Earlier this month during the Email Innovations Summit 2020, we had some fun; we played Family Feud: Email Edition.Armed with the results of our late May survey of the industry, we set out to see who would win a Family Feud game based on email industry survey topics. You may have...

Communities have always been an important part of my personal and professional life – even more so now that I, like many others around the world, am living under a ‘stay-at-home’ order due to the COVID-19 pandemic.There are many different types of communities; each is built on a shared interest or...

Only Influencers has set up this temporary job board to help email marketing professionals who are looking for work during this difficult time. All email marketing professionals, not just members of the Only Influencers community, are invited to participate. Special thanks to Ada Barlatt who is helping us manage this!Questions? Reach out...

 We thought it might be helpful to provide a round-up of resources on email marketing during the Coronavirus pandemic:Upcoming webinarsOn-demand webinarsComplimentary offersSwipe file samplesArticlesIf your company is planning to send out an email referencing the pandemic, or even just if you're continuing to communicate business-as-usual information to your email audience, scan...

Hi OI!Thought we would start a blog post about holiday emails. If you get one that strikes you, forward it to me at jeanne@onlyinfluencers.com and I'll add to this post and start a discussion on the list. I got a lovely one today from BrightWave (and very timely, since my Godchildren and I...

Wow, feels like I just wrote one of these!

I am honored and excited to be expanding my business relationship with Matthew Finlay and the team at Rising Media as I become the General Manager of Only Influencers.

I’ve been a member of Only Influencers from its inception in 2010; my relationship with the founder, Bill McCloskey, goes back even further, to when he was running eDataSource. It is a privilege to be entrusted to continue his work with not just the Email Innovations Summit but also Only Influencers.

Only Influencers is unique, just like the email marketing industry.

Jeanne Jennings is a recognized expert in the email marketing industry and a consultant who helps medium- to enterprise-sized organizations make their email marketing efforts more effective and more profitable. She is Founder and Chief Strategist at Email Optimization Shop, a boutique consultancy focused on optimizing bottom-line email marketing performance with strategic testing....

When I was in high school our history teacher, Mr. Holt, shared his theory-of-life with us: when in doubt, the answer is seven.A few weeks later we had a pop quiz in math, with an especially difficult problem at the end. At the one-minute warning, students who either hadn’t gotten to...

How well does your email marketing program align with your customer’s lifecycle? Put another way, are you practicing lifecycle marketing?This is one of the first things I investigate when I’m working with a new client, because often the answer provides the basis for recommendations to boost performance (which is the core...

Jeanne Jennings: This week’s discussion is centered around last week’s case study on email performance, lists and staffing. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet you can find it here: Interactive Case Study: Email Performance, Lists and Staffing.We raised a lot of questions about next steps in the...

When I was in graduate school, we did a lot of case study learning – and I loved it! Now that I’m an adjunct professor (Hoya Saxa!) I use case studies with my students. And when Bill asked me to lead a discussion on Only Influencers, I thought it might be...

There’s the textbook ‘right’ way to structure an email marketing program, but you can often meet your initial business goals with much less: fewer email messages, reduced cost and not as much lead time. Here’s a case study in how to build your email marketing program in an agile fashion, prioritizing...

Marketing and product are different but complimentary teams in any business. As an employee and now as a consultant, I’ve seen first-hand how the balance between them can help or hinder an organization. Read on to learn how to determine whether your company leans more toward marketing or product, and how...

How smart are your email segmentation, automation and personalization/customization strategies? Work on these 3 mini case studies, based on projects I’ve done with my clients, to find out.

It’s lovely to see more organizations consistently testing to boost performance! But it’s sad to see marketers doing tests which are returning inconclusive or just plain useless results. Here are three of the most common testing mistakes my team and I run across working with clients, along with tips for how you and your team can avoid making them in the future!

 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes the law of the land in the European Union on May 25, 2018. I’ve read a lot of ‘glass half empty’ commentary about current marketing practices that will be difficult or prohibited under the new regulations.But the more I read the more I feel...

In “The Blueprint for Better Performance Testing” I walked you through how I look at an existing email campaign to come up with hypotheses for testing.

But what do you do when you don’t have an existing campaign to look at – what do you do when you’re developing a performance testing plan for a brand-new product or service?

 

"It’s just not pony enough.”

Marketing Manager
My Little Pony

The quote above was the full extent of creative feedback to an email my creative team and I developed for Hasbro’s My Little Pony group back in the early aughts.

“The most important work in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.”

David Ogilvy
Founder, Ogilvy and Mather
Considered the Father of Advertising

Sending an email marketing message is easy. But boosting bottom line performance from send-to-send -- that’s a little more difficult. The key to success here is testing.

If you’re not doing any performance testing, now’s the time to start. If you are already doing regular testing, commit to upping your game. Either way, here’s a quick walk through the process my team and I follow to help guide you.

“I have more than enough time to do everything I want to do to make my email marketing program more effective.”

-- said no email marketer ever