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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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 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...

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 

Last week I was honored to be included on a list of ’The 20 Best Email Marketers You Should Follow and Steal From’ published by GetResponse. A colleague asked if that last part, “Steal From,” bothered me at all.

Some of the most effective email marketing campaigns are actually based on very simple ideas. Here’s a campaign that took very little effort but generated nearly $0.75 per email – along with the 5 simple ideas behind the program.

In case you missed it, using email newsletters to do content marketing is a thing. But not everyone is finding it to be effective. Many times the issue is the quality of the content. Here’s a brief overview of the situation along with 3 tips to help you elevate your content!

We continue our series of featuring some of the speakers at the upcoming Email Innovations Summit. Jeanne Jennings will be participating in the "Hanging Out Your Shingle: The Good, Bad, Ugly (and Upside!) of Starting an Email Consultancy" panel. Here are some of her most popular OI blog articles. The...

The 3Q 2015 Email Trends and Benchmark Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth taking a look at – reading it 3 things struck me.

Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. LinkedIn Pulse. Twitter. Vine. Your Company’s Blog. Your Personal Blog. Your Company’s Email Newsletter. The Email Newsletter for Your Personal Blog. The Article that You Write for that Industry Publication. The Post You Write for the Only Influencers Blog. And Random Other Opportunities that Arise.