How to Make Sure Your Email Marketing Hits the Inbox

5 tips on what NOT to do when sending email campaigns:

1. Do NOT buy email lists. You will waste time, money and-even worse-damage your online reputation which could severely limit the success of any future campaigns.

2. Do NOT send emails to people who have not opted in to receive them. This too will hurt your online reputation over time.

3. Do NOT send emails with misleading subject lines or sender information. Cute and catchy subject lines may get the recipient's attention, but if the sender and subject are not from a recognized source, and if they don't relate back to the email's message, you could be forever blacklisted by the user.

4. Do NOT send emails that include words such as 'free', 'increase sales', '!!!!', and other trigger words

5. Do NOT overwhelm recipients with too many emails. This too will find you a permanent spot in the deleted items folder. you can easily find on the Internet to know what to avoid.

Source: JangoMail

Pacific Sunwear: Tracking Business Trends with BI

With more than 900 PacSun stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, Pacific Sunwear is a leading lifestyle specialty retailer rooted in the youth culture and fashion vibe of Southern California, offering private-label and national brands, including Hurley, Billabong, Fox, Volvom, Vurt, Roxy and Quiksilver. In 2006, Pacific Sunwear was looking for effective ways to evaluate and improve business performance in order to achieve long-term growth. The goal was for executives to be able to access strategic information each day and then perform timely analysis of business trends and key metrics without significantly increasing IT staff or replacing legacy systems. In addition, the company wanted to reduce paper consumption by 50 percent through a significant reduction in the use of printed reports. Pacific Sunwear searched for an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution while at the same time consolidating its corporate data into a cohesive structure. Ultimately, the company selected Micro- Strategy as its BI standard and Quantisense for its retail-specific BI capabilities. Netezza was chosen as the high-performance BI hardware platform. The result, according to Pacific Sunwear's vice president of information technology Steve Rosenberg, is that the solution has enabled the company to deliver time-sensitive business performance metrics to a broad audience, while also enabling it to analyze performance and take action to drive results. "With the ability to access sales information by style, color, size, store, date/time of transaction along with other key product and location attributes, our associates no longer have to sift through volumes of reports to find information," he says. "We now rely on a core set of reports that provide flexible views of sales, inventory and sourcing data, and we have the ability to quickly create new reports to answer specific business performance questions as they arise." Improving the Monday-morning meetings PacSun's enterprise dashboard reporting application now provides a single channel of company-wide business reporting and analysis and a holistic view of all corporate data. Users can view information flexibly, by division, department, product attributes and location, at any time. For example, a buyer is able to look at all the hot-selling items and quickly get in touch with the vendor to speed up an order, resulting in fewer out of stocks and increased sales. "Once we went live with the application, we quickly saw that our Monday meetings were more effective, and that metrics and data were more standardized across the company," said John Fontana, senior vice president of supply chain and information technology. The QuantiSense application and Micro- Strategy's dynamic enterprise dashboards provide great scalability, performance and flexibility, he says, and enhance the company's view into the trends and the performance of the business. Pacific Sunwear's users are able to produce highly productive and detailed seasonal re-caps. With MicroStrategy, business users independently access detailed information to analyze business performance and make better decisions in merchandising, planning and allocation, store operations and store management. For example, buyers and allocators have been able to analyze size performance, with insight into which sizes to buy and reorder for each store. Additionally, merchandise planners and allocators are able to measure customer service levels across all of the styles and sizes in the stores and in the distribution center, and spot stock outs and imminent stock outs, and more effectively manage and fine-tune inventory levels across all of the company's basic denim lines. Additionally, QuantiSense built one of its signature Playbooks, "Top Stores," for Pacific Sunwear, to provide insight into the depth and breadth of the merchandise assortment between stores to optimize purchasing decisions. Gaining quick insight - without replacing core systems PacSun currently counts more than 150 users that run thousands of ad-hoc reports and hundreds of pre-built reports against a five-terabyte Netezza data warehouse. Pacific Sunwear supports its BI environment with a team of approximately five FTEs. Web-based training for the application is available, and users can seek this and other help topics within the application as well. "With MicroStrategy and Quantisense, we have an integrated, sustainable system quickly, with out-of-the-box retail metrics and dashboards that provide quick, actionable insight," said Fontana. "The software gives us access to very critical details of our business and helps us make faster, better, more informed decisions," he says. Additionally, the company was able to achieve these results quickly, without replacing core systems, which, Fontana is quick to note, would have been costly, painful and highly disruptive to Pacific Sunwear's business. Use of pre-built models significantly reduced the typical data warehouse implementation timeframe. Within six months of implementation, Pacific Sunwear's data warehouse was populated with three years of history, and provided more than 1,000 different retail metrics and 300 standard reports. PacSun is in the process of rolling out region, district and store sales dashboards and KPIs to field management throughout the remainder of this second quarter. In the future, the company will investigate the use of enhanced PDF reports to allow field users to drill down into details of their area of responsibility without a network connection or a local database. Pacific Sunwear will also look at opportunities to deliver information to mobile devices, hopes to leverage transactional-level data to perform market basket analysis to better understand consumer purchasing behaviors, and has plans to expand the contents of the data warehouse to include payroll data.

