To read Yael Penn’s comments and a summary of the roundtable, please visit http://bit.ly/aZ4ILu

I attended the BtoB NetMarketing Breakfast on February 25^th at the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York City.  The Panel consisted of Emily Riley, Research Director of Interactive Marketing for Forrester Research, Matt Preschern, Vice President of NA Demand Programs for IBM North America Marketing, Brian Nizinsky, Online Marketing Manager for Eastman Kodak Company, and Mike Hardy, Social Media Manager for Pitney Bowes.

Below are a few of the key takeaways:

• With so many new digital marketing channels available, too many marketers are focusing on tactics rather than overall marketing objectives.  Marketers need to start employing a holistic approach to effectively use both digital and traditional channels.

• Though email will continue to be an important marketing medium, especially in the B-to-B space, database fatigue is likely to occur at higher rates and response rates will drop due to mailbox clutter.  For this reason, companies should consolidate their databases at the corporate level and frequency-cap their marketing email communications.  Lower response rates may also necessitate that marketers focus more attention on nurturing individual leads—behavioral triggers are often a great tool for this.

• Social media continues to be extremely popular; however, marketers should look to leverage these tools for more than just buzz.  Many companies are monitoring social media to understand how people are using their products, what consumers like and don’t like, and spot potential “PR disasters” (and proactively work to turn the situation around).  Others are using tools like twitter for real-time customer service.

• Niche communities with specific interests are an extremely powerful tool.  If developed correctly, these communities can provide a wealth of knowledge for both marketing and product development purposes.

• Search engines are “broken.”  New content has exploded on the web and there is no longer a search technique that allows people to easily find what they are looking for.  Panelists called this a transition period for search engines that would likely lead to more efficient search-tools and technology.

• Though attendees were noticeably curious about how to leverage video on the web — and panelists all agreed video is becoming increasingly more important — there were no real “revelations.”  Common uses for video included: marketing videos, branding videos, user-question videos, and instructional videos.  Panelists also stressed that videos should be named and tagged with the appropriate key words to enhance video-search performance.

• 2010 will be a year of “rebuilding.” Although most marketing budgets probably won’t be cut this year, it’s unlikely they will see great increases either.  Most companies will continue shifting their marketing budgets towards digital initiatives.

This article was published in Chief Marketer.  To continue reading go to:
http://chiefmarketer.com/disciplines/online/1022-triggered-email/

What is an open rate? It’s the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. Below are a few tips you can use to increase this critical metric: 

Your list: If you consistently send to an in-house opt-in list, be sure to practice list hygiene.

• Segment the email addresses for people who have not opened your email in 90 days and ask them to update their profiles. This will either prompt them to opt-out or specify what type of information they want to receive from you.
• Only send emails that are relevant to the type of information the recipient has opted-in to.
• Remove all email addresses that have never opened your emails. Removing these people may decrease the size of your database, but will leave you with a more responsive list.

Open rates are not 100% accurate: Different email clients (Outlook vs. Gmail) and email formats (Text vs. HTML) will affect your open rate. Here are some of the discrepancies you should be aware of:

• Many email service providers (ESPs) place an invisible pixel in each HTML email and when this pixel is displayed, it reports back to the ESP that the email was opened. This poses a problem for text only emails because they don’t include this pixel. Although people may be reading the text email, they are not being counted.
• Microsoft Outlook counts an open in the preview pane (reader does not have to actually double click and open)
• Web email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) actually has to be opened to count as an open. Additionally, email clients usually have image blocking on default. If recipients view your emails in Gmail but don’t “download images,” it does not count as an open

Your Subject line and “from” field: Your subject line and “from” field is the first thing your recipient sees. Therefore it’s extremely important to make them relevant:

 From Field:

• Your “from” field should be a name your recipient will recognize and trust, such as the company name or maybe the company’s CEO’s name.
• Keep the “from” field consistent for specific types of email communications (i.e. survey vs. sales email vs. customer service email, etc.)

 Subject line:

• Make sure your subject line is relevant to the type of information they’ve opted-in to.
• Craft your subject line to peak their interest – don’t be vague
• Avoid words that commonly get flagged as spam in your subject line.
• Be honest – do not try to “trick” your recipient into opening your email
• When possible, use a mail merge (such as their name, etc.) in the subject line
• Test, test, test – whenever you send out an email, split your list segment in two and test two different subject lines (short vs. long, mail merge vs. no mail merge, etc.)
• If your testing subject lines, be sure to go back and analyze your results

Date and time your email is sent

You will often hear people say that either Tuesday or Thursday is the best day to send a marketing email because studies show emails sent on these days receive the highest open rates. I would advise you to take this information with a large grain of salt. If everyone followed this advice, it would mean seriously overcrowded inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Do you really want to add to this clutter?

The only way to find out when your subscribers are most likely to read your emails is to perform your own tests to see which day performs better. Start off by testing days of the week and once you’ve identified a trend start testing the time of day.