As you head into the frenzy of the holiday email-marketing season, take a minute to step back and appreciate email's great strength as the original disruptive marketing channel.

Email, in fact, is enjoying a renaissance! Those of us who have made email the center of our work lives can rightly feel vindicated when study after study shows people prefer email for brand communications. As shown below from Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census 2016, the ROI still outshines every other channel from print to broadcast to direct and social.

Some of the most effective email marketing campaigns are actually based on very simple ideas. Here’s a campaign that took very little effort but generated nearly $0.75 per email – along with the 5 simple ideas behind the program.

The way we test today only works with batch and blast

In the last few years digital marketing has been transformed. Marketers have moved from sending the same message to everybody on the list – batch and blast, to segmentation, where messages are specific to particular customer segments or persona’s. According to the 2016 Econsultancy Email Industry Census the majority of respondents claim to be doing basic segmentation while around 1/3 claim to be doing advanced segmentation.

As the holiday spending frenzy approaches, digital marketers should have a multi-point plan to capitalize on the busiest season of the year. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table. Consumers are the most active and spend the most money during the holidays.

It’s been just over a year since EEC 2015 and the panel on deliverability during which some of the largest inbox providers gave the audience some valuable insights into their definitions of engagement and how that relates to inbox placement. For those of you who missed that panel and are new to this debate Massimo Arrigoni wrote a very good summary on the Mail Up blog. What excited me most about the information the inbox providers shared was, for the first time since I got involved in email marketing we had valuable information direct from the horse’s mouth on what mail service providers really look at.

In case you missed it, using email newsletters to do content marketing is a thing. But not everyone is finding it to be effective. Many times the issue is the quality of the content. Here’s a brief overview of the situation along with 3 tips to help you elevate your content!

By now, you’ve played Pokémon Go. And if you haven’t, you’ve witnessed someone who is playing it.

Welcome to the world of mainstream augmented reality. Before we dig deeper into the implications of Pokémon Go to Email Marketing – and yes, there are several – let’s begin with a complete understanding of what augmented reality is and how it came to be.

Pokemon Go became the top downloaded and top grossing app when it was released three weeks ago. It already has more Daily Active Users (DAUs) than Twitter, and there’s probably much more to come —Niantic, the developer, has hinted at features that will involve bricks-and-mortar stores and may drive even more usage. In short, Pokemon Go is a massive hit.

I recently signed up for two very different email lists, Pottery Barn and Chubbies. Why on earth would I add more email to my already exploding inbox? In the case of Pottery Barn, it’s because I want some new towels for my guest bathroom and I was hunting for a discount code. In the case of Chubbies, it’s because I heard from a co-worker that their emails were hilarious, and I wanted to see them for myself.

Having been on both the brand and vendor side – and having been part of multiple decisions to evaluate and/or change ESPs (hint – it’s not as hard as your current vendor makes it seem…nor as easy as your new vendor claims), I’m surprised by how many mismatches between client and vendor still happen. It’s the biggest reason for account churn – bad fit between the client and vendor.

The possibilities and potential for machine learning never fail to amaze me, whether they could make my personal life easier (now my kitchen appliances can talk to each other, but do I want to know what they're saying about me?) or open up new vistas for email marketers.

I love when a marketer asks, "how should we measure this?"

Sometimes we get so caught up in opens, clicks, visitors, impressions, and all the other easy-to-get metrics that we forget what we wanted to accomplish in the first place. This is why it is so important to set up a formal approach to measurement before your marketing campaign launches. Yet a lot of marketers don't know where to start.

With endless approaches christened “best practices” and infinite blog posts on the latest email optimization tactics, it can be difficult to determine where it’s worth investing your email marketing money and manpower.

Survey Created by Loren McDonald.

Survey Results

First things first, I can’t stand the “email is dead” myth. It’s something circulated by traditional media, who love calling things dead to put us off the scent of their own problems. However, as an industry, our response has been weak.

“It depends; you should test that” has to be the most frequently used answer to any email marketing question.

And it’s not entirely unreasonable. What’s right for one for one brand isn’t for another.

Many companies struggle with measuring the impact of email on their organizations. As a result, it’s consistently undervalued as a tool in most marketers’ arsenals. As marketers, one of the most effective ways of showcasing the true benefits of a strategic email marketing campaign is to measure and understand the effects of an email, even when there was no open or click – what we call the halo effect.