• Great Email Marketing Starts With Great Acquisition
    Great email marketing is all about performance. Working with performance in mind is what we're all doing constantly: testing, analyzing, finding new ways to improve ROI: better inbox delivery, better segmentation, better offers. And the best email marketers add one more activity to that list: better acquisition.
  • Customer Data And The Power Of Now
    If a fly on the wall of most marketing departments took notes, it would know there is a massive amount of data out there. It would also know that, of all the data that's available, not much of it is being put into action. During the past few years I've heard many of the biggest brands express the same lament: We have a lot of data we're not even using, so do we really need more? The answer is yes, with the caveat that you need it to be the right kind of data. And the right kind of data …
  • Super-Engagement: Increasing The Value Of Your Most Valuable Subscribers
    Engagement is critical to email marketing success. It's so important that when our regularly scheduled broadcast emails fail to engage, we launch reengagement campaigns to reactivate inactive subscribers or those at risk of becoming inactive. That's smart because reengagement efforts improve deliverability and extend the time that subscribers are on your list, boosting their subscriber lifetime value. However, as much time as you invest in reengagement, you should be investing even more in "super-engagement": messaging tactics that further engage subscribers who are already highly engaged.
  • The Glass Needs Resizing
    The optimist says, "The glass is half full." The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty." The marketing consultant says, "Your glass needs resizing." This just about sums up a conversation about a distribution list late last week between a group of industry insiders. It made me think of several things. If the industry (marketing/advertising industry) is growing at the rates that groups like Winterberry reports, what is the real impact of this growth on the vendor supply chain? How is it affecting marketers and consumers?
  • Send a Blast, Kill a Hamster
    Ah, hamsters. They're cute and cuddly, even when they're running on their squeaky wheels at 3 in the morning. You feed them and keep them safe, and everything's fine until the day somebody forgets to refill the water bottle over vacation. Bye-bye, little buddy. Your email subscribers are like hamsters. They're less furry, perhaps, but they also react badly to mistreatment, like a pounding, constant stream of undifferentiated broadcast email messages.
  • Email Marketing, Then And Now
    Recently, my kids asked about what I do for a living. They decided my explanation wasn't good enough, so they did what they have grown accustomed to doing when they want a question answered: They hit up Google, and searched, well, me. (It was a surreal experience to have my children "Google" me!) During their search, they found the first post I submitted to MediaPost, on June 11, 2009, nearly five years ago. I was curious to reflect on the content and recommendations made "then" to what we are talking about "now" in the email space. What struck me as …
  • Artificial Manure And Better Emails
    Way back in the late 19th century, in rural England, an agricultural scientist named Sir John Bennet Lawes founded Rothamsted Experimental Station and patented the first artificial manure. This not only marked the start of the chemical fertilizer industry, but it was also a key development in the search for more effective emails. We are constantly told that testing is the path to better email response rates, but we also know how time consuming and expensive it is to test all the variables that define an email campaign. What Sir John and his colleague, Joseph Henry Gilbert, did was invent …
  • Is There A Future for Digital Marketing Within Wearables?
    Keep your eyes peeled, kids, a new screen is coming to town. While a bit down the road, 2015 may be the year that wearable technology marks a commanding presence, with products like Nike FuelBand, Google Glass and Samsung Galaxy Gear paving the way for more development within the wearables market. And where there's a screen, the digital marketer will come.
  • Achieving Omnichannel Marketing
    Since the '90, cross-channel, multichannel and omnichannel marketing has been the place where marketers connected user experiences with multidepartmental efforts. Optimizing this involves some guesswork, since if you ask folks exactly what is entailed, you will likely get different responses.
  • How To Better Position Your Emails In The Inbox
    Positioning is what you do when you set out to differentiate your emails from your competitors in your customer's mind, as well as the inbox. In my previous column, I outlined a strategy of evaluation and discovery you should follow before you get down to the nitty-gritty elements of email positioning. It's important to take these preliminary steps first, so you know where you're in relatively good shape and what you need to work on. Once you're ready to start working, the steps below can help you work through the tactical process of positioning -- or repositioning -- your email …
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