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.

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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.

We continue our series of featuring some of the speakers at the upcoming Email Innovations Summit. Jeanne Jennings will be participating in the "Hanging Out Your Shingle: The Good, Bad, Ugly (and Upside!) of Starting an Email Consultancy" panel. Here are some of her most popular OI blog articles. The Mindset...

“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.

"Machine learning" has moved out of science fiction and into real-life applications, like powering Tesla cars that run on autopilot and robots that can beat humans at the Japanese game of Go. For marketers, it gets them closer to their email nirvana: true 1:1 personalization on a mass scale. Machine learning,...

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.

I’m starting to cringe every time I hear the phrase, “We could segment our audience based on that data”.

People hear that phrase and eyes light up and heads bob in agreement. In meetings with the CMO/SVP, the phrase is carefully proffered as a goal about to be fulfilled, and the CMO/SVP solemnly nods and pats everyone on the back for having done a good job.

What utterly useless, well-intentioned bunk.

The 3Q 2015 Email Trends and Benchmark Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth taking a look at – reading it 3 things struck me.

Coupons are a good way to attract shoppers back to your website during the festive season and January sales. Coupons are known to drive loyalty, and consequently revenue.

As well as old‐style individual and mass coupons, you can use a lot of tricks to preferentially target loyal customers. For example:

A compendium of OI Blog articles on everything you need to know to get started with Drip Marketing.

I say automation, you think robotic, right?

No wonder. Experienced marketers and consumers alike receive corporate-heavy copy in their messages nowadays. Dry, humorless, stiff, computerized. Or the pendulum swings the other way with over-the-top witticisms and personality that tries too hard. Canned humor gets nowhere.

To strike a balance between robotic and over-friendly in your drip marketing campaigns is difficult, especially trying to let your usual brand voice have a weigh in, too. It isn’t impossible, though.

There are a few strategies that will help you craft conversational, concise copy that doesn’t sound like it came from a machine.

In a past Only Influencers article Automated Marketing: Drip vs. Nurture, the author argues that there are drip campaigns and there are nurture campaigns.

I wouldn’t necessarily argue that point, but I would take a different perspective.

There are a lot of opinions flying around about drip marketing campaigns. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people don’t know how to use it well.

If you’re like most e-commerce and other online merchants, you depend on regular (and often frequent) promotional campaigns to drive sales. These campaigns are loaded with offers, incentives, and immediate calls to action. But is the prospect really ready to buy? Do you have a relationship? Does your prospect trust you enough to buy from you? Drip email campaigns (also called nurturing campaigns) are the tool every online marketer needs to develop that relationship and trust with prospects that will ultimately result in more sales conversions and greater client loyalty over time.

DRIP campaigns have been shown to improve open, click-through and conversion rates, as well as deliver higher revenue per sale than business-as usual campaigns. They are also somewhat ‘set it and forget it’ – meaning you set them up once and they require minimal maintenance and time from your team to keep them running.

It’s August here and the Bay Area is going through one of its rare heat waves. Over the weekend, temps reached over 100 at our house, which normally never sees anything warmer than 80. Despite the summer heat, and the calendar, and the complaints of Christmas coming earlier every year, it really is time for us to start talking about holiday email delivery. 

As consumers, we cringe at the inexorable tidal wave of holiday ads headed our way. As marketers, we contribute to it. For email marketers, there’s an opportunity to elevate beyond sending five copies of the same catalogue to the guy who bought one item from your store four years ago. There’s a reason that email consistently drives the highest ROI of all direct marketing channels.

If yours is a retail or e-tail business revving up your holiday email marketing engines, this advice is not for you (but good luck and Godspeed!)

If on the other hand you’re in the same camp as non-retailers, your email running the risk of being stampeded by the crushing annual blow of “buy now” retail promotional messages to consumer inboxes from September through December, read on.