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...

You did it! You found a new email service provider to help you take advantage of all the innovations available to email marketers today. It's an exciting time – you're looking forward to working with a new partner, you have lots of new integrations to try, and you can't wait to...

This week Webbula published our latest special report, ‘The State of Appends,’ to expand the discussion around appends in the email industry. This report is based on non-email appends, the information you can add to your database in addition to email. (If you haven’t already read the report, you can download it...

The tough part is consistent execution and achieving that goal.  So how do we use email marketing to acquire a customer and satisfy that customer? Let’s start at the beginning.  When you have a problem, where is the first place you look for a solution? Google? Facebook? Youtube? You and I...

On a recent OI-members-only Live Zoom discussion we spent some time talking about how to leverage video in email campaigns. The conversation was spurred by Tejas Pitkar’s (Netcore) recent OI blog post and there were a lot of great ideas brought up by the group. So, I thought it would make...

In the email marketing world we are lucky to have an abundance of click rates to choose from when evaluating our campaigns. Here I want to talk about three of them – and when each is most and least useful. Definitions The first is the most commonly used metric in the...

Analytics done well can lead to better customer service and bigger bottom lines (for example, my client used analytics insights to increase sales 250%) -- done poorly it can be a complete waste of time. This article provides a quick and easy analytics roadmap specifically for email marketers. My aim is...

What takes a marketing email from good to great? Successful email marketers tend to agree on a few things. For one, great emails read like a note you would jot down to a friend—sincere and conversational. They are short rather than long. They are also punchy and direct. There’s no single...

Recently I was trying to buy some essentials online as our daily supply had run out. When the online grocery store failed to deliver at my location, I was really annoyed. I reflected back on it with a calm mind and came to a clear consensus. I couldn’t recall the last...

What a crazy time in our lives, when we get hit with three historic events at the same time: pandemic, racial tensions and financial crisis. At no other time in history have we been in this perfect storm: something equivalent to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, racial tensions mirror that of...

I've been working in the industry for some 17 years now. I fell into it totally by accident; it was a time when people referred to email as spam. It was soul-destroying. But despite the hard times email has established itself as an essential part of any marketers box of tricks....

The only right answer to ‘what is a good open rate?’ or ‘what should my open rates be?’ is: ‘it depends’. It’s also a lazy and useless answer when left at that because it ignores all the important contextual factors and provides no information. The truth is that if you are...

The holiday season is the most important time of year for retailers, with a large portion of sales being done at this time. MasterCard SpendingPulse reported that holiday ecommerce sales account for an average of 14.6% of total retail spending (and much more in some cases).   When Deloitte asked people...

Any discussion of the features and functionality of ESPs vs. CDPs needs to start with the ESP platforms. ESPs have been around in one form or another for over 20 years, and it should be well-estalbished these days as to what constitutes an ESP. Ah, if only it were so easy....

Every once in a while, during our careers, we get to do something truly exciting. Launch a new product. Solve a business problem in a novel way. Build a new system. On rare occasions, we get to do all these things at once. This is one of those stories. These situations...

Historically, ISPs have kept the way that they operate a closely guarded secret. Sure, we could make a few educated guesses drawing on what we've learned from testing, but could any of us say for sure why (for example) Gmail sends some emails to 'Promotions' and others straight to the inbox?...

One of the silver linings of this crazy 2020 has been getting to chat more often with far-flung marketing friends - the people I would normally see several times a year at industry conferences but now view weekly on my computer screen. These virtual happy hours began informally when we were...