• What You Missed In 2011
    Back to school time is the usual signal to marketers that the remaining year is about to get busy with planning and execution of holiday marketing plans. I thought it would be nice to reflect a little on all that happened in 2011 before getting lost in the busy season.
  • Typography In Email: Tell Your Story With Type
    Web-safe fonts have always been major components of the email designer's tool kit. With the proliferation of disabled images, using Web-safe fonts ensures subscribers can understand the message without the help of graphics.
  • What Teens Think Of Email
    Earlier this year, AWeber offered a scholarship to the high school or undergraduate college student who best described what they think will happen to email now that social media is demanding so much attention. We wanted to know where email marketing may be headed, and what better way to find out than asking the up-and-coming generation? Some of their thoughts may surprise you; others just make sense. Overall, 44% believe email has its place and will stick around, 41% are more inclined to think social media will overtake email and 15% just aren't sure yet.
  • The State Of The State For Email And Social
    It wasn't exactly "Stranger in a Strange Land," but I found my email marketing background gave me a unique perspective on the topics that social media marketers were talking about at MediaPost's recent in Lake Tahoe.
  • The Differences Between List Size And Audience Size
    What accounts for the delta that some companies see between the people whose email addresses they have, and the people whose attention they have? Here are some thoughts...
  • The Marketing Petri Dish
    I believe customer acquisition will be an oxymoron in the future. We will have all the customers available to us through some form of data that we own or have rights to. Acquisition will not be front of the funnel solely as it is seen today or measured as such.
  • What Type Of Email Marketer Are You?
    As we look at how email marketing programs have evolved over time, we often stop, scratch our heads and wonder, "Are we still talking about the same best practices we were seven years ago?" And the answer is mostly... yes. The directionality of the best practices may change over time, but the fundamentals are still the same. So I started thinking -- the one thing we often overlook when assessing program performance and best practice application is, well... you. If you are running or involved in email marketing programs for your brand, then there is some semblance (or stamp) of …
  • Mobile Email: Three Things To Consider Before You Get Started
    Smartphones are having a profound impact on email use. Smartphone sales are surging, and email is one of the most common items people use their smartphone to access. Only calling and texting are more common smartphone activities.Given these realities, it is no surprise that the topic of mobile email comes up in nearly every conversation about email marketing strategy and/or design. So I thought it was finally discuss how (or if you should) to mobilize your email program.
  • Animated Gif Usage Plateaus
    "Use animated gifs more frequently." That piece of advice was in last year's Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season, but not in this year's.
  • Capturing Contact Information
    Customers' contact information has always been critical to us direct marketers, but we've never seen such growth in different types of contact data as has occurred in the last 20 years. In addition to email address capture efforts, we're about to see the need to capture social handles and mobile numbers as well. This will challenge us to gather resources and attention necessary to capture these critical assets.
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