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Dela Quist

Member since May 2008Contact Dela

Articles by Dela All articles by Dela

  • Optimising For Both Ends Of The Purchase Funnel in Email Insider Europe on 01/22/2015

    The last year has been another 12 months of change for email, with high-profile acquisitions of specialist email businesses made by some of the biggest software companies in the world. Oracle bought Responsys, while IBM snapped up Silverpop. This is evidence, were it needed, that email is as important as it ever has been.

Comments by Dela All comments by Dela

  • Is Gen Z Snubbing Email Marketing? by Ray Schultz (Email Insider on 01/02/2019)

    Hi RayJohn Brandon is probably one of the most persistant "email is deader" around today. His perspective is driven his inability to distinguish a marketing email from a brand you buy from regularly and opt to receive email from and any other email, be it an email from your mom, one from your boss reminding you of a specific deadline or even a phishing email from Nigerian Prince. Anyone who cannot get their minds around the fact people treat & process the different categories of email in very different ways tends to be an "email is deader" by nature. This article like ALL his others proves it.He is obsessed with achieving inbox zero and therefore a HUGE fan of messaging so much so it wouldn't surprise me if he was a major investor in a messaging company :-)Dela

  • Does A Click Really Represent Engagement? by April Mullen (Email Insider on 12/17/2015)

    Hi April To truly understand engagement you have to do something counter-intuitive - walk away from campaign-level metrics such as open and click rates, which are the staple diet of email marketers the world over. Instead you must do what the inbox providers are effectively doing themselves - embrace subscriber-level metrics. They have dropped rudimentary rate-based metrics such as spam complaints and started looking at the inbox or subscriber level. Campaign-level reporting, such as those you describe and you get from your ESP, are what most email marketers use and are pretty simple to understand and calculate. Every time you send an email, you measure how many people got the email (delivered), opened it, clicked it, hit spam, or unsubscribed and then divide those numbers by the number of people sent that message. However, it is a HUGELY misleading measure of subscriber engagement because it looks at the message and not the subscriber who got it. Subscriber-level reporting is very simple in theory. You measure every interaction every subscriber on your list has with every email you send over a given period of time. When you send an email, every subscriber on your database can either be sent that email or not, receive it or not (delivered), open it or not, click on it or not and mark it as spam or not. Simple. But to truly measure engagement, not only do you have to repeat that process every time you send an email, you also have to connect each of these individual subscriber interactions with all of their previous interactions, whether you sent them an email or not. To find out more people reading this may want to read my article Deliverability Engagement and the theory of Email Marketing http://bit.ly/1B1wKwd

  • Go Ahead -- Send More Emails by Loren McDonald (Email Insider on 05/03/2013)

    Amen!! As you know Loren I have ever recommended that any serious email marketer send everyone on the list exactly the same message exactly the same number of times every month. That would just be stupid! What anyone who actually has to take responsibility for making their numbers knows is that if you send any given segment more email you will make more money and if you send them less you will make less money. So if you have 2 segments an active segment that you send 2 emails per week to and a less active segment you send 1 email a month you will make more money from BOTH groups if you increase the frequency of the actives to 3 a week and the inactives to 2 a month. The problem is that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work that out and stating the obvious doesn’t sell software or strategy. However the process of sending more email without compromising quality does however require a lot more resource. And to declare my interest, what Alchemy Worx does is provide highly skilled strategic, operational and analytical email marketing resources to our clients, enabling them to send every segment BETTER campaigns more often. And yes Chad some of those emails might not be triggered and go to the whole list. We have to stop our desire to sell our technology and expertise creating an environment where the very idea of wanting to send more email to be seen as Neanderthal or worse still spammy behavior!

