"the single most important piece of data for a successful email program is the email address. You may think, "Hey Bob, thanks for that blinding glimpse into the obvious." The truth is, this is a piece of data that if often beyond the control of the email team to actually gather, as this is usually a function of the web team. "

"With leading marketing technologies already established and new technologies emerging on a seemingly daily basis, marketers are faced with making decisions about how to optimize and deliver results with their technologies of choice."

"Drip marketing describes a series of predesigned emails sent on a predetermined schedule geared toward education, branding, positioning, or selling of your product. Drip marketing emails are distributed to a broad audience; lead-nurturing emails are distributed to a specific segment."

"Triggered messaging is a rapidly growing part of marketing with extremely good ROI. It's about delivering business messages that are personalized and near-real time: often sent by email but increasingly by other channels such as within web pages. "

"It’s a near certain fact that much of a marketer’s time is spent on analysing specific campaign ROI, or put another way, how much marketing spend was needed to generate a particular sale. It does seem to make sense that if a brand is employing a vast number of channels to reach a customer – PPC, social, email, display – it will want to know how to spend its limited resources, in order to optimise future campaigns. However, I am not convinced that campaign level ROI is the best metric for measuring campaign effectiveness."

"Epsilon released its Q4 2013 Email Trends and Benchmarks Report earlier this month and there’s some exciting new data here on triggered messages that will help marketers evaluate their email programs." Epsilon released its Q4 2013 Email Trends and Benchmarks Report earlier this month and there’s some exciting new data here...

"I call bullshit. Because - in email- relevance is irrelevant, once the consumer chooses you. (Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth music.) Why do I know this? Statistics."

"Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the technical term for strategically planning your tests. It’s the active process of defining the metric you’re trying to optimize, creating several hypotheses about what tweaks in your campaigns may increase your conversion rate, and measuring the effect of each hypothesis. It applies equally to email and landing pages, but I’ll limit the discussion here to email as much as possible."

"Where are the big opportunities for email innovation over the next several years? My bet is on the Inbox."

"Email Marketing in South Africa is truly in it's infancy. There are few true ESP's in South Africa, and very few companies truly using Email Marketing to it's full potential."

"If you’re a marketer, you’ve no doubt heard about the 80/20 rule. For those of you who haven’t, it’s simple: 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customer base.If that is indeed the rule, it means the vast majority of your business is coming from repeat customers....

"And what's the process for controlling email marketers and taking away the power of the channel? It's easy. Call them a spammer."

"Many companies use cause-related marketing to boost their brand image, build goodwill and create positive PR. This is widely apparent at holiday time and during October, for example, as businesses jump on the breast cancer awareness bandwagon."

"When your organization goes through change, it means you have to re-align your business leaders, your teams, your vendors and sometimes, your customers. What steps can you take to get back on track once you realize you are not aligned? "

"Personalization is touted in email circles as a positive. I tell clients all the time that including a recipient's first name and other personal details in a message has been shown to increase engagement. But there are times when personalization can be creepy."

"What do you want to accomplish this year in your email program? Sounds simple right? "

"The question is, if everyone wants to test, then why isn’t everyone testing? The answer is that testing is simple in concept but really, really hard to execute. But not for the reasons you think."

"Marketers, service providers and app developers alike must protect their data no matter where it resides. This includes holding service providers accountable by demanding they adopt the best practices available."

"Back in September I wrote a post for this blog about the mindset of great email marketers: that they are always looking at the data and using the quantitative results to improve their future performance."

"It amazes me how many companies start email “strategies” without putting much thought into the impact of a poor, or typically complete lack of, planning. It’s not easy to start emailing customers, potential customers or subscribers, or to add new campaigns to existing channel strategy – but, it all starts with understanding what they want followed by consistency."