AirwaysExpress

Marketers are moving more budgets to email marketing.

Contributed by Joel Book, ExactTarget

Two recent studies provide compelling evidence that marketers are turning to digital marketing – and specifically email marketing – to improve marketing effectiveness.

According to the “2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey” from the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, “The No. 1 strategy for marketers who wanted to improve effectiveness without spending more, according to the June 2009 poll, was shifting from traditional to digital media. More than one-half of respondents also reported shifting spending away from brand-building initiatives, and 38% were putting more spending into lower-cost media.”  VIEW ENTIRE ARTICLE

What Is the Future of Email?

Provided by eMarketer
An old digital format still has plenty of life left.
Compared with today's virtual worlds, e-mail is solidly Web 1.0—an almost archaic communication channel.

Yet e-mail works, and marketers and advertisers keep putting it to new uses. Moreover, consumers—whose opinions are the ones that matter—genuinely like e-mail. Nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America said they used it every day, according to an April survey conducted by Ipsos for Habeas.

Two-thirds of adult respondents said they preferred e-mail for communicating with businesses. Just as many—and this is the important part—said they expected to still prefer e-mail five years from now.

"Far from being eclipsed by Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, consumer expectations suggest that e-mail will be the workhorse channel around which future online communications will revolve," said Des Cahill, CEO of Habeas, in a statement.

That is not to say that consumers are ready for random, untargeted e-mail. Opt-in is still key. Consumers are even willing to help marketers custom-tailor their messages. More than 88% of respondents said they would like more choices in e-mail content and frequency, including options on advertisements and special offers.

So if e-mail is set to remain a consumer favorite for the next several years, that must mean e-mail ad spending will grow during that time, right?

Yes and no.

eMarketer predicts that e-mail ad spending in the US will hit $492 million this year, then increase by 55% to $765 million by 2012.

Sasquatch Wins Best of Show!

It's always great when we can share success and showcase a great client. The Web Marketing Association just awarded the 2008 Internet Advertising award for Outstanding Achievement in Internet Advertising for the Jack Links 2007 "Warm Holiday Wishes" email! Best Food Industry Email message, Best of Show Email message.

From Sasquatch to you, here's the 2007 Holiday promotion for Jack Links Beef Jerky that includes a smart loyalty marketing campaign with cool online elements that make it tick.

Our digital agency partner delivered an amazing microsite, and AirwaysExpress launched the email to 130,000 loyal email readers. Our click-through rate on this one set a personal best for Jack Links... 320% above their industry average.

The Sasquatch Holiday Greeting video is featured on YouTube, and has gotten tremendous pass-along from our viral email. view YouTube video.

It's all tied together to increase the value of email marketing for this client. What a great success for all!
For more details call Richard Allen 303.446.0500

Greetings from Airways

Greetings – happy belated new year! We expect the upcoming year to be very exciting for online marketers looking to leverage email and emerging one-to-one technologies to deliver relationships and drive business results.

What you’ll find new on this front in 2008 is that ISPs are clamping down more than they’ve ever done before. They’re automating their spam filtering and becoming faster on the trigger. They’re now blocking more quickly, and declining to unblock more often. They’re outsourcing more of their mail delivery choices to third parties. For example, Comcast is working with Return Path.  And Yahoo now uses the Spamhaus blacklists.

That’s why it’s becoming more important than ever to proactively ensure maximum deliverability through adherence to permission. If you don’t, you could easily find yourself trapped in a deliverability quagmire that you can’t easily resolve – even though it’s a practice that you received no negative feedback about previously!

ExactTarget has excellent technical tools to help you maximize your deliverability. Our automated feedback loop processing, bounce mail management, and mail server fine-tuning all work together to get as much as your mail to the inbox as possible. Our dedicated deliverability services staff stands ready and waiting to reach out to ISPs as needed to help resolve issues. But, even with all of those steps, reputation and permission remain the true, primary governors of email deliverability success.

