Sean Duffy is founder of Segmentum, an eCRM strategy & implementation agency, and Reignite, a real-time email personalisation platform.
Sean has been in the email marketing industry since 2003, initially spending 10 years at a start-up ESP, helping establish them as one of the UK's leading email marketing platforms. Since then he has also worked client-side before creating Segmentum in 2015.
"They basically all do the same thing". That’s a lot of marketers' views on ESPs, and if we take the basic purpose of sending and tracking a bunch of emails then yes, this is true. But those of you in the Only Influencers (OI) community know this isn’t really the case....
If you work for a consumer facing brand in sectors such as retail, marketplaces or travel where there is a relatively high propensity to buy multiple times, the chances are you are sat on a goldmine of under explored opportunities in relation to reactivating lapsed customers. I could quote lots of...
Just this week I saw yet another of those consumer surveys about email marketing commissioned by a tech vendor. Inside there were lots of obvious things that come from leading questions (like ‘Would you like less or more marketing emails in 2024?’. Phrased like that how do you think they’d respond?...
As marketers we tend to overthink how our customers feel, and how they interact with the marketing emails we send them. We obsess about what goes into the messages and the schedule, order and cadence of messaging. We’ve designed the campaigns so customers will rationally follow our lovely call-to-action as their...
In my last article I talked about the problem of using averages in email marketing. But there is of course a more pressing measurement issue with email – attribution. Attribution is the process of identifying and giving credit to the various touchpoints or interactions that contribute to a desired outcome, such...
Introduction As email marketers we think of ourselves as a data driven decision makers. We have stats coming at us from all angles such as open and click rates, transactional data like average order values and customer data such as time since last shopped. Yet the phrase “lies, damned lies, and...
A while ago I saw a press release from an ESP claiming to be net zero. At the same time, I was actively taking an interest in all things green having taken on an electric car. This seems to be the net zero version of a gateway drug to becoming obsessed...
In the B2C world what is the difference between CRM and email marketing? Nowadays the terms seem interchangeable. You only have to see many job ads that refer to CRM Manager who it seems sole responsibility is managing the email channel. Yet I would say there is a significant difference in...
For those who have had the pleasure (!?) of working with me over the years they’ll probably say I’m partial to a moan or a rant. I’d prefer to spin that as being a critical thinker but yes, there is a lot of truth in that! In all seriousness though no...
I’ve realised that as I write this, I’ve just hit 20 years in Email Marketing. Back in August 2002 I started my first job as Marketing Executive for a company that sold computers, printers, and peripherals to government and corporates. This is where, as a fresh-faced (and thinner) graduate I discovered...
According to Bluecore, 57% of brands number one email priority is email personalisation, which is unsurprising considering personalised emails can generate 6-times the transaction rates compared to ‘batch and blast’ (Source: Experian). With the demand for personalisation from email marketers being so high, it’s inevitable that every technological solution under the...
What is the best way of increasing revenue from email? Pop onto LinkedIn and you’ll see endless claims and case studies of what works with very specific strategies and approaches. But sometimes it’s useful to simplify the ideas and think more broadly about the best approach. Assuming we only have the...
As much as I’m clearly a fan of the email channel there have been a number of occasions recently where I see clients going to email to solve nearly all the commercial problems in their business. Whatever the problem is, the main action always taken is to send another email or...
Back in the 2000s everyone used to ask ESPs what their email delivery rate was. It was a meaningless number but one ESP would quote 98% delivery rates, the next would just claim 99%. Now you get the same questions around 'is your platform AI driven?' and ESPs have added AI...
As an email marketer for over 18 years across vendor, client and agency side I’m always struck by how much of our time is spent on tactical initiatives and having the feeling of being a factory producing the same campaigns week after week. It seems to me that most email marketers...