• More On Making Your Emails Shareworthy
    In my previous Email Insider column, I outlined what motivates people to share content, either by forwarding an email or posting the contents on their social-networking sites, and the qualities that make your emails more shareworthy. In this column, we'll dive into some design and content ideas that can lead to increased sharing.
  • What Social Media Can Learn From Email Marketing
    Psst. Hey, marketer! Trying to figure out your social media strategy before the boss asks again? I gotta few tips for you. Many social media challenges can benefit from hard won lessons we've learned through email marketing.
  • Convers@ions: From Conversations To Conversions Through Email
    With the decentralization of media and the decrease in technology costs for video and other technologies, I've long believed in the content imperative. That is, for most companies, it's no longer enough to just sell stuff at a great price. You also have to create content that gives context and meaning to your products.
  • Building Customer Loyalty - Some Creative Examples
    I had a birthday last week, and it was a great birthday -- with email greetings and Facebook posts galore. I even got a few communications from companies that I do business with. I got a card from my financial planner and my dentist, and coupons for a free dinner from The Keg and a night out at a local casino. All of this made me feel very special and celebrated, while at the same time creating a sense of good will and loyalty to these specific companies. The experience prompted me to think about which email marketers are doing …
  • The Inbox As The 'Great Equalizer' For SMBs
    In recent weeks I have been lucky enough to speak with both large and small businesses that leverage the email channel to acquire, retain and grow customer relationships. At first glance, it's hard not to look at smaller companies as if they are standing next to the six-foot-three center in the middle of the basketball court with no hope of competing. The good news is that, like my eight-year-old, many of the marketers we work with don't know the word quit. Even better, unlike my son (who simply cannot grow taller or get faster in the first quarter of a …
  • Make Time For Creativity
    This column is going to depart a bit from my standard fare on email marketing tips and tricks and focus instead on my other area of passion -- creativity. Even though I run an email marketing company today, in a past life I wrote a couple of books on the topic and spent quite a bit of my career focused on it. In this economy, I think it's the companies that figure out how to use creativity in their marketing efforts (and especially in their email marketing efforts) that will reap great returns.
  • Personalized Forwarding: It's PERF!
    The email marketing world is buzzing with the questions and possibilities surrounding social networking tools. The potential to reach more people in a viral way is exciting, and we're all striving to maximize opportunities to share our email messages using new technologies. Using the Email Experience Council's holiday ecard as a test case, Smith-Harmon recently tried out a new viral sharing technology from Quorus: the "personalized forward," or PERF.
  • Revelations, Renovation And Improved ROI
    Today, companies are so entrenched in the details of this economic tsunami, they're scrambling to scale back, while still hoping to increase ROI. This may seem unrealistic -- but it be can an attainable goal, assuming they view this time as the prime opportunity to "renovate" their overall marketing approach.
  • Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?
    The explosive adoption of social networking won't put email out of business, but it does mean marketers need to look at the emails they create and send in a whole new light: How "shareworthy" are they?
  • Timing Is Email's Trump Card
    I always get a chuckle when my email marketing colleagues push "relevance" as an industry best practice. If we as marketing experts have to remind the common practitioner to ensure their message matches their market, it proves email marketing is an institution with bottom-of-the-barrel admission standards. Based on my experience, most email marketers fail not with relevance, but rather with the timeliness of their messages.
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