Month: June 2008

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions: eec Reportlet: 7 Tactics for Driving Traffic to Stores With Email How to Leverage Your Store Base in Your Email Marketing Email Checklist Series: Email Design What to check to maximize your email creative's...

Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Stephanie Miller of Return Path: If you include your website navigation bar in your emails, test to see if...

The answer… 38% –> Direct mail and catalogs 19% –> Blogs/RSS 17% –> SMS (text messages) 10% –> Social networks 10% –> Internet ads 4% –> Search 2% –> Television and radio Are you surprised by the results? Share your comments below. Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the...

Hitting "send" on any email campaign always leaves us with a small feeling of dread in the pit of our stomachs. "Did I forget something? Did I double-check EVERYTHING? Will my message render properly? Will I have a job in two hours?" We feel your pain. Ever wish you had...

My little brother got tinted windows and rims on his sage green Chevy Malibu. (Sweet!) Just as he tricked out his transportation, so must we trick out our transactional emails, leveraging the opportunity to move the meter on the messages that generally enjoy the highest open rates (excuse me—render rates!)...

I rented a car from Enterprise for the May 2008 Email Insider Summit on Captiva Island in Florida. Enterprise has been my vendor of choice for the past 5 years because of their incredible customer service and comparable prices. As far as I'm concerned they are ozone layers above the...

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions: 2008 Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study Message Integrity & Email Design Issues in an Images-Off Environment Women's Bean Project Case Study The Results of the eec's 2007 Nonprofit Project FreshAddress: Build or Buy? Real-Time...

Over the past four weeks or so, I have been playing with a free outlook plug-in that has transformed my inbox into a much cooler place to be. It's called Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards) and I can now report with conviction that it is one of the more useful pieces...

Image blocking has become pervasive, with approximately half of all email users suppressing images by default. However, email marketers have not fully adjusted to this reality and reflected it in their email design. The two strongest weapons in their arsenal in the fight against image blocking, HTML text and alt...

A recent review of practices by top brand email marketers makes me think that there is something really wrong with our collective ability to follow best practices when it comes to creating compelling subscriber experience for new subscribers. Return Path just released the results of a study of 61 companies...

I was inspired by ExactTarget's recently published whitepaper, Subscribers Rule. "Subscribers Rule" is—in ExactTarget's words—"acknowledgement that we, as marketers, bear a responsibility to deploy one-to-one marketing technologies in ways that put subscriber needs first." I went for a jog yesterday in my "Subscribers Rule" t-shirt and contemplated great ways for...

Type the phrase "centralizing email marketing" into a search engine and you'll be served up an impressive number of results (at this writing, about 247,000). And it's no wonder—email marketing continues to rank among the most popular tactics that marketers use to reach their audiences. The arguments for centralizing are...