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.
“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.