How to create an effective brand?

There are several things that are important when it comes to building a brand. Number one, you look at the models for good branding.

One of the good models, for example is the whole series of book "for Dummies." You have Computers for Dummies, this for dummies, that for dummies, and they all have the same character logo used on the covers and on their Web site. it maintains a consistent color theme, which is black and yellow. Everything has the same graphic design, and so what that means is whether you're looking at the Web site or whether you're looking at the book, you know the company, you know the look.

If you think of Starbucks, what colors do you think of? Starbucks is associated with that green color they have, and so this is subconscious association. Psychologists call it contiguous association, and that's really what you're trying to build in branding. Hey, maybe your company won't get to that level, but if you work toward brand recognition in your neighborhood or area, city or state, that might be all you need to be successful.

Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars

What is the number 1 reason why businesses fail?

Many people have often said that the number one cause of business failure is that people run out of money. I'm going to say that the reason that they run out of money is because they are doing marketing that doesn't work. They end u spending all of their money in advertising and their kind of advertising doesn't generate a response rate. Therefore, they run out of money because of the way they approach their marketing Online I can do all kinds of things, without having to spend a lot of money, so if you are tight on your budget, online is really the way to go.

The other reason that online is different, dramatically different than the real world, is that in the real world you're trying to get a person to say "yes" or "no." And because you don't have the luxury of hanging around, you rent a mailing list, you prepare your direct mail piece and you send it in the mail and you've got to get that to pay. If it doesn't pay, you're dead.

But online, I don't want a "yes" or "no, " I want a "maybe." I want a person to raise their hand and say "Yes, I like your information and I think I will sign up for your e-zine. I will receive those free reports you said you were going to send. yes, I want to test it out, I want to just stick my toe in the water, I don't want to make a decision, I don't want to say yes or no, I want you to just lavish me with free stuff."

And frankly most of your free stuff is digital: digital special reports, digital streaming audio, streaming video. These are things that don't cost you any money to deliver except the cost of setting up the repository.

Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars

Did you know...

Guess what? Depending on the source, 50-70% of the people out there think that the companies listed at the top of the search engine rankings are the top companies in their field. That's right - as high as 70%.

Does your site address these customer concerns?

When we look at the most important factors that keep people from engaging in more online shopping, people say*:

• Sites carts are too complicated 14%
• Return/Exchange Policy 41%
• Fraud Identity Theft 49%
• Sharing Personal Information 53%

*Marketsherpas Econerce benchmark guide 2006

How will having your site listed on the first few pages help increase traffic and sales?

B to B Magazine said, "Studies have shown that second or third page rankings can increate Web site traffic by up to nine times. Top 10 rankings, or first page listings, can mean an additinal sixfold increase in traffic. The correlating impact in sales is also astronomical: 42% more sales within the first month of Top 10 listings and nearly 100% more the second month."

Numbes of Pages Looked at Before a Search is Concluded*:

First Page: 39%

first 2 Pages: 19%

First 3 Pages: 9%

More than 3 Pages: 10%

Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006 - Ad Age