Financial services companies who send customers opt-in emails gain credibility and brand loyalty, according to Epsilon. The research showed that these campaigns significantly influence online and offline behavior.

“Email marketing is a proven means to develop one-on-one communications and provide valuable and relevant content,” said Kevin Mabley, senior vice president, Epsilon Strategic Services. “Our latest research shows the effectiveness of these programs which drive online and offline behavior, from applying for credit cards to opening new accounts and selecting investment products.”

According to the survey, 54 percent of the respondents had a more favorable opinion of the companies that send them email, and 44 percent said that email from financial services companies make them feel more loyal towards the companies and their products.

The top reasons consumers subscribe to permission-based email from financial services companies were to receive e-statement notifications and to receive account alerts such as statement-ready, fraud protection, overdraft, etc. Over two-thirds want to receive personalized content based on their website activity, past investments, etc.

Epsilon’s email branding study is based on a mid-October 2008 survey of 1517 consumers. The survey, conducted by ROI Research, of Lancaster, PA, explored the general impact of permission-based email marketing as well as specific vertical product categories that included: Travel, Financial Services, Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Pharmaceuticals/Healthcare.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

SL6 was designed to give email marketers more power to manage their campaigns with less muss and fuss: the suite features 22 additions and upgrades in the areas of list and subscriber management; email and template management; reports and overall user experience. SendLabs said it will be able to eliminate pre-campaign spam and integrate with Google Analytics. The result: “email marketers dreams will finally be realized,” the company cooed.

“It’s time marketers get serious about their email and this is the tool they can use to do just that,” SendLabs President Brett Houle said. “Better and more effective email is a win-win for everyone and SL6 is how to get it done.”

SendLabs is offering a 30-day trial of the product and an evaluation of email marketers’ current program.

The Conversational Marketing Toolbox was introduced at to industry execs the Conversational Marketing Summit: New Brand Way in New York City today. The toolbox will attempt to provide an accurate set of campaign management, measurement and reporting tools to interactive marketers using the FM Network.

“One of the greatest barriers that we’ve seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting,” said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer, in a released statement. “There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form.”

The suit of services is built on an open, scalable architecture used to collect, aggregate and report data from internal reporting, third-party tracking providers and social media application developers. That data is available on a dashboard that shows the delivery, engagement, amplification and equity marketing partners have told FM they need.

BuzzLogic is working with FM on the project to help them provide marketers with targeting data.

“Social media is different than traditional media – it’s … social,” BuzzLogic’s blog reads. “But, we know traditional ad models aren’t going to vaporize overnight. Instead, advertisers need to build on traditional measurement models and adapt to the social nature of the Web. Understanding the conversational landscape around an ad campaign makes a huge difference.”

Blogs within the FM network focus on a variety of themes for cars to parenting to entertainment; their superstars include BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Digg and Bleacher Report.

Make your message relevant

Technology advanced in relevant delivery gives marketers unprecedented access to niche, highly targeted audiences. In order to tap into consumers’ needs and wants, marketers first need to know where their targeted audience is visiting and how they are interacting with different media content. Online tools collect valuable information about how a consumer interacts within their online environment. This interactive data allows marketers to learn not only who is engaged, but how they’re engaged and use the information gathered to send targeted follow-up messages.

User-created actions over user-generated content

Traditional mass media like TV and newspapers required advertisers to deliver a monologue; but online we have the tools to go a step further and engage consumers in a dialogue with relevant messaging. Forward thinking marketers should be facilitating user-created actions, not just user-generated content. Providing consumer’s with an action (i.e. sending an e-mail or SMS to a friend or adding to a social network), enables personal endorsement that aligns the consumer with the message and organically extends the message’s reach.

Allow your message’s delivery to be chameleon-like

Whose recommendations would you trust more than a friend? Marketers now have the tools that allow communicating messages in your audience’s preferred medium:

-E-mail
-SMS
-Social Networks
-Blogs
-Web sites
-Calendars

The overriding strength in advertising online, is the ability to deliver targeted messages relevant to an individual consumers’ wants and needs. So whether you’re a massive brand or corporation like Nike or McDonald’s or a small independent blog, everyone has the ability to reach a given audience with relevant messaging, in their preferred medium, where they live online.

