Communications Decency Act of 1996, §230(c)Protection for "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. FADE IN:  EXTERNAL WESTERN STREET - DUSK Townsfolk peer through...

2020 was a difficult year In many ways... but it was a banner year for the Only Influencers Blog!  Most of these are still relevant and will be through 2021, so if you're looking for some good industry reads, this is the spot!  Here are our top 10 most popular posts...

First, the good news: The end is in sight! Many of us are looking forward to 2021 and applying what we learned amidst the challenges of 2020 to help our customers succeed and to improve our business operations. The COVID-19 era that marked 2020 has put the spotlight on the major...

In the world of email marketing, scenarios in our daily lives sometimes run parallel to our work issues. But this helps us to look at the problem from a different perspective and come up with creative solutions. I had one of these epiphanies recently... I had gone to a nearby mall...

Have you ever seen a sudden spike in your email newsletter sign-ups and thought, "Yes, we finally see success with our email list growth!" Congrats, and you also generated a high click-through rate, or did you? You're not off the naughty list just yet. While list growth is something to celebrate,...

The reasons any of us shop in specific ways and stick to particular brands may be down to habit or, indeed, our senses of loyalty. Not to mention a need for a quality-assured product that we trust. But scarcity is a peculiar thing. It makes human beings act in strange ways....

Temporary email, fake emails, and disposable email addresses are nothing new and they are not going away any time soon. Caution is warranted: The results are costly to you as an email marketer. If subscribers have used a random email generator to create a temporary email address, they are most likely...

Earlier this year, I wrote a post for Only Influencers on Turning a Negative into a Positive which highlighted the value of analyzing the negative marketing signals generated by every email campaign (opt-outs, spam complaints, non-responders, etc.). I thought I would build on that topic just a bit before 2020 comes...

It's easy to focus on the negatives that 2020 has brought us, like the economic, political, and social disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic and all the uncertainty that has created in our marketing programs. But I've observed a major positive development this year as well: Marketers have paused doing business as...

The 2020 Trump reelection campaign has been anything but traditional and this has extended to their email practices as well. Political campaign email in the US is notorious for breaking general email best practices. Political email is explicitly exempted from compliance with CAN-SPAM, and so it is often a bit of...

Summary Using a defined creative delivery process with clear accountability across decisions and task, will ensure you produce the best campaigns with the minimum waste of time and effort. Have you ever found yourself having any of these conversations with colleagues or clients: “We need to do something, but we’re not...

No surprise, the 2020 holiday ecommerce season is shaping up to be the biggest ever. Beyond the normal increase in online holiday shopping, COVID-19 will shift many former brick-and-mortar purchases to online. However ecommerce companies are nervous this year about the ability of the shipping carriers to keep up with demand...

In my last blog post, I provided a quick and easy roadmap to analytics for email marketers. In this post, I’ll continue the discussion on analytics by taking a deeper look at predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning solutions in email marketing. [Moving forward, I’ll refer to the group...

So often I speak to companies that are working away in earnest at their email strategy, with the aim of meeting targets set by line managers and directors higher up in the company, without truly understanding why they are doing it. Even worse, they’re tasked with ‘improving open and click rates’ generally...

Earlier this year many of you took our Career Journeys in the Email Industry survey -- thank you! And thanks to our sponsors, Origin Email Agency and Red Pill Email, as well as our committee chairman, Ryan Phelan, and members, Kate Barrett and Anthony Chiulli.  We are excited to be publishing...

Digital Transformation is back. You would be right to wonder, “Where did it go?” I've worked in the email marketing industry for a little more than twenty years. Before that, I earned a master’s degree in Technology Management at Mercer University in Atlanta. That was in the late 90s and, I...

Summary What’s the purpose of your newsletter? Often one of the largest and most frequent sends from a brand, but often a compilation of message and objective, as it tries to do all things for all stakeholders. When trying to speak to all of your audience at the same time, what...

80/20 rule - Engaging with the engaged The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule states that in very many situations 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort. This principle is very widely accepted and holds true in many cases, for example in IT, 80% of system crashes are...

On opening one of my more-than-a-few email accounts, that little red number by Inbox — or the marching rank-on-rank of boldfaced unreads — sparks a tiny twinge and a little wave of fatigue. Yes, Mom, I know I haven’t read them all. (No, Mom, I’m never going to read them all.)...

I’ve helped a lot of my consulting clients create or improve subscriber preference centers over the years. The key to success is to create one with options that meet both the subscribers' needs for content and your business goals. Here are a few of the most common preference center mistakes I’ve...