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Elie Ashery

Member since December 2006Contact Elie

Elie is a true entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to Internet marketing and new media. He is responsible for the vision and strategy execution for Gold Lasso and helps to lead the innovation behind the Company’s products and services. Elie’s career as an Internet marketer has been chronicled in numerous media outlets including Entrepreneur Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine and The Washington Post. As a thought leader, Elie has written a variety of articles for trade journals and blogs covering a wide range of Internet marketing topics from strategy to ethics and speaks regularly at trade events. As a loyal Maryland Terrapin, Elie hold an executive masters degree in business administration and bachelors degree in finance in addition to serving as an adjunct professor of strategy and game theory at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business

Articles by Elie All articles by Elie

  • Publishers' Missed Opportunities With Mobile Email Have Wider Consequences in Email Insider on 09/24/2014

    I'm a news junkie! I admit it! To continually feed my habit every waking hour, I subscribe to no fewer than 137 daily email newsletters, from big-name publishers to small niche bloggers, and I scan almost all of them on my four-inch iPhone 5s screen. In general, my daily email newsletter habit saves me a lot of time. It's quicker than jumping from app-to-app or site-to-site to satisfy my fix. However, at times I get frustrated and stumble from the routine of using my right thumb to scroll down and click. This frustration usually happens when I encounter a mobile-unfriendly newsletter,

  • Native Variables For An Email Home  in Email Insider on 08/19/2014

    Native ads are hot! This controversial yet ultra-effective tactic of blending content, advertisement, and placement is heading straight for consumers' inboxes. With a firm hold on the social channel, native ads are quickly making their way to the email channel where they are a natural fit for mobile newsletter formats. Despite the initial success of native ads, many email publishers are fumbling with their implementation and optimization. Here's some help.

  • Monetizing Email Post-Click in Email Insider on 07/29/2014

    When publishers think about email newsletter monetization, the first things that come to mind are usually list rentals, sponsorships, and display ads. While these typical pre-click monetization tactics work well, they often have inherent risks such as subscriber disengagement, list attrition and deliverability issues. What if there was a more elegant way to monetize email? While most publishers focus on the real estate inside an email for monetization opportunities, they often overlook the most valuable parcels containing complete subscriber attention: the post-click.

  • Get Ready For Email 3.0  in Email Insider on 07/29/2009

    It's definitely not the most elegant collaboration tool, but email is the most widely used for sharing thoughts, documents and other communication essentials. So it's surprising it has taken this digital medium over 40 years to evolve from plain ASCII text to a soon-to-be social application for managing relationships and efficient collaboration on business documents. Get ready for Email 3.0, a one-inbox mix of social media, instant messaging, text messaging, news feeds, widgets and other mash-ups all swirled together creating a better organizational environment for the user -- and greater challenges to the email marketer.

  • Streaming Video -- Coming To An Email Near You in Email Insider on 06/03/2009

    According to comScore, more than 10 billion video clips are viewed online every month -- providing companies big and small with an incredible opportunity for cost-effective branding, product display and demonstration. Ironically, the ability to incorporate streaming video into an email campaign was practiced in the early days of the commercial Internet, yet stymied when inbox providers and software developers started blocking javascript in email for obvious security reasons. With cutting-edge video technologies now available and the pent-up demand for video integration with email from both marketers and consumers, inbox providers are heeding the call by developing new programs for marketers to tinker with email video delivery.

  • Social Media Vs. Email: The Debate Continues in Email Insider on 04/08/2009

    To build on my colleagues' positions in previous postings, social media is eroding email's social use in spite of its reliance on the medium and desperate claims that these two mediums can exist symbiotically in their current forms. If you're a B2B marketer you can skip reading the rest of this -- because I have yet to see LinkedIn and the like encroach on email's power in the business world. However, consumer marketers better pay attention, because your ability to achieve the same ROI year over year with email is going to be turned on its side.

  • How to Squeeze More Value From Your ESP In Tough Economic Times  in Email Insider on 03/11/2009

    In case you haven't kept up with the email marketing industry over the past few months, it has been star of glimmering hope for marketers enduring economic turmoil. In fact, the industry has been faring so well that many email service providers (ESPs) have announced record growth for 2008 and expect to do equally as well in 2009. Even though demand for ESP services is high and clients are spending more, there is still a lot of competition. Now is the time to try to squeeze more value from your ESP, while many are fat and happy.

  • Timing Is Email's Trump Card in Email Insider on 02/11/2009

    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.

  • The Boldest 2009 Predictions For Email Marketing  in Email Insider on 01/14/2009

    Every January email marketing pundits try to make predictions of what the industry will bring for the upcoming year. They range from the career conservative to off the wall reckless. Some self-serving predictions blur the line between editorial and advertising so much so only a New Year's hangover can help you tell the difference between the two. With that being said, here are my four bold predictions for 2009, prefaced by the fact that I have a short-term 50% accuracy rate and an 80% long-term rate. So I'm usually right, eventually.

  • The $700 Billion Bailout And Email Marketing in Email Insider on 11/04/2008

    I can't help but feel queasy about how current economic conditions are going to affect my business and the email marketing industry as a whole. Not understanding the full ramifications of sub-prime derivatives, in January I predicted that a recession would be good for email marketing as companies increase their investment in lower cost marketing mediums with a strong ROI. Even with frozen credit markets and a shrinking GDP I'm confidently standing by my prediction especially since the volume of my email subscriptions has spiked exponentially over the past couple of months.

