In the middle of rushing to send the latest announcement, update, sale email or whatever, it can be easy to forget the “who” and the “why”. But to maximize results, marketers need to know their audience well enough to know who they are sending to, and why that message will be important to that person. Do this by creating a customer journey for each segment of your audience.

The Email Innovations Summit is just weeks away. And this year we've been able to assemble a world class lineup of speakers to take your email marketing career to the next level. Here is just a small sample of this year’s incredible list of instructors and speakers. Register Early to Save and use the promo Code "ONLY" to get a additional discount just for readers of the OI newsletter

Paul Airy is the author of "A Type of Email: A handbook for working with HTML typography in email" and will be presenting a Post-Conference Workshop in HTML Typography in Email (Advanced) at this year's Email Innovations Summit. 

“I have more than enough time to do everything I want to do to make my email marketing program more effective.”

-- said no email marketer ever 

Bill Belichick is the greatest coach in the history of the National Football League. He’s been to 10 Super Bowls as either a head coach (7) or assistant (3), where his teams have accumulated an incredible 7-3 record. That’s an astounding 19.6% of all Super Bowls! Love him or hate him,...

Every Friday the Only Influencers members gets to pitch the membership on their latest tools and services. These are the Best of the Week; 

We talk a lot about how to wake up inactive subscribers and customers, but none of the usual strategies and tactics tackle one of the root causes: Your email's personality doesn't appeal to most of your subscribers.

Chris Arrendale says: Inbox Pros now offers a way for email marketing departments to no longer worry about monitoring email campaign replies, using our new service Reply Monitor: What are email marketing replies? When sending marketing emails, it is expected to receive replies such as, unsubscribe requests, out-of-office replies, an inquiry...

A lot of the entrepreneurial stories that I read feature the ‘entrepreneur as hero’.  A dashing visionary (maybe wearing a mock turtleneck) has a brilliant idea and through near-supernatural effort creates a new product or a new industry.  In this narrative, the founder hero is the center of the story - everything starts with the hero.  I’m part of the founding team of a ~ $100 million email technology business and my experience couldn’t be further from that narrative.  In my experience, the success of a business isn’t about the brilliance of the founder (or founding team).

Email automation is not the panacea for email marketing that many articles seem to suggest.

The story goes “buy a leading edge automation platform” and your email marketing is no longer spam and strategy is improved double quick.

I’ve never seen this to be true and have certainly spoken to too many email marketers who have found out it’s not true - the hard way.

Email strategy is not created by buying some cool tech.

Every Friday, members of Only Influencers gets to pitch their products and services to the membership. Here are the best pitches from Jan 20th:

Open rates across industries average somewhere between 20% and 25%, depending on which benchmark you look at. Not everyone is lucky enough to meet or exceed the benchmark though. Every once in a while, I meet a good marketer who has really bad open rates: between 1% and 5%. No, they aren’t spammers, but they’re stuck with the results of years of poor email marketing practices. What do you do if you’re stuck with bad open rates? Here are some ideas to revive your list:

Jessica Best will be presenting "Getting Jiggy with Animation & Video for Email Marketing" at this year's Email Innovations Summit, April 19-21st in Las Vegas.

Every Friday, the OI membership gets to pitch the membership on their latest tools and services. Here are last Friday's pitches: 

I’m thrilled to announce the 2017 lineup for the Email Innovations Summit, to be held in Las Vegas on April 19-21^st, including a very exciting half day workshop on the final day:

Every Friday, the Only Influencers membership gets to pitch their latest product and service. Here is last week's winners:

Last week I was honored to be included on a list of ’The 20 Best Email Marketers You Should Follow and Steal From’ published by GetResponse. A colleague asked if that last part, “Steal From,” bothered me at all.

Every Friday the OI membership gets to pitch their latest tools and services:

Last Thursday, people sat down with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving and eat their hearts out. Whether the tradition is to eat turkey, tofurkey, or chinese takeout, one things is for certain, most of the people who are busily enjoying a large meal on Thursday are ready to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  In early October, National Retail Federation released their forecasted numbers for 2016. While the 2015 holiday season didn’t perform as well as estimated, increasing 3.2% over the previous year, they’re forecasting in-store sales to increase 3.6% to $655.8 billion. Moreover, NRF is forecasting non-store (online sales) to increase a whopping 7-10% to as much as $117 billion.

The just-concluded Presidential election was – in a word – interesting.

As a marketer, it was fascinating watching two diametrically opposed candidates take each other on. This was not a test where one candidate was just slightly different than the other – it was a case where the candidates could not have been more opposite.

 While you may not be thrilled with the results, there were three key things that all marketers - and especially email marketers - can take away from the drama to make each and every one of their programs be more successful.