Dela Quist, is CMO of Alchemy Worx, the largest email marketing agency. He is a highly experienced expert email marketer with a strong background in digital media and advertising.
Services include: email marketing strategy, email marketing best practice, email campaign planning, email design, email copywriting, HTML email production, email campaign deployment, email delivery and reputation, spam filter avoidance, reporting, and analysis.
Are you an email marketer who grapples with the perennial dilemma of being urged by business stakeholders to send more emails? You want to deliver value to your business, but you're equally concerned about losing subscribers or tarnishing your brand's reputation. If this scenario feels all too familiar, you're not alone....
Clarity At Last As many of you will know, Google's recent announcement about their impending 2-year account inactivity policy change has me revisiting an ongoing beef of mine. Namely, why you should email inactives and how long you can safely do so before they become Spam Traps. The answer to that...
The Email Innovations Summit 2023 is just around the corner (June 19-21, 2023), and it promises to be one of the best ever! Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend this year's summit, and I am feeling disappointed about missing out on what promises to be an amazing event. For those...
Many companies struggle with attribution in general, but when it comes email the failure to measuring the true impact of email on their revenue is spectacular! As a result, the email team at most brands face a constant struggle for recognition and more importantly a fair share of available resource. The...
Anyone who follows me will know how unusual a post like this is for me, as I am generally reluctant to make predictions about the future for good reasons: they can come back to bite you. Just think back. How many predictions about 2020, made in 2019, anticipated the changes COVID...
Now the summer is over and our thoughts are already fully focussed on the upcoming holiday season. In particular we are increasing our focus on re-engagement. The goal is to re-engage as many inactive subscribers as possible before Black Friday. If you are like most businesses, your focus is on customers...
In my last contribution to the OI Blog I wrote about Alchemy Worx’ Audience Management methodology. Which requires a move away from just pulling segments, which is a reactive process, to a more proactive approach which takes behavior from all channels into account. In it I showed how subscriber engagement does...
80/20 rule - Engaging with the engaged The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule states that in very many situations 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort. This principle is very widely accepted and holds true in many cases, for example in IT, 80% of system crashes are...
During a panel discussion I took part in recently, an audience member asked which companies did the panel think are doing a good job of multi-channel messaging. I thought it was an interesting question because unless you are armed with a knowledge of what data is being used and how it...
As the current crises began to unfold, I was interested to note that while we started out by calling the disease Coronavirus, the name COVID-19 began to emerge as the favorite among email marketers for use in Subject Lines (SL). So, a couple of days ago I decided to dig into...
I have been following a recent discussion by the Only Influencers membership around how adopting new technology - or even fully using the existing functionality available to you - can be a challenge. Something I am sure many of you reading this would also testify to. The percentage of users who...
The ability to measure engagement using open rates click rates make email the most measurable digital channel, yet most marketers struggle to prove the value of email an email address to their organization. As a result, email is the most consistently underrated digital marketing channel. Paradoxically the main reason marketers find...
Everyone loves Halloween! Well perhaps not everyone but, judging by the number of Halloween themed offers and Subject Lines to be found at this time of year, marketers certainly seem to. There seems to be consensus that incorporating the Halloween theme in a Subject Line is a good thing. But what...
Current Best Practice When it comes to your inactive subscribers, best practitioners have always advocated that you stop mailing them. Following this advice will have the immediate effect of improving your open rates without you having to do anything difficult like write better subject lines or improve your content and/or creative....
“Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a voice.” Stephen Few This is an article that wrote itself. It started out as a rant about the relentless negativity surrounding the email channel and how everyone under estimates its importance to the digital ecosystem. As...
Dela Quist: This week’s I’d like to open up a discussion around Batch & Blast something I wrote about last week for the OI bog titled: Forget Batch & Blast, it’s Fire & Forget Damaging Your Campaign Performance - Here’s Why Most of you will have heard me point out that...
“It is not worth-while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible” – Mark Twain Back in 2013 Alchemy Worx published a thought piece on the impact of send volume, send frequency on open rates – almost always negative....
Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning - Terry Tempest Williams
Background
As some of you may already know, Alchemy Worx the agency I founded in 2001 was recently acquired by SellUp an email marketing agency with offices in NYC and Manila, founded by Allan Levy – whom I have known for many years and respect a great deal. One of the primary reasons for doing so was to free up the time I was spending running the agency full time to spin off the software division of Alchemy Worx into a separate company. The new company, Touchstone Intelligent Marketing exists to help plug 2 significant gaps in the marketing clouds - testing and subscriber level reporting. The 1st of these Touchstone Tests a testing tool that allows you to try out any number of subject lines quickly and without burning out your customer database, is the source of the data I am about to share.
The way we test today only works with batch and blast
In the last few years digital marketing has been transformed. Marketers have moved from sending the same message to everybody on the list – batch and blast, to segmentation, where messages are specific to particular customer segments or persona’s. According to the 2016 Econsultancy Email Industry Census the majority of respondents claim to be doing basic segmentation while around 1/3 claim to be doing advanced segmentation.
It’s been just over a year since EEC 2015 and the panel on deliverability during which some of the largest inbox providers gave the audience some valuable insights into their definitions of engagement and how that relates to inbox placement. For those of you who missed that panel and are new to this debate Massimo Arrigoni wrote a very good summary on the Mail Up blog. What excited me most about the information the inbox providers shared was, for the first time since I got involved in email marketing we had valuable information direct from the horse’s mouth on what mail service providers really look at.
