• Introducing The 'Render Rate'
    As an email marketer, publisher, email service provider or other participant in the email industry, you have a chance to help shape the development of an important new metric: the render rate, as proposed by the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the Email Experience Council. The "render rate" is a new industry-wide metric created to measure the initial level of email engagement more accurately and consistently than the open rate.
  • Using Response Data To Make Great Decisions
    No one outside the email team cares about clicks and opens. What they care about it is response - the email channel's contribution to revenue and other business drivers. If we email marketers want to be taken seriously, we have to start measuring our success in succinct business terms.
  • 5 Tips To Help You Stay Out Of The Oopsy Hall of Fame
    Tomorrow I'll be inducting the newest class into the final Hall of Fame of 2008 -The Oopsy Hall of Fame. This is the kind of fame that nobody wants, but highlighting the email marketing slips and gaffes by some of the world's largest online retailers drives home the importance of being careful with your brand in a medium that's high-volume and lightning-fast. You can check out all the particulars tomorrow, but here are five tips based on trends from the 2008 class of the Oopsy Hall of Fame:
  • Take The Oath Of Office
    As I sat watching President Obama sign his first executive orders, it made me think about the first 100 days of an executive term and how that sets the tone for the whole time as leader. There is a great read by Michael Watkins, "The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels," that is a must-have for any manager or leader in a new role. Some of the principles in this book are important to people running eCRM and email programs for major corporations.
  • Email Data Is Your Friend: 4 Deliverability Measures To Increase Revenue
    Email marketers do have an arsenal of ammunition at the ready -- it's sitting in our data. Beyond the typical open, click, bounce/delivered and unsubscribe metrics, start to take a look at other data sources: Web analytics, inbox delivery rates, ISP feedback loops and time delays on response, profile data, demographics, social media traffic and the topics covered by citizen media and bloggers. The real power of this data is not at the campaign level, but at the subscriber level. This is the only way to move from batch and blast to a lifecycle email marketing approach -- and earn …
  • Obama Embraces The Change We Need With Email
    Ever since the election's conclusion, the Obama-Biden transition team has been reaching out to me for input, to educate me on the challenges ahead and to solicit my commitment to stand with the president to drive change, all via my inbox. Let's look at two of the email campaigns the transition team deployed and use them as examples for how all email marketers should be engaging their customers.
  • Puttin' On The Ritz: Is Your email Up To The New Gold Standard?
  • Puttin' On The Ritz: Is Your Email Up To The New Gold Standard?
    Joseph A. Michelli's book, The New Gold Standard, covers the "5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company." While email inboxes don't have much in common with plush Ritz-Carlton hotel rooms, there are lessons about stellar service that we can use to make our email programs a bit ritzier.
  • Five Steps for Implementing A Lifecycle Marketing Plan
    The concept of lifecycle marketing has been around for some time, and most marketers do it to some extent, even if they don't call it "lifecycle marketing," per se. It goes hand-in-hand with segmentation -- and unfortunately, just as with segmentation, we still see a lot of marketers who do not leverage this strategic imperative, or do it poorly. Here are five key steps for making lifecycle marketing work for you, whether you are a beginner, or want to take a step back and evaluate your current program.
  • Twitter: Email With A 140-Character Limit?
    Twitter is (pick one): A. The latest fad that will eventually fade away; B. The biggest time suck since Facebook; C. The biggest communications revolution since email. I vote for "C." If you haven't dived into Twitter yet, you should, because your customers, prospects and competitors are tweeting away without you (and maybe even about you). Twitter is a different channel from email, mainly because it's real-time communications, but the two have many similarities that reinforce best communication practices, no matter which channel you use.
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