketing are now resurgent. Take direct mail for example. So much of this has now moved to email marketing, that clever, creative direct mail has become a rarity. Which has greatly increased its impact. Creative direct mail has always stood out, but even more so now as a welcome distraction from the choked inbox. Also, as the effectiveness of spam filtering increases, many emails never see the light of day. Most busy decision makers work quite hard at ensuring that...

I was just on our B2B Marketing LinkedIn Group (a plug already!) and I read a response to a question I have heard a lot lately. “Where do I put my marketing spend in 2010?” Do I keep a good mix or bin traditional marketing in favour of digital, as it’s cheaper. The thing is, in today’s market I think this general talk of shifting away from traditional spend to digital is already outdated. “Digital” is not new anymore, I know we’re not yet hanging out with Star Trek's Captain Picard but come on; we’re online most of the day...