By Michelle Guzzo, Solution Strategist

Email Marketing is one of the longest standing online marketing mediums and continues to evolve to meet the ever changing demands of today’s customer. Now more than ever, customers have strong control over the way they research and purchase products online. Today’s customers want what they want, when they want it. And they now have on-demand tools to have their demands met. If your business is not there to provide them with the product or service they are looking for, they can quickly find a competitor of yours who can.

Email Marketing is a great way to build relationships with your customers so that they continue to come back time and time again. However, with your customers receiving 100s to 1,000s of emails a day, you need to find a niche where your message stands out among the crowd.

There are a number of easy, effective practices to put into place that will drive improved results for you almost immediately. Here are three quick tips you can implement today:

• Your email subject line is the simplest variable to test and make changes where applicable. This should be an on-going initiative that strives for continuous improvement. 

• Grow your subscription base through easy techniques such as adding opt-in information to the last slide of all your presentations, old-fashioned networking and word of mouth, and even promoting your e-newsletter in your email signature.

• Make sure your unsubscribe option is in a clear, easy-to-find location in your emails. Hyperlink the word “unsubscribe” directly to your opt-out form. As important as it is to make it easy for your customers to subscribe to your emails, it is equally important to allow an uninterested customer to unsubscribe.

For more tips on how to Reinvigorate Your Email Marketing Campaign, click here to download our Email Marketing Best Practice whitepaper today!

By Zachary E. Cook

For many people, this week is truly the most wonderful time of the year—Shark Week. This is the week where everyday people switch from watching mindless sitcoms to educational documentaries on Discovery Channel. So how do they do it? The lessons gleaned from this marketing phenomenon just might help you take a bigger bite of (web) surfers looking to shop online.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing.
At its core, Shark Week is essentially a promotion to get viewers to change their channels from the reruns of their regular shows airing in the summer in the hopes that they can hook them to stay tuned in when the week is over. But the content is useless unless Discovery Channel can inspire viewers to tune in. To do so, they have created a social media frenzy (almost 70,000 fans on Facebook), Shark Week games and a very creative “Happy Shark Week” campaign that creates the impression of a holiday in the minds of viewers. While a great marketing campaign is nothing without a great product behind it (and often vice versa), Discovery Channel has proven that if the campaign has enough bite, it can often become the product when people just want to be a part of it.

Create excitement for your product.
People love Shark Week because it is just that—one week dedicated to one topic. I’m confident that if Discovery Channel had a weekly TV series on sharks they would have very few passionate viewers. But by creating excitement around the one week a year that all of their programming is dedicated to this one topic, people have a defined event to look forward to. Marketers and merchandisers can do this with annual sales, regular product releases and other events that shoppers can mark on their calendar. By creating an event that gives shoppers the impression that they are participating in something rare, valuable and seldom offered, you have all the ingredients for a feeding frenzy on your site.

Give the people what they want.
Let’s just be honest—you don’t tune in to Shark Week to learn about the migratory patterns of nurse sharks. We want to see a great white launching into the air and feasting on some poor, unsuspecting seal that got separated from the herd. So when you see ads for Shark Week, these are the images you are bombarded with. Take a note. Use your best sellers and hot products to drive traffic into your site and then slowly introduce new products. Just as Discovery Channel will mix in some info on how sharks sleep and people will listen, so to can you display a few new products while serving up the content they came for without fear of losing too many visitors. Just know who your great whites are and who your nurse sharks are.

While it's clear to see why Shark Week has been such a success for Discovery Channel, it's more difficult to find the right promotional plan that will work for your ecommerce site. Whether it's swimming in shark infested waters or planning your ecommerce promotions, the key is to always have the right equipment. Make sure your ecommerce platform is equipped with all the right merchandising tools to land the big ones.

By Zachary E. Cook, Demandware Interactive Marketing

With the new year upon us, it's a great time to not only make resolutions to better your life but also to better your business. But rather than setting lofty goals you'll likely give up on by Valentine's Day, I propose a few realistic steps to help you begin 2009 better than you ended 2008. This series will help you steadily grow your brand's online presence, one step at a time by focusing on incremental, actionable steps. Please share any questions, comments and suggestions and we'll be sure to answer.

Listen to what others are saying about you-and your brand, and your market, and your customers, and your competitors...

