Rube Goldberg's CSV

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At some invisible horizon-line future moment, marketing systems and practices of today will look as quaint, convoluted, and fragile as the mechanical systems immortalized by Rube Goldberg do to us. Goldberg’s whimsical machines — and more than a few real-world machines — amuse because they expend so much design and effort...

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What's Wrong with Email Marketing?

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As powerful and unique as email marketing is, it’s far from perfect. If you want to grasp some of its imperfections, just look at what the inbox and mailbox providers have been doing. The features they’re pushing will give you a sense of what they feel is wrong with the channel....

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What do we mean by personalisation in email marketing?

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According to Bluecore, 57% of brands number one email priority is email personalisation, which is unsurprising considering personalised emails can generate 6-times the transaction rates compared to ‘batch and blast’ (Source: Experian). With the demand for personalisation from email marketers being so high, it’s inevitable that every technological solution under the...

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Ask the OI Experts: What role do you see SMS and email marketing playing in a customer's journey

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If you happen to come across one of our Webbula posts on LinkedIn or Twitter, or stumble across the Webbula blog, you will find one of our most common series called, “Ask the Experts.” Webbula launched this series in 2021 to share the voices of email experts on various topics within...

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Should You Build Your Own ESP?

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The decision of whether to build your own email solution or outsource to a vendor can have serious consequences for the future of your email marketing. It’s not a decision to be made hastily before giving it some serious thought. Reading the rest of this post is a great place to...

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Out of ideas? Here are 5 super simple recommendations to develop your emails

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Over time it gets tougher and tougher to come up with those new ideas that will keep your email campaigns on an upwards performance. You’re not alone. And as someone clearly open to keeping well read and informed, here’s some help, just for you (ish). One of the toughest tasks for...

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Email for the Win

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Time to rise up! Let’s look at email marketing with the backdrop of a cookie-less world with the demise of third-party cookies. This past week I was on a Zoom call with a fellow marketer asking for some marketing strategy advice.  No sooner did the words email marketing leave my mouth...

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Zero/First Party Data and your ESP - an opportunity for email marketers

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We email marketers are in a great position to deal with the data challenges posed by new data-privacy laws and the impending loss of third-party tracking cookies. That's because we often have access to the most valuable kinds of data, most commonly referred to as first-party data and, increasingly, zero-party data....

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How Serendipity Enhances the Art of Personalisation

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In my previous Only Influencers post (When "One to Everyone" Email Messages Make Sense), I urged you to send “catch-all” campaigns to scoop up customers and subscribers who do not fit your segmentation criteria or triggered touch points. I am by no means saying that you should scrap your highly personalised...

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Everything you need to know about auditing your email marketing

The word ‘audit’ sounds scary, but an email audit is nothing to be afraid of. It’s actually a very good, very useful thing. Think of an audit as like a health check for your email marketing. It will tell you what’s going well, what could be improved, and how you can...

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Understand your customer’s mindset with engagement journey mapping

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We often think about customer journey as a series of touchpoints and device interactions. The customer opens an email, visits a website, or opens a mobile app. But it is often more meaningful and far more rewarding to examine and understand the customers’ state of mind as they progress through the...

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Does having a more racially diverse leadership team create a more diverse organization?

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This week Only Influencers published our second annual ‘Racial Diversity in the Email Industry’ Benchmark Report. We invite you to download the full report – and to watch our webinar presenting the highlights of that 44-page document. But first, I hope you’ll take a minute to read this blog post about...

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Looking at Email’s Place in 2022

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With 2022 speeding along at a breakneck pace, I wanted to take a moment and consider the outlook for the email channel in the overall marketing mix this year. Over the course of the last two years, digital marketing, in general, took on more importance than ever before, as real-world business...

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Nailing cross-channel marketing. Email how it was intended to be.

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I've been working in email for 18 years now, and I love it. It's allowed me to travel the world, speak on stage, work with some incredible clients, and most importantly, meet so many beautiful people. But, I have to say I'm not a fan of that; I can’t look at...

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Declutter your mind, and improve your email marketing in 2022

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Not long ago, my inbox stood at over 25k emails. Of those, around 2k were usually unread at any one time. An inbox like that is stressful. It was certainly stressing me out. I used to close my email overwhelmed, dreaming of ‘Inbox Zero’ - a nice, neat, tidy dashboard with...

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How Should Email Marketers Handle Click Metrics?

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In this uneasy post-MPP-launch period (early 2022), one consistent theme to email marketing articles/tweets/punditing is “we should be focused on clicks anyway.” Makes sense; clicks are a big signal. Your relationship with the recipient, and your campaign content, have inspired them to act, exiting the email client for the actionable, scriptable,...

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The 5 ways of increasing revenue from email marketing

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What is the best way of increasing revenue from email? Pop onto LinkedIn and you’ll see endless claims and case studies of what works with very specific strategies and approaches. But sometimes it’s useful to simplify the ideas and think more broadly about the best approach. Assuming we only have the...

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3 Things I Wish I Learned about Email Marketing in College

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Last month I celebrated my fourth year at Webbula and being in the workforce after graduating from university in the Fall of 2017. I've had many conversations about how I ended up in this space throughout the last four years. My answer, like most of you, is I just fell into...

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2022 State of the ESP RFP Survey Results and Conclusions

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In late 2020, Email Connect and Only Influencers put out our first survey of the RFP landscape. We were interested in looking at the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on brands’ plans for ESP RFPs during 2020. Among our survey respondents, 40% of those who had originally planned to conduct an...

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5 steps to simplify your email planning. Stay fresh, relevant, and ahead of your competitors

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Is the need to deliver the next email campaign NOW! causing you to simply rinse and repeat old activity? Planning doesn’t need to be a luxury you don’t have the time for. Here are 5 simple steps to work through to ensure you keep your activity fresh, relevant and delivering maximum...

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