• Leap Ahead: Email Marketing In 2016
    In honor of Leap Day tomorrow, let's leap ahead four years to the year 2016. A lot has changed in the world of email marketing....
  • Take A Creative Leap On Holidays
    Holidays provide wonderful opportunities for email creative teams to break away from the routine and turn their imagination to witty tie-ins. Two factors are essential for holiday email success: the right timing and an appropriate message.
  • 25 Email Marketing Questions to Ask Yourself Now
    In my role as a marketing evangelist, I spend much of my time answering questions from email marketers, from the basic -- "What's the average open/click-through rate?" -- to increasingly more important queries, such as "How do we optimize our emails for mobile devices?" However, I'm still not hearing many marketers ask the tough, strategic or root-cause questions that address core business issues, analyze challenges or identify opportunities. Here are 25 questions (some with corollaries) that you and your marketing team should be able to answer, immediately or after some analysis or investigation.
  • Dancing To The Tune Of The 'All About Me' Consumer
    At least one speaker at the recent MarketingSherpa Email Summit mentioned that today brands must deal with the "all about me" consumer. The implication seemed to be that this was something new, but I disagree with that notion. It's not that consumers' natures have changed. It's that the tools at their disposal to express their natures have, making it clear what it's always been about: them.
  • Email Insider Summit: Call for Submissions
    The Media Post Email Insider Summit is a unique event where the biggest brands and brightest minds caucus for a three-day whirlwind of island events and ardent discussions on the state of email marketing. Many of us have been going for years and couldn't imagine not being there. The programing committee is currently working to secure three keynotes and eight to nine program panels. In keeping with past events, we are looking to combine the expertise of known leaders in the industry with the best and brightest new voices in email marketing. And this is where we could use your …
  • Four Signs Of A Dysfunctional Email Program
    A friend of mine recently shared with me an article that her office was sending around. Titled "7 Signs of a Dysfunctional Company," it was distributed by her company's executive management team, who asked staffers to comment, honestly, on how they felt their company fared against the criteria mentioned in the piece. As I read through the article, two thoughts immediately struck me. First, one had better watch out for the sorry suckers at her office who step in that landmine. I mean, c'mon. Executive management asking the staff if they meet the definition of dysfunctional -- isn't that, in …
  • Don't Be Creepy: Keeping Subscribers Comfortable In The Days Of Diminishing Privacy
    A couple of years ago, the major conversations about privacy in the email world concerned list sharing: Is it okay to share your subscribers' email addresses with your sister brands? Is it okay to market to purchased lists? Now, with the ever-increasing interconnection of our subscribers' email habits and their other social networking sharing, privacy questions get more complex and expansive. We have multiple contact points with subscribers, reaching not just their inboxes but their mobile devices and their social networks. The lines have blurred.
  • DMARC: What It Is And Why You Need To Care
    By now nearly everyone in the email industry has probably heard about DMARC, a coalition of leading companies like Google, PayPal and Microsoft. The goal of the group is to create a standard for how email authentication is handled so that brand owners can safeguard their domains from phishing.
  • Target Non-Responders
    There's been a lot of debate about whether to target those who never open, read or respond to your email. Conventional wisdom would conclude that consumers who don't have a measured interaction through a channel in a given period of time would naturally be suppressed from future mailings. But the email marketing community doesn't give up that easily.
  • What's Your Black Friday?
    Black Friday has become a critical day and event for many retailers. For florists, their "Black Friday" is now: the period leading up to next Tuesday, Valentine's Day. For your business, it could also be an obvious event or time period such as Mother's Day, Halloween or ski season. More likely, however, it is probably a key trigger aspect of your business or marketing program that drives the majority of revenue or conversion activity. This critical aspect is the "fulcrum" of your email-marketing program: the point on which the rest of your email success depends. Following are four suggestions to …
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