You can’t change people. You can only change how you react to them. That is something we say a lot in our household. It’s a hard-won pearl of wisdom from years of working with therapists so my wife and I can be better parents to our autistic son, be better spouses...
The feedback mechanisms, controls, and algorithms that inbox providers use to decide whether to block, junk, or deliver email messages to their users continues to evolve. Since the 1990s, there have been five ages of email deliverability, each of which was ushered in by the arrival of a major change: In...
With an updated and greatly expanded 4th edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, out this month, I wanted to look back at the predictions I made about the future of email marketing in the 3rd edition nearly six years ago. I predicted 11 changes would occur in the next 10...
Gmail is getting old. What’s the next hot email app? That was the gist of a tweet I saw early this year. At the time, the question made me reflect on the different features and capabilities of all of the major inbox providers, and what those differences said about inbox providers’...
Basketball hall of famer and greatest of all time Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And...
As powerful and unique as email marketing is, it’s far from perfect. If you want to grasp some of its imperfections, just look at what the inbox and mailbox providers have been doing. The features they’re pushing will give you a sense of what they feel is wrong with the channel....
Most commercial email that’s sent is never deleted by recipients. Moreover, most commercial email content is only relevant for a fairly short period of time—say, weeks tops for the vast majority of it. As a consequence, mailbox providers currently store and maintain access to a tremendous amount of old and completely...
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will have a broad range of effects on email marketers, impacting email analytics, design, deliverability, personalization, and optimization efforts. Sadly, subscribers who enable MPP will receive less relevant emails and more emails than they would have otherwise gotten if marketers could better measure their engagement through opens....
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will have broad implications for how brands operate their email marketing program. These changes are most disturbing because they disrupt norms that have been in place for more than a decade—norms that have served consumers well and kept marketers honest. I would go so far as to...
List building has been challenging over the past 18 months, which has now made managing subscribers a challenge. Before talking about the issues that are pressing now, let’s look at how we got here… When coronavirus lockdowns started in March last year, consumer behaviors started to rapidly evolve. Many stores were...