LOS ANGELES – May 16, 2012 – Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce, announced the winning companies for its 2012 ICE (Internet Commerce Excellence) Awards, presented on May 15, 2012, at the Digital River® Globalocity™ annual commerce conference, Digital River’s annual three-day conference at the JW Marriott LA LIVE in Los Angeles, California.

The ICE Awards recognize companies which creatively use commerce and e-marketing best practices to launch innovative online campaigns designed to attract customers, build loyalty and drive revenue through their online stores. ICE Award finalists included Microsoft, Electronic Arts Inc., Logitech, Corporation, Lominger International, Razer, Tely Labs, VMware, Inc., Kaspersky Lab, Nuance Communications, Inc., Trend Micro Incorporated, Autodesk, Inc., AVAST Software, Logitech, THQ Inc., Wondershare Software, EnMasse Entertainment Inc., Lenovo, Cloud Engines, Remo Software. Mattel, Inc., Parallels, Bare Escentuals, lululemon athletica, KFC, HighRoad Solution, Dialog Interactive, Boot Barn, KSL Resorts and SnagAJob.com.

Julian Aston and Christopher Barnes, Co-Principals Dialog Interactive said “on behalf of our agency and our many clients, we are proud to share the limelight with industry leading companies and will continue to maintain the highest levels of professionalism in everything we do.”

About Digital River, Inc.
Digital River, Inc., the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce, builds and manages online businesses for software and game publishers, consumer electronics manufacturers, distributors, online retailers and affiliates. Its multi-channel commerce solution, which supports both direct and indirect sales, is designed to help companies of all sizes maximize online revenues as well as reduce the costs and risks of running a global commerce operation. The company’s comprehensive platform offers site development and hosting, order management, global payments, cloud-based billing, fraud management, export controls, tax management, physical and digital product fulfillment, multi-lingual customer service, advanced reporting and strategic marketing services.

Founded in 1994, Digital River is headquartered in Minneapolis with offices across the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America. For more details about Digital River, visit the corporate website, follow the company on Twitter or call +1 952-253-1234.

Digital River is a registered trademark of Digital River, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.

About Dialog Interactive, Inc.
Dialog is an interactive marketing agency providing strategically sound, creative marketing programs, including Business Strategy & Planning; Marketing Strategy & Creative Services; Market Research & Analysis; Product Branding & Positioning; Media Planning; Email Strategy & Implementation; Social Media Strategy & Execution; Website Design & Development; Search Engine Optimization (SEO); Landing Pages & Micro sites; Database Management; Business Presentations & Webinars, and Marketing Automation.

Founded in 2010, Dialog is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. For more details, go to www.dialoginteractive.net or call (866) 447-4631.

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Enter the new era of “Marketing Automation.” It’s the art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing and content of your outbound marketing messaging, and due to the increasingly digital nature of your customer data and interactions, the need to automate your marketing increases dramatically.

The ultimate benefits of Marketing Automation include increased productivity; timely responsiveness to specific actions; better relationships built through appropriately timed, highly personalized and relevant nurturing techniques. In short, you drive increased revenue into your organization by getting the right messages to the right audience at the right time!

So how would you best use marketing automation to automate and streamline tasks in your organization?

First, understand that marketing automation tools are designed to perform three key tasks:

1. To perform processes and tasks based on predetermined criteria like date-initiated, triggered events.
2. To provide sales and marketing departments not with just information about customers and prospects, but with increased knowledge, to improve the quality of their personal interaction – resulting in exponential revenue increases.
3. To ensure ROI by providing management and analysis of marketing campaigns across all phases of the marketing process.

Second, isolate the key marketing tasks in your organization which could be automated, i.e.:

–Lead management: automatic responses to inquiries from landing pages and other sources
–Cross-sell/up-sell: Termination date and renewal notices
–Relationship building: Birthday and event greetings
–Life cycle/nurturing: Segmented messaging triggering “drip” email campaigns

This automated messaging could be based on the inbound actions and online behaviors of your customers and prospects, date triggered events, and much more.

Now that you have a clearer picture of your present and future needs, take a look around at the available products and services. Due to the myriad options available, and because your needs will be unique, we suggest you contract with an interactive marketing agency, like ourselves, for assistance in making the right choices.

The answers to their professional questions should reveal if:

1. Your needs are answered by a properly setup and managed email marketing platform? And, if so, which platform would best answer your objectives?
2. Your organization is using a CRM system and does it stand alone or is it integrated with an email platform?
3. You focus on B2C or B2B markets, or both? Does your website, be it a shopping cart or the inquiry forms properly integrate with backend systems, and are those systems providing you with the type of reporting that allows you to make informed marketing decisions?
4. You are using marketing automation to bring all of your advertising media together, and what forms of media are you using to advertise your products and services? Online/offline, social, mobile, digital…the list is endless.

