• Email Brand Equity: Hotels
    A few weeks ago I spoke about releasing a Brand Equity Index that would attempt to measure the overall impression that a customer might have of a company based on its total email marketing efforts. By total efforts, I mean the effect that not only a company's in-house lists generate -- but also the effect that third-party sponsorships, newsletters, and affiliate networks have on that brand. Multiple considerations went into developing the index, including the percentage lift in Web traffic after an email is sent, frequency, and list quality. We tried to provide a level playing field so that small …
  • Best Day To Mail?
    If you are considering testing to find the best day of the week to send your email, the Email Diva has some advice for you: don't bother. Or, perhaps, make this the LAST thing you test, after you have optimized your user experience, opt-in page, format, creative, copy, links, subject line and offer.
  • Better 'Gift-Giving': More Effective Email Creative
    The holidays are right around the corner, and my five-year-old is already counting down the days to the big gift-opening extravaganza otherwise known as Christmas at Nana's house. His approach to opening gifts is down to a science. He scans his pile and evaluates who each gift is from, and has an idea of what to expect based on previous experience. It dawned on me that his approach to opening the gifts is not unlike how we approach reading emails in our inbox. Perhaps when developing email creative, business managers can apply tactics similar to that of the gift-giver.
  • The 'Balanced Scorecard': Measuring The Entire Email Picture
    An effective email marketing program isn't just a big single-cell creature. It's an interconnected ecosystem, with many factors that affect its vitality. Using a limited set of metrics to measure performance can mislead you into thinking you're succeeding wildly or failing miserably. Instead, use a "balanced scorecard" approach to get readings from all around the ecosystem and help you understand more clearly exactly how well you're really doing.
  • Email And Europe
    According to the latest Jupiter report, there may be trouble ahead for Europe's growing email business due to the over-reliance on home-grown email applications (or HEAs, as Jupiter likes to call them).
  • Spam Traps And List Hygiene
    Dear Email Diva: I work for a nonprofit and we use an old version of [email software] for our many lists. We continually run into trouble with spam trap email accounts subscribing to our opt-in lists, which causes us to be blocked by Spam Cop. Our aging system doesn't have an effective way of identifying these or other bad email addresses. Can you recommend a utility that will scrub our subscriber lists?
  • Olive Oil Maker Provides Conversion Lessons
    Search marketing is often the first place brands turn to when attempting to minimize conversion costs. They create a keyword strategy and optimize their site for better organic results. Maybe there's some display advertising in the mix, too, and ongoing testing and iterations of creative to maximize pull. Then they add in some landing page optimization to push conversion metrics higher still. Now the marketer's program is running on all six cylinders. Yet among the hand-raisers, some convert and some, well... don't. Unfortunately, many marketers stop their conversion efforts then and there, But what about those hand-raisers that didn't convert? …
  • The Achilles' Heel Of The Email Marketing Industry
    The DMA 07 conference last month was an eye-opener for me, with a few events coming together to convince me of something undeniable in the email marketing space: there's a huge demand for basic email marketing education.
  • The Email Brand Equity Index
    A product's "brand equity" has been described as the sum total of the tiny impressions a consumer builds up around a product, through each and every interaction that consumer has with the brand. Giant missteps either intentional (New Coke) or unavoidable (the Tylenol scare) can destroy a brand's equity over night. But more common is the death of a thousand cuts where day-by-day, small impression by small impression, a once strong brand is reduced to a shell of its former self. Think Saturn.
  • Static IP And Dedicated Server?
    Dear Email Div: We run a small boutique email marketing agency from Monterrey, Mexico and send the campaigns from a hosted campaign manager. Since we have shared hosting, and reputation is now a critical deliverability issue, I would like to ask you: Do we really need a static IP, and is that enough, or do we need a dedicated server and a static IP?<
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