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Using Personality To Help Drive Engagement 
Posted by Loren McDonald on Oct 22, 12:28 PM
My previous column, where I shared personal experiences about assumptions others have made about my wife and me without knowing us, turned out to be the second most popular column I've written for Email Insider, as measured by the number of readers' comments. I intended the column to caution against assuming too much about your subscribers and customers. However, reader reaction confirmed my view that showing a human, personal side in email, blogs and other communications content will lead to greater engagement with your customers and subscribers.
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My Name Is Loren. BTW, I'm A 'He' 
Posted by Loren McDonald on Oct 8, 11:31 AM
Hi, I'm Loren McDonald, and I'm a "he." You might not know that, though, by looking at the mail in my mailbox and messages in my email inbox. While I've never done an actual audit of my mail, I'm guessing that when a gender is inferred (e.g., Mr. or Mrs. Loren McDonald), one-third to one-half of my mail assumes that Loren is a female. So, how can you avoid or minimize potentially embarrassing and costly mistakes by assuming the wrong things about your customers and subscribers? Here are a few tips.
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Email Share-to-Social: Not Just About The Links 
Posted by Loren McDonald on Sep 24, 3:15 PM
I agree with my industry colleague Chad White, who predicted in this space that marketer adoption of email social sharing -- referred to as "share-to-social" or "share with your network" -- will overtake "forward to a friend" usage, perhaps even as early as two years from now.
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Warning: Blasting May Be Harmful to 'Our' Health  
Posted by Loren McDonald on Sep 10, 12:21 PM
A bunch of self-proclaimed "email snobs" (myself included) have been heating up the Twitterverse, email discussion lists and the blogosphere with a debate over the merits (or lack of them) of the language we use as email-marketing practitioners. Some of us believe that seemingly harmless words, like "blast" to describe deploying an email message or campaign, or "buy" to describe list rental, are symptoms of marketer ignorance, both accidental and intentional. Others say efforts to obliterate these words from the marketer's lexicon waste everybody's time on inconsequential matters and distract us from the real issues we have to deal with in email marketing.
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If Someone Says 'Buy' A List One More Time...  
Posted by Loren McDonald on Aug 27, 12:24 PM
Time to update the list of "Killer Bs" I first wrote about here in 2007. We'll save the upcoming "ban the blast" initiative for another time, so the next "B" word I would like to excise from the email marketing lexicon is "buy," as in "Where can I buy a list of a million dentists/Democrats/dog owners?" Sorry if I sound like an email snob, but I cringe when I hear someone, usually (but not always) an email newbie, talking about buying lists.
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Relevance: What Is It, Anyway?  
Posted by Loren McDonald on Aug 13, 11:33 AM
Ask any of my fellow Email Insider columnists (or other industry pundits) what is the No.1 key to email marketing success. I bet they'll reply with some variation of "relevance." But what does "relevance" mean? What makes one email more relevant than another?
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Email Success Requires Well-Educated Marketers 
Posted by Loren McDonald on Jul 30, 1:06 PM
A colleague on an email discussion group posed a version of this question recently: "Who is responsible for educating email marketers?" Is it their email service providers (ESPs)? Their employers? The more knowledgeable marketers are about the specialized approaches required for success in email marketing, the better for their company and the industry as a whole. Here's my list of essential areas that email marketers need to grasp in order to run successful programs.
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B2B Email Marketing Comes Of Age 
Posted by Loren McDonald on Jul 16, 9:35 AM
Consumer marketers have traditionally led in marketing innovation with their larger budgets and resources, use of agencies and direct sales models. However, B2B marketers are catching up to their B2C colleagues and, in many cases, surpassing them with the breadth and depth of their email marketing programs. They're finding ways to deliver greater utility and value without risking channel burnout, as we've seen on the consumer side.
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