Jarvis, Handle My Email

Inbox-Zero-200

On opening one of my more-than-a-few email accounts, that little red number by Inbox — or the marching rank-on-rank of boldfaced unreads — sparks a tiny twinge and a little wave of fatigue. Yes, Mom, I know I haven’t read them all. (No, Mom, I’m never going to read them all.)...

Continue reading
  2533 Hits

3 Common Email Subscriber Preference Center Mistakes – and How to Fix Them

preferences-200

I’ve helped a lot of my consulting clients create or improve subscriber preference centers over the years. The key to success is to create one with options that meet both the subscribers' needs for content and your business goals. Here are a few of the most common preference center mistakes I’ve...

Continue reading
  3571 Hits

Why you should be adding phone numbers to your email database

1-phone

This week Webbula published our latest special report, ‘The State of Appends,’ to expand the discussion around appends in the email industry. This report is based on non-email appends, the information you can add to your database in addition to email. (If you haven’t already read the report, you can download it...

Continue reading
  3440 Hits

Increase Conversions With Timely Relevant Messaging... Email Marketing for the Buyer's Journey!

drucker-updated

The tough part is consistent execution and achieving that goal.  So how do we use email marketing to acquire a customer and satisfy that customer? Let’s start at the beginning.  When you have a problem, where is the first place you look for a solution? Google? Facebook? Youtube? You and I...

Continue reading
  3066 Hits

4 Creative Uses of Video in Email

video-200

On a recent OI-members-only Live Zoom discussion we spent some time talking about how to leverage video in email campaigns. The conversation was spurred by Tejas Pitkar’s (Netcore) recent OI blog post and there were a lot of great ideas brought up by the group. So, I thought it would make...

Continue reading
  3183 Hits

Click, click, click... which click rate is most important for your email campaign?

travel-200

In the email marketing world we are lucky to have an abundance of click rates to choose from when evaluating our campaigns. Here I want to talk about three of them – and when each is most and least useful. Definitions The first is the most commonly used metric in the...

Continue reading
  8843 Hits

A Quick and Easy Roadmap for using Analytics in Email Marketing

roadmap

Analytics done well can lead to better customer service and bigger bottom lines (for example, my client used analytics insights to increase sales 250%) -- done poorly it can be a complete waste of time. This article provides a quick and easy analytics roadmap specifically for email marketers. My aim is...

Continue reading
  4332 Hits

Perfect Storm: Traits of Digital-native Brands to Leverage Now

Digital-native-200

What a crazy time in our lives, when we get hit with three historic events at the same time: pandemic, racial tensions and financial crisis. At no other time in history have we been in this perfect storm: something equivalent to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, racial tensions mirror that of...

Continue reading
  2530 Hits

7 email stats and what they mean for your business

statistics-200

I've been working in the industry for some 17 years now. I fell into it totally by accident; it was a time when people referred to email as spam. It was soul-destroying. But despite the hard times email has established itself as an essential part of any marketers box of tricks....

Continue reading
  4692 Hits

Where It's At on Opens by Mailbox Provider

graphs-200-wide

The only right answer to ‘what is a good open rate?’ or ‘what should my open rates be?’ is: ‘it depends’. It’s also a lazy and useless answer when left at that because it ignores all the important contextual factors and provides no information. The truth is that if you are...

Continue reading
  3680 Hits

9 Steps to Prepare Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategy for Success

Happy-holidays-200-wide

The holiday season is the most important time of year for retailers, with a large portion of sales being done at this time. MasterCard SpendingPulse reported that holiday ecommerce sales account for an average of 14.6% of total retail spending (and much more in some cases).   When Deloitte asked people...

Continue reading
  5825 Hits

Worlds Collide: The Head-on Crash of CDPs and ESPs

planets-collide-400

Any discussion of the features and functionality of ESPs vs. CDPs needs to start with the ESP platforms. ESPs have been around in one form or another for over 20 years, and it should be well-estalbished these days as to what constitutes an ESP. Ah, if only it were so easy....

Continue reading
  7930 Hits

My First CDP: Why I chose a CDP as my ESP replacement

CDP-keyboard-400

Every once in a while, during our careers, we get to do something truly exciting. Launch a new product. Solve a business problem in a novel way. Build a new system. On rare occasions, we get to do all these things at once. This is one of those stories. These situations...

Continue reading
  3956 Hits

Has the new ISP in town lifted the veil? My thoughts on trialing Hey.com

hey-logo

Historically, ISPs have kept the way that they operate a closely guarded secret. Sure, we could make a few educated guesses drawing on what we've learned from testing, but could any of us say for sure why (for example) Gmail sends some emails to 'Promotions' and others straight to the inbox?...

Continue reading
  3006 Hits

How Empathy is Making Us Better Email Marketers

trains-200-wide

One of the silver linings of this crazy 2020 has been getting to chat more often with far-flung marketing friends - the people I would normally see several times a year at industry conferences but now view weekly on my computer screen. These virtual happy hours began informally when we were...

Continue reading
  3322 Hits

Nobody reads your emails -- and it's all your fault!

morin-pic

You’re not getting the readership you hoped for? Your open rates and click-throughs are generally poor. And you’re wondering what’s wrong? Read on to learn why.  Assuming that you don’t have an inbox-placement issue, your customers aren’t reading your emails because:  Your copy doesn’t provide valuable content – Yes, there are...

Continue reading
  3459 Hits

Learning from Failure: Stories and Lessons from Members of Only Influencers

Oops-road-sign-200

One of the foundations of marketing is to test, learn and improve. The learning that comes from constantly trying and testing new approaches and tactics is one of the aspects of marketing that makes it exciting and interesting, even for grizzled veterans like me. “We learn wisdom from failure much more...

Continue reading
  6081 Hits

AMP for Email: Mustangs, Barbed Wire & Aggregation

animal-animal-photography-barb-wires-cavalry-614505

Email is the most widely used personal communication channel on the globe, with over 3.8 billion people sending more than 280 billion messages each day. The technical standards that enable this massive message exchange are not ‘owned’ by anyone; by and large, they remain open Internet standards. Google currently provides the...

Continue reading
  3574 Hits

Turning a Negative into a Positive

neg-pos-200

As email marketers, most of us are focused on how our campaigns perform. Even if our emails aren’t specifically designed to drive leads, sales, or other recipient actions, we still monitor key metrics like Open Rate to at least determine if recipients are looking at the message.  For those email marketers...

Continue reading
  3075 Hits

Family Feud: Email Edition, Email Industry Survey Answers

fam-feud-200-wide

Earlier this month during the Email Innovations Summit 2020, we had some fun; we played Family Feud: Email Edition. Armed with the results of our late May survey of the industry, we set out to see who would win a Family Feud game based on email industry survey topics. You may...

Continue reading
  8409 Hits