So now that we have raised your awareness to the world of Marketing Automation, find out more by attending our next training webinar: MARKETING AUTOMATION: Extend Your Resources Through Smart Automation taking place on Wednesday, June 13, 2012 at 11am PST. By attending you’ll learn about the many types of marketing automation and how to start with a simple but often overlooked email automation program.

Click here to register for this complimentary event.

Sure, there have been numerous past email innovations which didn’t make the grade for one reason or another, but today, the opportunity to refresh content is the most likely place to start innovating, and, that innovation can begin with taking static email content and evolving it into real-time, web-like pushes. In short, refreshing content in real-time.

And, leading marketers are already thinking outside of the box….according to a recent Forrester Report entitled “Emerging Innovations in Email,” daily deal aggregator, Redeemio, has introduced a way to optimize email content when a recipient opens an email. This move has generated a 17% lift in click-through rates compared with the static version.

Recently, one of our own client experiences has seen email testimonials deployed via email, (linked to youtube but these could also be animated GIFs), generating more than 20% click-through rates – that’s click-through’s, not opens.

The Forrester Report also points to LinkedIn, Living Social, Netflix and Posterous, as companies testing in-message “windows” to their web environments to conduct searches and execute transactions such as booking a hotel room without leaving their email.

So here’s the buzz…we have only just begun to utilize the type of email which enables the recipient to consume and respond to rich media content, resulting in huge gains in readership and engagement.

Key points:

Be Specific: No more “batch and blast.” It’s not enough to send your entire audience the same email communication, unless your audience is completely homogeneous. This is no longer “one size fits all” marketing. Be relevant to your subscribers – send specific emails, personalized to their needs and interests.

Optimize your Email: Sounds simple but many people are still not doing the very basic things to make sure their email is read.

– Use alt tags in your email for your images
– Make use of the pre-header to let people know what your email is about
– Optimize for the preview panel – your call to action should be in the top 1/3 of your email
– Have a creative but succinct subject line
– Personalize your email
– Optimize the “text” version of your email

Use an ESP (Email Service Provider): There are a multitude of email marketing service providers that can offer expert services at a reasonable cost. No more going it alone sending your emails via Outlook or your own internal server. With an ESP you will get better delivery and key statistics to drive your marketing. Here are a few that we have vetted that work great for our clients: ExactTarget, Blue Hornet, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor.

Optimize Email for Different Devices: Users are in the habit of accessing email anytime, anywhere—from home, at work and on the road—and from a variety of devices—desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones. Plus there are dozens of email programs in use, from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail, Yahoo and others.

Optimize Emails for reading in Different Programs and Devices: Have a link at the top of your emails allowing users to access a web version in case the content does not render well in the program they’re using. Poll your users to see how they’re viewing your emails (some solutions segment views into email client types). Remember – there is a big migration to the third screen (mobile). How does your email render there?

Testing is a given: Testing helps you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. Plain and simple. You can test various components of your emails and make adjustments based on what you learn to increase your results in terms of clickthroughs and conversions.

Test these areas:

-From line and subject line
-Day of week and time of day for sending
-Number, placement and type of links
-Call to action; and
-Layout and use of graphics

Using Email for Lead Generation. There are plenty of potential customers you are not able to reach because they haven’t heard of your company or you haven’t met them. If you want to use email to prospect, here’s a method we’ve had success with…advertise or place advertorial within third-party email newsletters that target your audience, then drive them to a landing page to gather their data. Just one of a number of out-of-the-box methods you should try.

Most marketers are being challenged to grow their customer base and improve profitability of campaigns. Why are the cross-sell rates not as high as they should be? If you look at the number of customers they have versus the number of customers they can speak to, it’s a different number. For many clients we see that more than 50% of their customers are unreachable because of opt-outs.

One of the nice things about email is if you get it right it can be very effective.

-A well thought out on boarding process, which is not comprised of putting consumers into the hopper out of the gate, but instead listening first by collecting preferences. Ask consumers to update preferences so that they state what’s important and what they don’t find important. If you put this strategy in place it affects the frequency and relevance [of emails]. If I can only send one email this week or month, what email should that be?

-Ask your customers what they think might be relevant directly. That’s the best thing you can do to start that relationship.

-Get rid of long subject lines and make them focused.

-Do A/B subject line testing to increase the incremental open rates.

-Rethinking your opt-out strategy. When someone clicks unsubscribe, give them options and alternatives to opt out right in the landing page. Allow them to update preferences rather than just completing the opt-out. Make it easier for them to opt down rather than out.