Ivan headshotIvan Ilin,
CEO of Blocks and EmailSoldiers Inc.

With 10 years of experience in email & marketing automation, Ivan Ilin has learnt all the nuances of digital marketing (both from client and agency’s perspective). Ivan co-founded a team of marketing enthusiasts that now has over 100 people.

Always open to new connections on LinkedIn.

Will AI Be a Substitute for Email Marketers? Our Experiment with Email Generation

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Can AI take over the whole email creation process? Does it match human creativity in crafting a full-fledged campaign? And are email marketers at risk of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence? Since AI is revolutionizing email marketing, my team and I decided to put this emerging technology to the ultimate...

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My Go-to Solution to Increase Revenue During the Holiday Rush

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Soon comes the busy holiday season lots of marketers and companies anticipate and fear at the same time. Want to stand out and make the most of it? Here's the solution that we've been using for the last few years: launch a special project that goes beyond the usual email format...

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How We Taught Our Client to Do Email Marketing and Remained in the Red (It Was Worth It)

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For several years straight, we’ve been successfully setting up and launching email campaigns for our clients. But sometimes, we come face to face with unusual tasks where the most reasonable decision is to teach the client’s team all the required details. In November, the e-learning team of a large cosmetics brand...

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How a Simple Tool Changed the Way We Analyze Email Test Results

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Want to make the right choice? Run a test. A series of tests will be even better (for validation). Some of the large companies we work with require testing several hypotheses in a single email campaign. To make the necessary changes fast, we needed a convenient way to work with the...

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How (& Why) We Created Standards for Trigger-Based Sequences

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The term “triggered emails” stands for messages that are sent automatically as a response to an action or event related to the user. Here are just a few examples of triggered emails (in case you forgot what they are): welcome emails sent after users sign up to a platform or subscribe...

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How to Build a Customer Journey Map If Customer Needs Are Not Identified

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Marketers build Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) to see how customers behave from the moment they first need the product till they finally buy it. But what if your product can solve the problems your potential clients haven’t thought of yet? Why customer needs are essential for building a CJM I think...

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How to Avoid 4 Common Issues in a CRM Strategy  

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A CRM strategy is similar to a scheme that shows you why and how a company will communicate with clients: for example, in what cases you should send emails, and when you are to use push-up notifications. I’d like to share my experience in developing such strategies and tell you how...

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Case Study: Using AI to Save Time on Email Creation

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Are you spending your working hours efficiently? Can you unlock the full power of email marketing and achieve the highest ROI possible with your current approach? If you read my previous article for OI, you already know that I’m a huge fan of the resource-efficient approach in marketing: I believe that...

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My Formula For Optimizing Resources and Managing Time Spent on Email Marketing

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According to Litmus, in 2020, 44% of teams spent about 1–2 weeks producing one email, and 52% of them spent at least 2 weeks on the same task. That’s a lot! To stay ahead of the competitors, we must find ways to work faster, better, and cheaper than others. Being the...

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3 Reasons Why Your Promo Emails Might Be Bad

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In some of our projects, promotional emails bring up to 80% of all the sales from email communication. If you see that your promotional emails are no longer effective, search for the reasons and improve the situation as fast as you can.   How to understand that your emails are bad...

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Stop Using These Email Marketing Techniques in 2022 

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  Are there any email marketing techniques you’ve gotten tired of? I’ve gathered several examples of the most common mistakes and outdated strategies that some marketers are still stuck with in 2022. Disclaimer: There’s no universal recipe for a perfect email marketing strategy. However, you can use the tips from this...

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