Month: April 2009

Email marketers are always on the lookout for the next best thing. We always want to be recognized as "thinking outside the box." This kind of entrepreneurial spirit is what we're all about as we go off into the digital world. Some recent studies have suggested that around 95% of...

There's plenty of information on the Internet about how to manage bounces, but not much about why it's so important to do so. And if you don't know the why, will you follow the how? Although email marketing has countless moving parts to it, one part is key: Deliverability. This...

One of my favorite quotes in the past few years is from David Daniels of Forrester Research who often says that "sending email to people that haven't opened or clicked in a year is like flying an airplane advertisement over a ghost town." Love it. That visual really brings the...

It's not surprising that a recent study of UK email subscribers finds that most email marketing is pretty terrible – it's irrelevant, untargeted and poorly timed. What the study really points out is that consumers notice. Put out by Emailcenter, an ESP in the UK, the study polled British consumers...

A recent MediaPost article explores the notion of placing unsubscribe links at the top, rather than or in addition to the bottom of email marketing messages, in order to mitigate spam complaints. My take: Placing an unsubscribe link at the top of an email marketing message in order to reduce...

For too long, too many marketers have underestimated the value of email's impact on offline retail. Some believe that email marketing boosts only online sales, when in actuality cross-channel messaging carries high value across brand sales, reinforcing relationships with customers and, when optimally leveraged, alerting them to brick-and-mortar sales and...

Following the eec announcement of the Render Rate, some have asked why? Who cares? And what makes the Render Rate better than the other proposed metric—Action Rate—or vice versa? As outlined in the previous post, How Opens Are Tracked and Reported, there are a large number of scenarios where an...

As the first quarter of the year recently ended, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss a question that I keep getting asked by current and prospective clients: "What is the industry average for delivery rates?" As much as I've talked about this with clients and in public...

Last month I was delighted to learn that one of my clients, Sony, won the gold award at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami for best automated series. The winning campaign was a serialized message stream developed to welcome, educate, and engage individuals who had just joined the Sony Rewards...

Marketing to a belt-tightening consumer base, it's now more important than ever to entice subscribers with the most compelling offers you can dream up. It's equally important, of course, to deliver the offers in the most compelling emails possible. It's been interesting to see more inventive sale messaging strategies and...