Last Thursday, people sat down with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving and eat their hearts out. Whether the tradition is to eat turkey, tofurkey, or chinese takeout, one things is for certain, most of the people who are busily enjoying a large meal on Thursday are ready to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  In early October, National Retail Federation released their forecasted numbers for 2016. While the 2015 holiday season didn’t perform as well as estimated, increasing 3.2% over the previous year, they’re forecasting in-store sales to increase 3.6% to $655.8 billion. Moreover, NRF is forecasting non-store (online sales) to increase a whopping 7-10% to as much as $117 billion.

The just-concluded Presidential election was – in a word – interesting.

As a marketer, it was fascinating watching two diametrically opposed candidates take each other on. This was not a test where one candidate was just slightly different than the other – it was a case where the candidates could not have been more opposite.

 While you may not be thrilled with the results, there were three key things that all marketers - and especially email marketers - can take away from the drama to make each and every one of their programs be more successful.

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William McCloskey says:

Influencers,

Last week I had a rare experience of a lifetime: seeing the evolution of an idea I had in my garage 13 years ago fully transformed into a powerful marketing tool used around the world. And for me it was an incredibly humbling experience. Let me explain: 

Every Friday, the members of Only Influencers get to pitch their latest tools and services. Below is the best pitches from the last month: 

Email Aptitude is a leading ESP-agnostic email agency, providing strategy and full-service management for some of the world's largest brands and fastest growing startups. The Email Aptitude team is made up of industry veterans and the new bright minds of email who work tirelessly to crush records for our clients. For...

(The following is the executive summary of a new report: "2016 Holiday Email Marketing Report" from Mailcharts. Download the full report here.)

Email marketing is crucial to your holiday success. Online sales reached $89.01 billion in Q4 2015 with email marketing driving 20% of that revenue. Online retailers know that email marketing is big business: email volume increased by 23% in Q4 2015 (compared to Q4 2014). Expect to see a similar increase in email volume during Q4 2016. Do you have a solid plan for the most important time of the year? Here’s our view on exactly what you should do. Let’s go!

Digital marketing leaders continue to promise consumers a true 1:1 personalized interaction. We have all said it, preached it, and many of us have it tattooed somewhere. Right Message. Right Time. Oh, Right Channel. Recently. Right Person.

Simple: load up the data, drag and drop, press magic button, personalization.

Emarsy  is a leading global provider of marketing automation software and the first marketing cloud for retail and e-commerce. The Emarsys B2C Marketing Cloud enables true, one-to-one interactions between marketers and consumers across all channels — building loyalty, enriching the customer journey and increasing revenues.  Machine learning and data science fuels...

The concept of “Identity” is having an identity crisis. While there has never been more data available for reaching and leveraging customers, there is a lack of resolution, both conceptually and practically, around the industry as to what it really means.

We already know that email can form the hub of your digital marketing program, with the email address housing all of your information about each customer in your database. Now, I want you to think how email testing can also drive your multichannel testing program to gain insights across your entire customer database.

  Despite the seemingly infinite real estate of the Internet, realistically, there is only a certain amount of inventory any individual publisher is going to have to sell that’s actually worth anything. So what’s the best way for publishers to provide more impressions without having to create new content or cramming...

“Why is my mail being blocked if I still get spam?”

It’s almost an inevitable question when handling delivery issues. I understand why I get it so often. People look in their inbox and see this mail is clearly spam and it’s in the inbox. But they look at the mail they send that they know isn’t spam and it ends up in the bulk folder. It’s logical to ask why legitimate marketers have to follow all these complicated and arbitrary rules to reach the inbox when spammers reach the inbox and they don’t follow any of the rules. 

After a long rumored courtship, Verizon finally pulled the trigger, acquiring Yahoo! for the sum of $4.8 billion dollars, raising questions about whether this move would put the massive telecom company in a position to turn Google and Facebook¹s digital media duopoly into a triopoly (which, we’ve just recently learned,is not...

68% of online shoppers abandon their carts. Sad, right? All those lonely, forgotten products… not to mention all that potential revenue your business is missing out on. For retailers, that comes out to $18 billion annually.

The Big Lebowski

Google recently announced that they will be supporting media queries within their Gmail platform which is great news for the email community. I was ecstatic when I heard the news and I can only imagine the cheers (and tears) of joy when other email developers around the world were notified as well. Although this update has not been released just yet, Google has hinted that it will be in place by the end of 2016.

As you head into the frenzy of the holiday email-marketing season, take a minute to step back and appreciate email's great strength as the original disruptive marketing channel.

Email, in fact, is enjoying a renaissance! Those of us who have made email the center of our work lives can rightly feel vindicated when study after study shows people prefer email for brand communications. As shown below from Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census 2016, the ROI still outshines every other channel from print to broadcast to direct and social.

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.

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.