Last week, organic grocery giant Whole Foods announced its plans to open a low-cost grocery chain targeted at the millennial market. The concept, according to CEO Walter Robb, will be “unlike anything that currently exists in the marketplace,” boasting “a modern, streamlined design, innovative technology and a curated section.” In the same week, McDonald’s—in an attempt to boost its falling popularity with the twenty-something set, revived its Hamburglar mascot complete with a head-to-toe hipster makeover. With two major players joining the race to capture (and retain) their share of the millennial market, media outlets and marketing professionals alike have called into question the efficacy of their tactics. Why the skepticism? All too often companies miss the mark when it comes to millennial marketing, due in large part to the mass confusion surrounding how to engage this elusive yet highly influential group.

It’s your first week as an email marketer.

Then you blink and a whole year has flown by. It happened to me, and it’s probably going to happen to you. After a year of email marketing, you certainly haven’t learned everything there is to know, but you do discover some pretty eye-opening lessons.

Why Vet new Clients? According to MAAWG: "ESPs take on significant risk every time a new customer sends email. A bad client can undermine the sending reputation for the ESP’s other clients as well as inflict abuse at recipient domains. When proper pre-send vetting is performed, ESPs can preempt damage caused by bad clients to both recipient domains and to their own sending reputation. " If you are building a client vetting program, the following is a list of some recommended resources, courtsey of OI member Andrew Bonar:

Looking for some examples of exceptional email-focused dashboards. Can be focused on engagement, delivery, or other email-related data presentation and manipulation metrics. Interested in seeing how various bits of data are presented, how they can be interacted with, what you like and dislike about them.

Alchemy Worx launches ImageWIZZ, a free personalized Image tool for Emails and Landing Pages. Boost your email response rate by adding personalized images. Give it a try today!

"It is almost ridiculous how much money you can save by being a self-sender. At Zeeto, our ROI has doubled since we went down the path of self-sending – even though we have experienced each and every one of the cons outlined"

Trilogy Our people – 30 strong in our DC, Chicago and Berkeley offices – thrive on finding the right solutions to your trickiest communications challenges. We can make uninteresting stuff compelling. We can unknot years of data and make it easy to use. We can even build a million-dollar moneybomb. We’ll...

Inbox Marketer is a leading data-driven email marketing services and technology solutions company.

An often overlooked aspect of Email Design Practices is designing for failure: images failing to render on the client's browser. Using some basic email design techniques, you can insure that your customers experience the best possible visual email in their inbox. Below are a series of tutorals and resources to teach you these basic technigues: Some of the techniques you will learn include using Web Text, using stylized Alt Tags, coding background colors, and creating pixel art.

"To not have an email address is the digital equivalent of being homeless. Without an email address, you cannot shop online, bank online or engage with social media."

58% of people said they abandon because shipping costs increased the price too much. 57% said they wanted to get an idea of the price including shipping. 55% said they weren’t ready to purchase and wanted to save the basket for later! 50% said their order didn’t qualify for free shipping and 37% complained shipping costs were shown too late in the process.

"Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the power struggles between the teams traditionally responsible for information technology and those responsible for marketing. Heidrick & Struggles sums up the collision of these two functions very well."

Despite all the talk over here about the EU Data Protection Reform, with its unknown content and unknown timescales, we’ve been relatively calm and relaxed about the whole thing. After all, who has time to worry about something “12-24” months away when you have things which matter now?

"Personalization is under attack. Not the act of personalizing messages to be more relevant and valuable – just the word itself. A recent Buzzfeed article reports that brands like Walmart, Macys and Gap are eschewing the term "personalization" in favor of "relevancy." Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, with the amount of contextually relevant data now available to marketers, the term personalization seems dated, limited and even "invasive and robotic," according to the article. Second, brands are very aware of not crossing the line between relevant and creepy. "

A collection of some of the best April Fools Email campaigns from 2014

Spike

Welcome to Spike. We’re a full service email marketing agency that works with businesses that range from: Retail to Real Estate, Baby Clothing to Health Stores, Insurance, Recruitment and Energy Providers. We use the insights gained by linking email marketing to business objectives to send Email With Purpose and get results. Are you ready to start sending Email With Purpose? Let’s talk!

Shaw + Scott Shaw + Scott is a digital communications agency with a passion for customer relationship marketing. We specialize in strategic, creative and technical solutions to help define, craft and support your email, mobile, social and web campaigns—all tailored to your brand, marketing objectives, and production realities.

Inbox Group

Inbox Group is a full-service email marketing agency you can trust to deliver top-notch customer service and support at every stage of your email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing programs. Whether you require a full-service email marketing or social media solution, or simply some help sending your monthly email newsletter, our team of experienced marketers are at the ready to support you.

Harland Clarke Digital What we do is marry technology and marketing expertise. What we do is provide products and services to power digital marketing programs. What we do is listen to our clients.

Extravision

With over 10 years’ experience in email for both B2B and B2C we know how to create campaigns that work. Email is what we do every day. From strategy through to creative, build and analysis we help our clients achieve their marketing goals and objectives with tangible results.