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 how they’d...

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 present...

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?Like...

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 all...

You’re not getting the readership you hoped for? Your open rates and click-throughs are generally poor. And you’re wondering what’s wrong? Read on to learn why. Assuming that you don’t have an inbox-placement issue, your customers aren’t reading your emails because:  Your copy doesn’t provide valuable content – Yes, there are plenty...

One of the foundations of marketing is to test, learn and improve. The learning that comes from constantly trying and testing new approaches and tactics is one of the aspects of marketing that makes it exciting and interesting, even for grizzled veterans like me.“We learn wisdom from failure much more than...

Email is the most widely used personal communication channel on the globe, with over 3.8 billion people sending more than 280 billion messages each day. The technical standards that enable this massive message exchange are not ‘owned’ by anyone; by and large, they remain open Internet standards.Google currently provides the most...

As email marketers, most of us are focused on how our campaigns perform. Even if our emails aren’t specifically designed to drive leads, sales, or other recipient actions, we still monitor key metrics like Open Rate to at least determine if recipients are looking at the message.  For those email marketers...

In present day marketing, reducing email churn is one of the constant challenges for a marketer.Customer retention and reducing churn is a major part of CRM. Because of a rise in non-paid services, the attrition numbers have grown as users don’t incur any losses to unsubscribe from a service they don’t...

Earlier this month during the Email Innovations Summit 2020, we had some fun; we played Family Feud: Email Edition.Armed with the results of our late May survey of the industry, we set out to see who would win a Family Feud game based on email industry survey topics. You may have...

In the past, marketers have had a negative opinion about data appending, especially regarding appending of email. Marketers would often find providers giving significant amounts of inaccurate or falsely positioned data, creating a fair amount of distrust. The reasons: Data providers did not have the technology, talent, and time to invest...

During a panel discussion I took part in recently, an audience member asked which companies did the panel think are doing a good job of multi-channel messaging. I thought it was an interesting question because unless you are armed with a knowledge of what data is being used and how it...

One good thing to come out of the coronavirus pandemic is that marketers are rediscovering how to be marketers again, and the evidence is all over the inbox.Email open rates have been going up since COVID-19 lockdowns, quarantines and "safer at home" orders went into effect in mid-March. Granted, more of...

I found myself recently opening a package that had been delivered to my front door. Inside the box was a chain. You know, the kind that you use with a padlock to lock a bike or other object, to prevent its theft. That was it, a chain. I had ordered it...

Communities have always been an important part of my personal and professional life – even more so now that I, like many others around the world, am living under a ‘stay-at-home’ order due to the COVID-19 pandemic.There are many different types of communities; each is built on a shared interest or...

With Microsoft rolling out more tabs in Outlook and Hotmail to help users organize their inbox by segmenting messages into Promotions, Social, Newsletters, people are naturally wondering what this will mean for marketers and how this will change your ability to reach your users at Microsoft domains. While no one can...

We are living in unprecedented times….. no scrap that…. That’s how every blog post or notification seems to start nowadays doesn’t it?! And actually, how unprecedented is the time we are living in?We’ve seen global (or near global catastrophes) before, whether health related or war related, and as a society we...

These are indeed challenging times for all of us. How do we make the right decisions on what messages to send, when to send them, how not to offend or be tone-deaf? A lot of us are confused. If marketing is anything, it's predictable, and you can use it to forecast.Red...