Maybe you resolved to mind your own personal life this year, but your brand's online reputation is a different story altogether. While turning a deaf ear to detractors in your personal life may be a sign of confidence, professionally it is simply naïve, foolish and downright dangerous.

Before you can truly jump into the online conversations happening all around you, you need to know who is talking about you and what they are saying. If you keep getting caught off-guard by posts on forums, blogs, Twitter and other online media outlets, it's time to gain control. This doesn't mean scouring every social networking site under the sun, but simply finding the best tools to do the dirty work for you. Here are a few good places to start:

Step 1: Get Up and Running with Google Reader This RSS aggregator should be the first stop on your quest towards monitoring your online reputation. Basically, Google Reader allows you to discover, subscribe and organize all of your RSS feeds-from blogs and forums to search results and Twitter. Start by searching for relevant blogs via the "Add a subscription" link or simply by subscribing to your favorite blog's RSS feed and you're off and running.

Step 2: Hear Everything (well, almost everything) via Niche Search Engines
One of the best ways to stay up to date on what is being said about you and your brand (with minimal effort involved) is to subscribe to RSS feeds on niche search engines. This allows you to receive automatic updates to your Google Reader account anytime your search terms are published. Start with Google News and Google Blog Search (search for relevant terms, people, URLs, etc.) and then move on to Twitter Search (Twitter), BoardReader (forums & discussion boards), BackType (comments) and any other relevant engines you can find. Just search, subscribe and follow.

Step 3: Listen!
Simply listening (to customers, prospects, competitors, etc.) allows you to tap into real buyer personas, identify successful promotions and address negative sentiments towards your brand. Such negative sentiments, (retailer sensored below) can really harm a brand image and bottom line, but before leaving a trail of comments and linkbacks, listen to what others in your market are saying and how they are saying it.

One of the worst things you can do at this stage of the game is to leave a quick comment with a link back to your site-if your online reputation is hurting this will only make it worse. Watch, listen and-when the time is right-engage.

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

If there's any upside to a commute it's that it provides at least some opportunity for idle thinking. So on the way home last night, breezing North on 93 and beat down by Red Sox doom-and-gloom sports talk, I snapped off the radio and started to idle the old squash. Free form association kicked in and when I blew through the yield sign (nearly T-boning a lime-green hybrid in the process), I thought, "Wow! Now that's a much better model for ecommerce!" Ok, so maybe I should back up and explain that a bit.

Over years of depicting the costs and effort allocation of a typical ecommerce operation, I had evolved into using a tried-and-true pyramid diagram. You know the one. At the bottom was the hardware and infrastructure. It was wide and thick, signifying gobs of energy and cost. Stacked on it were databases, app servers, IT professional support, point applications and other such things-each showing diminishing time and effort. Finally, perched at the very top, with the smallest land mass, was merchandising, marketing and site experience. It always seemed wrong that such important activities would get such a relatively small piece of the pie, but hey that's how things had to be. In fact, analysts point out that up to 80 percent of ecommerce resources (dollars, time and people) are spent simply maintaining the existing infrastructure and processes.

So wrong.

Effectively this means that 80% of an ecommerce operation is going to activities that yield absolutely NO competitive differentiation. For instance, when was the last time a customer went to a site and said, "Kudos. It's up!" or "Hooray! It has secure checkout!"? Likely never and yet that's exactly the type of activities that are getting the most resources.

And that's where the upside down pyramid comes in.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the basic table-stakes portions of the ecommerce operation took up the minority of effort? All the behind-the-scenes work that goes into a professional operation-security, compliance, hardware and database performance, application upgrades etc.-was just there? And instead, retailers could spend more time in the areas that will really drive top line growth. Price management, promotions management, presentation of the assortment, UI innovation... You know the list. This is the stuff that consumers really care about.

So I challenge you commuters out there to make your mindless travel time more productive. Ponder the tough questions and voice your opinions. While no one has the answer, everyone has an opinion-and stringing together enough of these thoughts and opinions can lead to a breakthrough big enough to change the game. Heck, it worked for the Sox, why not us?

What would revenue look like for most operations if these were the areas that received not 20% of the effort, but 80%?

Are there really people out there who would prefer to spend their time worrying about site uptime and secure checkouts rather than marketing, merchandising and selling their products?

What steps are you taking to turn the ecommerce status quo on its head?