YesMail News & Events Feed

01.31.2012 — Yesmail Interactive Releases "Look Book" as a Result of Receiving Two Prestigious Industry Awards

Yesmail Interactive Releases "Look Book" as a Result of Receiving Two Prestigious Industry Awards

Portland, OR - January 31, 2012 - Yesmail Interactive, an Infogroup company which powers intelligent customer interactions, today announced that it is releasing its "Look Book," which focuses on email design that works in both traditional and mobile email environments.

Yesmail Interactive's Creative Services team, led by Senior Creative Director Matt Caldwell, recently received two awards. In celebration of these awards, the team has released its new "Look Book," a guide on mobile-scalable email design. The Look Book showcases the team's work on creating emails that are presented clearly in both traditional and mobile environments. The Look Book can be downloaded at www.yesmail.com/2012lookbook.

According to Mr. Caldwell, "We love Email Design Look Books - they're great sources of creative ideas. Since we're the longest-running, dedicated email design agency, we have tons of email layouts to feature and we want to inspire email design makeovers to drive improved performance."

The two Yesmail Interactive awards include:

* The 2011 OMMA (Online Media, Marketing, and Advertising) Award for Best Email: CRM Campaign. Issued in September, the award goes to the Creative Services team for its work on HP's Customer Revival Campaign.

"Yesmail Interactive provided us with the capability and creative to target both previous purchasers and inactive subscribers, offering progressively valuable discounts throughout the series, a compelling design, and an effective call-to-action. This campaign generated much greater return than our previous messaging," said Victor Chemtob, Senior Retention Marketing Manager from HP, "The results confirm that with the combination of thoughtful targeting, the right offer, effective design and a clear response mechanism, formerly inactive subscribers can be deeply engaged and moved to purchase."

* The 2012 MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for a Welcome Series campaign on behalf of Feld Entertainment. A Silver Prize winner in the "Best Triggered Email or Auto-Responder Series" category, the campaign was selected for its skillful application of creative and strategy that enabled the campaign to increase ROI.

"In one brand-centric communication, we are able to express gratitude to our customers in a personalized manner, provide outlets for social sharing and incentive for future visits," said Christine Douma, Assistant Manager of Online Marketing for Feld Entertainment. "We believe these three elements are essential to the enrichment of our customer relationship. We are very pleased with the results of the newly implemented Welcome Series, designed by Infogroup, which successfully fulfilled these three needs. We are excited to have this program acknowledged by Marketing Sherpa."

The winners of MarketingSherpa's 7th Annual Email Marketing Awards were announced on its website on November 7th and are featured in a new special report: "MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012: 19 award-winning B2B and B2C email marketing campaigns." The annual awards feature the best email marketing campaigns of the past year, as selected by a panel of five expert judges from MarketingSherpa's editorial, analyst and marketing staff.

Mr. Caldwell added, "We owe the awards to our clients - who push us to innovate. HP's customer revival campaign is a great example of a direct, to-the-point activation campaign that is readable without images and mobile-scalable. Feld's welcome campaign displays the clarity and friendliness that every welcome campaign should have. We thank our clients - professional marketers who demand results."

Download the MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report http://marketingsherpa.com/emailsummit/awards

About Yesmail Interactive
We power intelligent customer interactions. We give you the insights to recognize and understand your customer to deliver contextually relevant digital communications- while respecting their preferences and privacy. We help marketers evolve their customer relationships through intelligent interactions via technology, insights and services in a near real time multi-channel environment. We help you compete in the age of the customer. For more information, call 1-877-YESMAIL or visit www.yesmail.com.

Infogroup Contact:
Sally Cates
Corporate Communications
Phone: (402) 836-5290
E-mail: corporate.communications@infogroup.com

04.21.2011 — Infogroup Presents Email Design Session at the 2011 Email Insider Summit

Infogroup Presents Email Design Session at the 2011 Email Insider Summit

Matthew Caldwell Introduces Email Design Concepts for Mobile and Social Marketing

Omaha, NE - Infogroup, recognized industry-leading provider of permission-based online marketing solutions, today announced it will present a key session on email design during the Email Insider Summit May 1 - 4 at South Seas Island Resort in Captiva Island, Florida.

The session, titled How Social and Mobile are Changing Email Design presented by Matt Caldwell, Senior Creative Director of Infogroup Interactive, outlines the five most important techniques for designing "scalable" email layouts, which can be viewed on small and large screens. Also to be discussed are the latest developments with CSS3 @media queries which allow email layouts to change based on the medium within which they are viewed. Caldwell and his team are recent winners of the Web Marketing Association's Internet Advertising Competition award, and a finalist in MediaPost's OMMA Awards.

Infogroup is a presenting sponsor of the Email Insider Summit. To view our award-winning creative portfolio and learn more about the creative services offered by Infogroup, click here. Large enterprise email marketers who want to learn more about the Yesmail Enterprise cross-channel digital marketing platform can visit here for more information.

What: Session - How to Create Scalable Mobile-Ready Email Layouts

Who: Matt Caldwell, Senior Creative Director, Infogroup

When: Tuesday, May 3rd, 8:30am - 8:50am ET @ MediaPost Email Insider Summit

Click here for more information or to register for the event.

Click here for detailed information about Infogroup's interactive capabilities or Yesmail Enterprise7. Forrester Research ranked the Yesmail Enterprise Platform as a Leader in "The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q4 2009", and the Infogroup's interactive client services organization earned perfect scores across the services categories - underscoring Infogroup's commitment to its clients.