Comments by Elie All comments by Elie

  • Email Marketing (Is) For Dummies by David Koretz (Publishing Insider on 08/12/2010)

    Like any institution the quality of output is based on admission standards. Email marketing as an institution has bottom of the barrel admission standards. It's cheap and anyone with a pulse can call themselves an email marketer. Things have improved slowly over the number of years with more companies embracing best practices however there won't be a tectonic shift until price or some other force flushes the bad apples.

  • Get Ready For Email 3.0 by Elie Ashery (Email Insider on 07/29/2009)

    @Dean - You could be right. Google has had a ton of flops however I definitely think email will change over the next few years.

  • Get Ready For Email 3.0 by Elie Ashery (Email Insider on 07/29/2009)

    @Keith - You need to do more research before you post. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Internet knows it started as DARPAnet. From Wikipedia "The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation" So while you hippies were frying your brains at Woodstock the military nerds created the network you make your living from. How Ironic!

  • Social Vs. Email: It's The Wrong Debate by Morgan Stewart (Email Insider on 04/29/2009)

    Morgan, This is a good piece and a very good analysis. My tirade wasn't an either or debate but rather a distant prediction of social media cannibalizing the social use of email for the 35 and younger crowd. Therefore I should have chosen a more suitable title however I don't think it would have been as enticing. My comments on integrating social media with email are to stress to marketers that they shouldn't rely on technology alone. Technology facilitates the integration, but content is the impetus for success. If your messages are construed as boring, what incentive does an individual have to share them? This is why just having a social media link doesn't cut it. If you have any stats regarding social media integration I would love to see them. I don't think it's a far cry to hypothesize that success is based on message content not technology.

  • Social Media Vs. Email: The Debate Continues by Elie Ashery (Email Insider on 04/08/2009)

    John, Please read my blog post in its entirety. I never said email is dead or will die. Email works and will continue to work otherwise I wouldn't have mortgaged my house five years ago to fund Gold Lasso. Just as direct mail continues to work 150 years later for some industries, so too will email in 20 years. My blog is about trends and how it's important for email marketers to understand the social media trend. It seems as though many ESPs already get this hence SilverPop branding themselves as a customer engagement company and ExactTarget as a marketing messaging company. This kind of market positioning uses email but doesn't rely on it exclusively for continued future growth. Why? Because other channels such as social media are a preferred channel for younger generations. This is what marketers call a growing trend. Unlike RSS which didn't and still doesn't have real market adoption, FaceBook with 200M users is a different story. If you can't get this than you're not as smart as your LinkedIn profile makes you out to be. I'm not having it both ways... I'm trend spotting. Please stop trying to twist my words for the people who are too lazy to ready the whole blog post and only read comments. And as far as my age goes, I started a venture backed dot com when I was 21 that completely relied on search and email marketing. The company was purchased by MarketResarch.com. So yes, I do have just a little bit of experience. I forgot to address one last thing... Greg, I humbly disagree with you that FaceBook is only good for all inclusive socializing. There's definitely a private aspect to the service and the intra email features pretty much mimic any other email service that's out there. People ARE communicating very private things via FaceBook.

  • Social Media Vs. Email: The Debate Continues by Elie Ashery (Email Insider on 04/08/2009)

    John - I've been in the email space before I drinking age and I agree email is still the Internet's killer app. However, I'm not going to bury my head in the sand and pretend that Social Media isn't taking major market share away from email. BTW: My tiny, non-venture backed, profitable ESP that flies under the radar continues to grow adding hundreds of middle market clients annually. We are hiring people in this terrible economy and everyone is well compensated. I thank email marketing every day for my success!

  • Social Media Vs. Email: The Debate Continues by Elie Ashery (Email Insider on 04/08/2009)

    I never said email doesn't work or won't work in the future. It obviously does otherwise I wouldn't be in the business. All I'm saying is that it's going to be marginalized by choices and a dominant choice is going to be social media. Paula - I still get birthday cards too! Once a year! What does your mailbox look like the other 364 days of the year? If you are my age (34) or older, I promise your kids and grand kids will be too freakin' lazy to buy and mail you a birthday card. Look at the modern conveniences these kids have with instant gratification. You tell me the trends? Craig - The trend is your friend! Don't ignore it! Embrace it! Keep in mind this isn't an article but a blog post. I never stated any facts just thoughts. Also, I don't have dreams because my infant son keeps me up all night... wanna babysit? Lighten up a little! Jason - I never said putting social media links in email won't work... I said it wasn't practical to do so with the same crappy email content. However, I'm in total agreement with the 1:1 factor of email... not that many marketers take advantage of it. Also, if you're one of those dorks that likes to tell your friends on FaceBook about the cool new white paper your company released... YOU AREN'T COOL AND DON'T FRIEND ME! Save it for LinkedIn. I work 14 hour days too but I don't care about your white paper, business blog, case study or survey when I'm trying to find out what my drinking buddies are doing or the latest neighborhood gossip. Get a life!

  • Will Social Media Kill The Email Star? by Loren McDonald (Email Insider on 03/26/2009)

    Loren, I agree with your analysis of the evolving inbox. It supports the theory that your inbox will soon resemble the metal mailbox sitting on your front lawn... filled with bills and junk! Unless Social Networks become the new inbox providers, "email" marketers will be shut out of the social channel. No one wants to post a commercial email on Facebook - way lame!

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