  • Social Components Boost Email Campaigns by Gavin O'Malley (Online Media Daily on 03/29/2013)

    Hi Karolina You beat me too it, but it has just been brought to my attention that my comment (posted at 1am after a 9 hour flight) reads much more harshly than I intended. You are correct that 158% represents the increase, but it was reported in a way that was open to misinterpretation by a tired person :-) As to whether the mere presence of a Linked in icon can improve your click rates by such a staggering amount? No chance! So lets just agree to disagree

  • Social Components Boost Email Campaigns by Gavin O'Malley (Online Media Daily on 03/29/2013)

    There are lies damn lies and bad infographics. This piece of research is deeply flawed and it's findings completely misleading. Worse than that it fails the basic math test. GetResponse claim that including a linked in icon in your email improves average click rates from 2.4% to 6.2% - that is NOT a 158% increase it is a 258% increase! How can you trust research from people who make that kind of mistake! Even if you are generous enough to overlook that HUGE error, last years findings (dropped from this years infographic) stated that including a LinkedIn icon in your email will generate 4 - YES ONLY FOUR LinkedIn shares per 10000 emails opened. That is a share rate of 0.00008% (if you assume an open rate of 20%) and yet the study claims including a LI icon last year boosted click rates by 7%! To do that every share would have to generate 875 clicks. I doubt even the most enthusiastic drinker of social media cool aid would believe that to be true Dela Quist CEO Alchemy Worx

  • The Welcome Email Is Dead! by Loren McDonald (Email Insider on 05/31/2012)

    Hi Loren Good article and I agree with your central premise, however unlike Kurt I do think that there is a place for including a sales component to your welcome or on-boarding program without upsetting the new subscriber . Here's an example of why. A consumer is thinking about purchasing a new camera. As part of their research they visit 2 retailers’ websites and after looking around for a bit decide to subscribe to both their email programs. Retailer 1 sends a thank you for subscribing email with a voucher offering 10% off any camera (better still the camera they were looking at) if purchased online or in-store within 10 days. Retailer 2 spends several days/weeks over multiple emails building rapport, setting expectations, trying their hardest to sell the email program rather than a camera(s). Who do you think will get the sale? My bet is retailer 1. BTW The term I coined is Unemotionally Subscribed which I use to describe what I believe to be the largest group of people on your list; they are happy to be on your list, but have either not opened your email for a while because they haven't needed your product or service in that time or are buying regularly from you via other channels and do not feel the need to open your email. I derived it from the term emotionally unsubscribed which was in widespread use a couple of years ago which describes the same group of people but implies that they DON'T want your email at all, but just can't or won’t unsubscribe. As a result every email you send them makes them hate you more See you in London Dela

  • Relevance Is Overrated by Morgan Stewart (Email Insider on 04/27/2011)

    Hi MorganLike you I have long felt that it is time to STOP trying to be relevant. http://bit.ly/9HmFnE Instead of asking: "How can I be more relevant?" Ask how you can add more value to your email communications. You will then, by default become more relevant, and more importantly, you will be providing your subscribers with a reason to stay subscribed and interacting with your email program. Dela

  • Happy Valentine's Day, Says The Optimist by editor and David Baker (Email Insider on 02/14/2011)

    Great post David One of the problems the email industry has is that we love to make email marketing seem very much more complicated than it is or should be. We seem to prefer being up to our necks in the weeds "fixing" some arcane email specific issue to marketing. So it is nice to see you championing simplicity. Simple does not mean stupid. This is a must read for anyone who feels that they are too busy getting their campaigns out the door to do the smart stuff.

  • Do We Always Need Explicit Permission? by DJ Waldow (Email Insider on 12/20/2010)

    I know its called agreeing violently :-)

  • Do We Always Need Explicit Permission? by DJ Waldow (Email Insider on 12/20/2010)

    Hi Chad Fine if you disagree with me, but to say I completely misunderstand how the world works is overstating things a bit don't you think? For a start it implies omnisience on your part something I wouldn't dream of claiming; I just have an opinion that is as likely to be right as yours. Basically I also don't think that tried to understand my point. I did not and would not say we shouldn't learn from consumers all I was saying is that as an industry and as individuals we can also through education play a role in improving their lives. Let me take your point about consumers not having much faith in the unsubscribe button and that they don't believe that brands won't sell their email address. All of our clients and I would like to think all of Responsys' clients always honour the unsubscribe button and never sell their customers email addresses. Surely a campaign educating consumers of that fact would be beneficial to our clients AND their customers!All I was suggesting is we work together to find a way to teach consumers the difference between an opt-in email from Gap or CNN and some random CAN-SPAM compliant email from someone you never heard of who bought your name off someone equally disreputable. How could that be a bad thing? Sometimes I think that we as an industry prefer consumers to distrust all email. We can't stop spam nor can we stop snake oil salesmen using the channel, but we can teach consumers the difference between the sort of clients you and I have and the rest of the crap out there.

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