About Infogroup

Infogroup is the leading provider of data and interactive resources that enable targeted sales, effective marketing and insightful research solutions. Our information powers innovative tools and insight for businesses to efficiently reach current and future customers through multiple channels, including the world’s most dominant and powerful Internet search engines and GPS navigation systems. Infogroup’s headquarters are located at 5711 South 86th Circle, Omaha, NE 68127. For more information, call (402) 593-4500 or visit www.infogroup.com.

Infogroup Contact:
Billy Kenny
Director, Corporate Communications
Phone: (402) 836-5509
E-mail: billy.kenny@infogroup.com

03.04.2011 — Mobile Email Campaigns Tied To Paid Search

Mobile Email Campaigns Tied To Paid Search
by Laurie Sullivan, Friday, March 4, 2011, 1:33 PM on MediaPost.com

Most consumers with a smartphone, even those a little less techie, reach for their mobile device to check email several times daily. Analyst firm eMarketer points to stats from Merkle indicating that 32% of U.S. mobile email users age 18 or older with an Internet-enabled phone check personal email via a mobile device between one and three times daily. Compare this with 31% who check four or more times daily, 26% once per week or less, and 11% two to six times per week.

Email campaigns geared toward mobile devices can more finely target campaigns and align with paid-search ads. I had thought email campaigns a dying strategy until I considered the amount opened on mobile phones. Personally, I open my eyes in the morning and reach for the fully charged BlackBerry on the nightstand before anything else.

Recent comScore numbers reflect my ritual. The number of visitors to Web-based email sites declined 6% in November 2010, compared with the previous year, but users continue to access email on mobile devices at a rapid pace, according to comScore stats released in late January. For instance, email access through mobile devices rose 36%.

SEM expert David Harry has not given the idea much thought, but believes marketers would need tightly geographic-targeted email lists to combine mobile paid search and email campaigns effectively. Think location-based services.

Marketers talk about display ad campaigns, location-based services, and mobile click-to-call benefits, but what about tying together a mobile paid-search campaign with a mobile email campaign? Every mobile handset sends back to its receiving data center information about the operating system and browser -- data the marketer could use to support paid-search campaigns or optimizing for search on mobile.

Optimizing email campaigns on the small screen requires links to a text version, dedicated mobile version, and scalable email designs. During an OMMA Global presentation in San Francisco earlier this week, Matthew Caldwell, director of creative services at Yesmail, ran down five important points to making scalable email designs, so the content looks good on any size screen.

There are pitfalls for each. Marketers on phones get one click. So, the problem becomes: do marketers want the one click to become the link to the text version or call to action? A dedicated version of a mobile email campaign also requires more work. It might look great on the phone -- but not so much on the desktop, laptop or even tablet.

So it's important for marketers to consider email designs that scale down from large to small cleanly for the best way to optimize layouts for mobile campaigns. The format change not only becomes more efficient, but also brings costs down.

Designing messages on a grid system to align elements on page and allow emails to scale up or down in proportion
Creating one-column designs
Grouping items into sections
Designing to a width of 450 pixels and minimum body copy font size of 14 points
Placing viewpoint meta tags in the HTML header to enable smartphone browsers to automatically change the dimensions of the email to fit the device

Read the original article here.

02.17.2011 — Transforming Social Dispatches into Email Content

Transforming Social Dispatches into Email Content
Feb 17, 2011 4:10 PM, By Sherry Chiger on ChiefMarketer.com

When most organizations think about integrating social media and email, they focus primarily on including links to their social pages within the email and encouraging recipients to share the email with their friends and colleagues. A third, often overlooked way to leverage the social element within your email marketing is what Matt Caldwell, senior creative director of Yesmail, calls "dispatches": incorporating content from social media into your email messages.

Not counting excerpts from your own corporate blogs, there are several types of social media you can tap for this sort of content. Contributions from fans and followers of your own social platforms, such as your Facebook brand page or your Twitter, help create a sense of inclusion and engagement with your audience, and featuring them shows that you listen to and value your customers.

Including quotes from customer product reviews does the same, as well as reinforces the credibility of your offering. When Yesmail client HP began to include excerpts from product reviews in its emails, it saw a slight but measurable increase in conversion, Caldwell told attendees of a session at the 2011 Email Evolution Conference in Miami.

Contents from outside your networks—for instance, snippets from third-party blogs that mentioned your brands or one of your products—also provides an impartial imprimatur and reinforces your credibility. For instance, HP includes excerpts from tech blogs in some of its emails, Caldwell said, as a way of showing that the company is a "thought leader" in its sector.

When featuring social dispatches in your emails, Caldwell advised using "social graphical cues" so that recipients know the opinions aren't those of your brand but rather from users and customers just like them. Encasing the quotes in speech bubbles; surrounding them with oversize quotation marks; accompanying them with avatars, author photos, or icons from the network sources; or setting them in "big, chunky type" are effective ways of setting off the social content from your brand messaging.

What if you don't have much in the way of social content to draw from? Ask for contributions. Prior to Mother's Day last year, Overstock.com asked its Twitter followers to tweet the best advice their mother had ever given them. To encourage response, it offered a 10% discount code to everyone who participated. Not only did the online discounter manage to generate fun content for a subsequent email campaign, but by stoking the conversation on Twitter, it generated buzz among its followers and their networks as well.

You don't, however, want to include stale content, Caldwell said. Ideally your dispatches should have been posted within the past month or so. And he recommended not only citing the author of the content but if the dispatch is from a third-party blog, linking to it within your email. While some marketers may fret that including an outside link could direct subscribers away from the brand website, "editorial authority comes from linking not just to your site but also the source of the content," Caldwell said.

Read the original article here.

MarketingSherpa Email Summit '10 - InterContinental Hotel - January 20-22, 2010 - Miami, FL