• Did Your Email Have A Wardrobe Malfunction?
    It happens to the best of us (even A-list celebs): the dreaded wardrobe malfunction. You put something out there in the world that is best kept under wraps or to the confines of your private life. But, nonetheless, it is out there and needs to be dealt with. Some wardrobe malfunctions are bigger than others -- and the response will depend on just how egregious the offense happens to be. And to be clear, "oops!" isn't always the right answer.
  • Three Messages That Kill Deliverability
    More than any others, these three message types drive complaints. They hit spam traps. They are sent to dead accounts. They get ignored. They get deleted without opening. They're your worst-performing emails: the ones responsible for your biggest blocking and bulking problems. Unfortunately, they're also among your most important. As we review thousands of email programs and millions of messages every day, we find these three are the source of a disproportionate number of deliverability issues. The good news is that as bad as their impact can be on your email program, there are many concrete steps you can take …
  • What Email Marketers Can Learn From Well-Managed Social Media Content
    Last week, Mike May wrote a great post posing an important question: does a brand's social media content make good email marketing content? Put another way, since social media is so effective at engaging customers, should email marketers pull copy directly from their Facebook timelines or Twitter feeds and plop it into their email campaigns? Mike makes an insightful case for why this isn't a good idea, and his post sparked some thoughtful conversation in the comments about where a brand's social media and email content should and shouldn't overlap.
  • Getting Email Marketing Done: Lessons From The Sustainability Revolution
    "We're strong on the destination, but we're weak on getting there." That quote is from Auden Schendler's "Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution." He's talking about his experiences in greening up the ski resort industry, but his quote also describes many marketers' efforts to reach their email marketing goals.
  • Does Social Content Make Good Email Copy?
    I've written before about how email and social media are similar, in that they are both permission-based channels (or earned media) that require a similar approach to content strategy. But are email and social media similar enough to share not just a content strategy, but actual content? An increasing number of marketers have remarked to me that it would be nice if emails could automatically pull content off the brands' Facebook timelines or Twitter feeds, and auto-generate emails. It's a question worth pondering.
  • How To Design Great-Looking, High-Performing Mobile Email
    Knowing how to design great mobile email is one of the cornerstones of a great mobile advertising campaign. You could be running a mobile search campaign driving people to a landing page optimized for driving sign-ups. Or you could be running signup ads on mobile apps to capture the email addresses of people who are interested in your business. No matter what type of campaign you are running, you need to design great looking mobile email if you want to extend that first point of contact into a long-term relationship. Using these simple tips, you'll be able to do just …
  • Learn About HTML Code To Understand What's Possible In Email
    What's the one thing all email marketers should know? The backbone of email marketing is HTML, yet very few email marketers understand what is possible or how to interpret it to effectively direct the implementation teams doing the work. Now, the expectation isn't that you should be able to code an HTML email from scratch, in a notepad file. -- no one expected me to run the die-cut machine at the printing press when I was in direct mail -- but you do need to understand what is going to drive your production team batty (more times than not).
  • The Fallacy Of The Hyper-Relevant Unsolicited Email
    Everyone hates spam, but some Big Data evangelists have been making the claim that in time marketers will be able to send unsolicited emails that are so personalized and relevant that consumers will completely forgive that they were spammed. In fact, consumers will reward the marketing sophistication of these brands by opting in to receive future emails. It's a wonderful bit of boasting that's sure to appeal to Old School direct marketers who are resentful that all the New School channels are permission-based. But it's a claim that's completely unhinged from reality, for three key reasons:
  • Attribution, Response And Audience Management
    Attribution in the online space is a practice that is so overused, and so misunderstood. The very simple goal of attribution is to weight the various stimuli influencing a purchase or desired interaction to help inform how you spend your marketing dollars. The challenge with adding email to the view of attribution is that it skews all attribution models, since it has a longitudinal impact on engagement -- and doing an attribution exercise for a specific time period doesn't accurately reflect the real influence on a purchase of a stream of emails that serve different functions.
  • The Latest Email Benchmarks: How Do You Compare?
    Email marketers love benchmarks. Of course, they aren't the only ones, but emailers have a special yen for the numbers because email marketing has so many ways you can use them to measure your success. So, if numbers are your thing, I have a smorgasbord of them for you.
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