In 2021 my company FreshAddress merged with TowerData; in May 2022 we announced our rebrand as AtData. As part of the rebranding effort, we created a new company story, rethinking what our company represents. With all of the mergers and acquisitions in the marketing technology space over the last few years,...

As third-party cookies are scheduled to disappear, it is becoming more important to collect zero-party and first-party data to improve automation and personalization in your campaigns. Your ESP can be the best place to gather this first-hand data, as I explained in an earlier OI post (Zero/First Party Data and your...

The Holistic team and I discovered something unexpected recently while analyzing activity in a client's customer database. This surprising information shed new light on how we segment customers and how we message them based on what our data is telling us. Although our program is still a work in progress, I'm...

We all know that consumers expect and demand a more personalized customer experience. They want emails that are relevant to their interests, needs and aspirations. The challenge is that the data required to personalize is often missing or incomplete. So, what can we do to backfill missing data to make our...

As we approach the halfway point of 2022, we’re now a bit over 2 years since Covid was declared a pandemic (March 11, 2020). At that point, it's safe to say that marketers had little to no idea how dramatically our businesses and marketing programs would be impacted. Now, with 2...

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is what we email geeks are striving for. We want to surprise and delight, under promise and over deliver. We want our subscribers to be hooked, coming back for more and waiting for our following email to land in their inboxes. Newsflash, unfortunately, your subscribers won't...

  Are there any email marketing techniques you’ve gotten tired of? I’ve gathered several examples of the most common mistakes and outdated strategies that some marketers are still stuck with in 2022. Disclaimer: There’s no universal recipe for a perfect email marketing strategy. However, you can use the tips from this...

I'm not big on making predictions for year-end or new-year stories. The email industry can be unpredictable, as we saw in 2020 when COVID-19 brought email back to well-deserved glory. But I do like the approach Chris Brogan takes every January. He sums up his intentions for the new year with...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...