Since its inception, basic analytical information has been available to YouTubers, but this brings the data mining to a new, sophisticated level that advertisers are more apt to appreciate.

Interactive advertisers will be able to use YouTube as a kind of test tube for their campaigns: by running several simultaneous ads they will easily be able to see which one gets the most traction and move forward accordingly, the Times reports.

“Effectively, YouTube has become an ad-effectiveness, or an insight-effectiveness, tool,” Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, told the Times. “YouTube has millions of viewers every single day, and has become the world’s largest focus group.”

Bazaarvoice, a company that specializes in hosting social commerce applications that aim to boost sales, today launched Bazaarvoice ReStyle, a flexible content styling tool that allows online marketers to customize content of surveys in holiday and seasonal promo blitzes, contests, cross-channel campaigns and Web site redesigns.

Marketers can use the tool to integrate Bazaarvoice’s social commerce content with multichannel marketing campaigns – display options can also be tweaked.

“The ability to provide a more flexible and dynamic way to display user-generated content is critical to brands that want to create a specific look-and-feel for the content on their sites and streamline all marketing campaigns around a central theme,” said Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice.

The catch? You have to be a client. ReStyle is immediately available to all current Bazaarvoice clients free of charge.

The company offers outsourced technology, services, analytics and expertise to help companies enhance online shopping experiences with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice’s clients include Dell, Macy’s, Office Depot, Inc., Overstock.com, QVC and PETCO.

i33 specializes in online user experiences which includes designing and developing social media applications, widgets and rich media experiences for clients including PBS, Target and Borders.

While 360i often produced online ad campaigns — for clients like NBC and Bravo — featuring widgets and search applications, it previously didn’t have the tools to create them.

“To compete and reach audiences effectively online, smart marketers today require a whole new kind of agency – one that has a deep understanding of how to create engaging interactive consumer experiences that are searchable, integrated and provide measurable impact to the marketer,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i. “We’ve worked with i33 on a series of integrated programs and have consistently found their team and their work to be nothing less than exceptional.”

“This is a perfect marriage, combining our skill sets with 360i’s roster of blue-chip clients, as well our joint focus on delivering engaging and measurable results to our strategic clients,” said David Levin, President/CEO of i33.

The acquisition follows an industry-wide trend of indie digital agencies being snapped up by bigger fish. iCrossing recently acquired Proxicom and Search Rev recently bought AKQA.

360i is a digital agency specializing in search, behavioral marketing and social media.

The national survey uses the answers of 120 senior level respondents that are directly or indirectly responsible for managing digital marketing budget allocation across multiple channels.

This survey showed that marketers lack tools necessary to optimize their marketing efforts across the full spectrum of digital channels. Over half of the respondents felt “somewhat confident” or “not confident at all” in their capabilities to track campaigns across multiple channels in real-time. Only 19% reporting the ability to make campaign changes in less than 24 hours.

Findings included that marketers were most confident in their ability to track Email (32%) and Search (30%). About half of the respondents claimed they do not believe campaign data provided to them does not evenly measure and compare performance across all digital channels; with difficulty in comparing metrics across channels being the most common hurdle to accuracy(28%).

Marketers are increasingly concerned about the influx in acquisitions. 41% of respondents fear being lost in the shuffle with thousands of other clients as a result of consolidation in the online advertising industry.

Gaston Legorburu, Chief Creative Officer of Sapient stated “While marketers have developed an aptitude for tracking more traditional online channels, the emergence of social networking further complicates the interactive landscape. In 2008, marketers will seek the ability to seamlessly incorporate this medium with their other channels, including search and email, and the capability to monitor and measure performance to ensure they are achieving optimum results.”

Legorburu continued to say “In 2008, analytics will become the new black – the absolute, must-have essential for all marketing teams. Without an effective analytics tool that can measure and fine-tune all online marketing campaign channels, marketers will be left in the dark wondering if they actually reached potential buyers in the dynamic social networking world.