Back to Basics

The value of email isn't in the technology, but in applying the technology to traditional DM principles.
Let’s take a step back to basics and MAKE SURE we are using our rich customer data (such as RFML) to its fullest extent. We all have this data, but whether or not we use it is another matter…

• Are you using segments to target and send to disengaged customers?
• Are you deploying dynamic content/promos to reduce costs of retention? Remember that not every customer needs / deserves our best offers!
• Are you using previous purchase activity to align successful historic promotions to new promotional emails (I respond better to free shipping than 5% off)
• Are you using dynamic subject lines in conjunction with dynamic content to align the message to the micro-masses?

Executing on direct marketing basics will result in sizable program impact.  Interested?  LET’S TALK!

AirwaysExpress and Jack Links Beef Jerky team up, delivering an awesome integrated online program.

Why Email Works. "One of the real strengths of email is its ability to finish the customer acquisition job started by media advertising." Once the customer has been attracted to the web site, email can move a prospect through the consideration and preference phases all the way to purchase - A task traditional marketing channels do not do as quickly or efficiently." Jim Nail, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

This is just what AirwaysExpress helped Jack Links Beef Jerky accomplish in 2007. Watch for more news from Sasquatch! Visit JackLInks.com

A CIM Never Sleeps (Constant Improvement Mentality)

By Jeff Rohrs, ExactTarget - an AirwaysExress Premier Partner

With the pace of marketing change these days, it is easy to get overwhelmed and seek refuge in what you know works. For many marketers, email is their trusted medium of refuge. Email does, after all, produce the highest direct marketing ROI per dollar spent—$45.65—according to the DMA’s latest survey.

But online marketers who rest on their laurels—or industry statistics, for that matter—are likely to find themselves quickly displaced by more nimble, insightful competitors. Like it or not, even email marketing is a medium defined by change—changing subscriber preferences, changing consumer interests, and changing ISP requirements. The net effect is that to be effective, email marketers must maintain a Constant Improvement Mentality (CIM) to achieve lofty returns on investment.

AirwaysExpress Launches Jamba Juice Summer Promotion

Building relationships one at a time is the point, and AirwaysExpress makes it possible. San Francisco, California, July 2007. It's officially summer, and the time has come to get outside and enjoy some summertime fun. AirwaysExpress and Jamba Juice teamed up to celebrate summer and good health with an amazing viral promotion for Jamba smoothies. Jamba Juice is all about healthy living and healthy fun. For program information contact Richard Allen with Airways Communication. Check out Jamba Juice Functional Smoothies!

Accelerate revenue by accelerating trust.

AirwaysExpress is a digital marketing agency with offices in Denver and Los Angeles.

Let's face it, your marketing firm is only as good as the people who work on your campaign. Airways has assembled teams of experienced marketing, creative and technical professionals representing the most relevant experience today.

By focusing on accelerating trust, we improve your sales tactics and conversion rates. We integrate brand strategy with emerging Internet, Social Media and PR tactics. Then a funny thing happens: the community we create shortens your sales cycle and increases your revenue.

Our teams design, execute and manage high performance marketing solutions serving many vertical markets. We create maximum customer value from our client's marketing investment. No juniors here.
Email Me: Richard Allen

Making Your Best First Impression.

Leslie Gabriel, Design Director, AirwaysExpress

The First Impression: Opt-in
First impressions count online, especially when collecting a subscriber's email address. When someone surfing your site comes to a web page asking for an email address, this person makes a judgment call. They decide if your email campaigns have potential value, if their information will be safe, if they'll be spammed by providing an email address, and if their information will be abused, rented or sold.

Optimal deliverability hinges on a subscriber's first impression of your email campaigns. An explicit opt-in process, with an unchecked box or double opt-in process, is the best way to minimize deliverability problems. Double opt-in, also called "closed-loop" opt-in, requires any subscriber who submits their email address to validate their opt-in by responding to a confirmation email.

As you may know, subscribers who receive emails for which they have not opted-in can report messages as "spam" or "junk" with their ISP. Enough of these complaints will lead to blocking and/or blacklisting - an email marketer's nightmare.

(Contact Airways if you have specific questions about your email opt-in program 303.446.0500 and ask for Richard Allen, or just continue reading)