The View From Here
By Melissa Campanelli
About Melissa
Melissa Campanelli is the editor-in-chief of Target Marketing's eM+C brand and Retail Online Integration, a monthly print magazine, website and e-letter (The ROI Report) that's all about the integration of sales channels, including print/catalog, transactional websites and retail stores, as well as email, mobile, social media and more.
Prior to becoming editor-in-chief of eM+C, Melissa spent ten years at DM News, where she was first a senior editor and then deputy editor. She's also a leading expert in small business e-commerce and author of the books "Entrepreneur Magazine's Open an Online Business in 10 Days" and "Start Your Own e-Business."
15 Minutes Ahead
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Ways of Thinking
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Redefining Performance Marketing
Affiliates: Redefining the Original Performance Marketing Channel
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Inside Mobile Marketing
Researching the Mobile Marketing Opportunity
Aug 12, 2010Mobile marketing is a case in point: A forthcoming Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) survey of U.S. advertisers and...
Melissa Campanelli's The View From Here: Sears Experiments With a New Google Email Tool
Knowing that Chad is an authority on email — and a very smart guy — I decided to take a look.
Sears, according to Chad's blog post, "will be wrapping up beta testing of a potential new Google offering called ‘Enhanced Email,’ which allows a form of browsing to occur within an email viewed within Gmail."
In a limited test of the functionality last month, White wrote, "Sears was able to include seven ‘pages’ containing 20 best-selling products that its Gmail subscribers could browse using the navigation within the module without leaving the email."
Here's where it gets even cooler: When a subscriber hits the “next” link in the module’s navigation, White wrote, "the current set of products slides out of the box to the left and the next set of products slides in from the right in one smooth motion."
Pretty cool, indeed.
For his blog post, White interviewed Ramki Srinivasan, the manager of email innovation at Sears, who said the set of products for the browsing module is displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, "which allows the information to be as current as possible." He also said the test saw "higher opens, clicks and revenue per email," but stressed that it’s too early to make any final assessments on the functionality.
In closing, White said Enhanced Email is just one more sign that the inboxes of the future will allow much more activity to occur within them. As a result, marketers will have to come up with "new ways of measuring email success and of thinking about email strategy, particularly the relationship between email and website landing pages," White said.
Have any of you experimented with Enhanced Email? If so, would you like to tell us about it? If you haven't yet tried it, are you interested in checking it out? Let me know by leaving a comment here.
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