Despite all the talk over here about the EU Data Protection Reform, with its unknown content and unknown timescales, we’ve been relatively calm and relaxed about the whole thing. After all, who has time to worry about something “12-24” months away when you have things which matter now?

"Personalization is under attack. Not the act of personalizing messages to be more relevant and valuable – just the word itself. A recent Buzzfeed article reports that brands like Walmart, Macys and Gap are eschewing the term "personalization" in favor of "relevancy." Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, with the amount of contextually relevant data now available to marketers, the term personalization seems dated, limited and even "invasive and robotic," according to the article. Second, brands are very aware of not crossing the line between relevant and creepy. "

Did you know that sometimes your users will open email on a mobile device? I know, it was a shock to me too. But here we are in 2015, and after at least 5 “the year(s) of mobile email”, we’ve mostly got past the idea that we have to at least do something to consider this.

There’s plenty of stats and reasons why mobile is important – we won’t focus on those here (though, for the record, it’s around 55% opening on mobile for the average audience). However I have seen a bit of misinformation and confusion around mobile email design lately, so I thought it’d be useful to look at the three main approaches to improve the experience for mobile users.

Spoiler alert: the best approach is to adopt all three.

Ever since the final session at EEC 2015, it’s been a seismic few weeks for the email community when it comes to understanding deliverability from the perspective of the inbox providers. In that session, a seemingly innocuous question from yours truly turned what would have been a worthy, but predictable panel on deliverability featuring 4 major inbox providers (AOL, Comcast, Gmail and Outlook.com) into one of the most controversial and talked about panels in the history of the EEC.

Download the 2015 MAAWG Sender Best Common Practices White Paper

"EEC15 proved that Dela and the people who have discovered that sending more results in higher sales - despite the misgivings of a large part of our email community – is absolutely right."

We need to talk about how we measure success when it comes to mobile email. The email experience today is miles apart from the one ten years ago – there are mobile phones, tablets (is that a mobile device or not?), watches, laptops – yet on the most part we are still using the same success metrics.

This isn’t going to be an article about design tips or how to add “the responsive code”.

Quick: What’s one thing everyone reading this article has in common (other than this article?) We all have a smartphone. Furthermore, I’m fairly certain we’ve all used a smartphone today, either to check email or go on the Internet or both. You might even be reading this on a smartphone. Smartphones and mobile devices have become so prevalent that you can’t walk down the street or into a restaurant without seeing one in use.

We know this as consumers. We live it every day at work and at home, with our colleagues and our families. But are we acting on this knowledge as marketers?

"The best tips I can give you this holiday season is to spur your creativity with example of past programs that did more than offered shopping experiences. Given it’s less than a month out, it’s still not too late to use your brand as the experience vs. selling products to augment the experience. Not everyone has a power brand like Tiffany’s. "

"Email. It’s “antiquated,” always on the verge of dying and if you ask what the internet thinks of email marketing you will find that 74.9% find it negative. Yet 66% of B2C marketing professionals still maintain that email is the most effective channel to reach and engage customers. Our job as email marketers is to continually drive engagement and grow this high ROI channel. This Valentine’s Day let’s get back to the basics and take a look at nine great best practices we can follow to fall in love with email again."

When looking to China, and in excess of a half billion consumer mailboxes , it is no surprise email marketers will identify substantial opportunity, this should be balanced with the understanding the landscape is very different to anywhere else in the world.  It is certainly not a simple matter of transferring your experience gained in North America, Europe or even Asia-Pacific and applying that to the mainland Chinese market.

Marketing in China offers several opportunities. The overall market huge and wealth is on the rise – two factors that are especially attractive to international companies. That said, marketing in China can differ significantly from marketing in the U.S. as well as many other Western countries. Email marketing, in particular, offers specific challenges not common in the rest of the world.

I’ve been lucky in my career – I’ve been brought in three different times to turn around and/or grow an email program. Two were (and are) rousing successes. Let’s just call the other one... a valuable test.

"Here’s what’s on the 2015 “to-do” list of these top marketers, and should probably be on yours as well."

The practice of marketing has long searched for the ideal, one-to-one, marketer-customer communication channel – one that would allow two-way conversations and deliver masses of critical customer information back to the marketer. For marketers everywhere, this would be the marketing “Holy Grail.”

How to Maintain Consumer Confidence and Trust When Selecting a Mobile Program Provider.

Vendors that focus on the acquisition of email addresses have been shamed for too long. Admittedly, the email acquisition space is rife with vendors of ill repute, and plenty of people have lined their pockets with the money of marketers hoping for a quick way to grow their prospect databases. This does not mean, however, that ALL acquisition vendors or all email acquisition practices are bad!

Last year was a big “rethink” year for email, after clawing its way back into the limelight as the reigning champion of digital marketing. Mobile email penetration peaked in 2013 igniting marketers’ need to gain insight on how this growth was influencing their email programs. Inbox Marketer’s behavioural email data showed major shifts in device usage and consumption patterns, underscoring the need for new strategies in the design and development of mobile optimized email.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at an Atlanta Interactive Marketing (AiMA) event on must-have marketing automation tools. Marketing is about getting the attention ofthe people who matter most to your business, and what makes it possible to reach these people is the data we have about them. No matter how you compile it, the data you have about customers is what drives your automation. What I wanted to share at this event was that, regardless of which automation platform you use and which processes you have in place, your automation efforts will never be as effective as they could be if you’re not automating the data that drives these processes. Marketing automation isn’t complete without data automation.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the letters “RFP”? Chances are it isn’t something good—unless, of course, you work at The Relevancy Group. We love RFPs and helping our clients manage the process and get great deals. But for the rest of the email world on both the buy side and the sell side these three letters come with a lot of baggage. Why is that?