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In my February blog post for Only Influencers, I asked you, "How strong is the state of our union?" My own answer was ambivalent.

For close to 20 years, the tracking of email marketing engagement metrics has not changed very much. Apart from the standard open and click metrics with variants, marketers rely on engagement metrics that only scratch the surface of what it takes to propel growth within a program. In fact many industry benchmark reports, still use metrics that have been been around for a long time.

(Industry Veteran David Baker delivered one of the three keynote addresses at this years Email Innovations Summit. David had been away from the conference stage for a few years as a result of losing his ability to speak. Using text-to-speech technology, we were honored to invite David back to the stage. Needless to say, he hit it out of the park.I asked him to discuss his experiences in presenting. Thanks, David!)

For as long as marketers have been using email, email subscriber acquisition has been an important element of successful programs. The larger an email list, the greater the revenue opportunity. The more addresses a marketer acquires, the better chance he or she has of bringing on some great new customers.

“My grill station just went down, my bartender is drunker than his patrons, and my hostess just quit mid-shift. Can I call you back tomorrow?”

Anne Tomlin is the founder of Emails Y’all, an email development company. Specialities include responsive hybrid/fluid layouts, modular development, code reviews, template creation, code optimization, Outlook troubleshooting, and email testing. Emails Y'all is a trusted source for email development done fast and correctly the first time, every time.

LashBack provides digital marketers with unique and actionable insights for them to protect and grow their business. LashBack allows clients to “email with the lights on” by combining data, technology and industry expertise to provide a new level of visibility into the performance of current and potential marketing partners.

Many companies now ask for a customer’s phone number as well as the email address at point of sale, shipping, or entry. They use online forms or capture it in person through a pin pad or mobile credit card reader.

This week, we are looking under the hood of Fresh Relevance, who provides real-time personalization and automation across email and web to optimize revenue for e-commerce companies. Based in the UK with US offices in Boston, they enable marketers to track all behavior in real-time and use this data to personalize the shoppers journey on all channels and devices. They boast about 550 websites using their technology.

If your business collects personal data from people residing in the European Union, regardless of where in the world your business is based, then it’s most likely in progress with an implementation plan to comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that comes into effect on May 25, 2018. If your business falls into the first bucket but hasn’t started yet, then it’s as late as being a 50-mile drive away from its best friend’s wedding that starts in 4 minutes.

Email marketing books are only as good as the authors who write them and for those who implement their recommendations.

How smart are your email segmentation, automation and personalization/customization strategies? Work on these 3 mini case studies, based on projects I’ve done with my clients, to find out.

Personalization has been a common term in the email industry for years. The theory is that if you customize and personalize an email message, the recipient is much more likely to engage with the content, more likely to open, and more likely to click through. The problem is that different people have different ideas what personalization means.

In light of my last post for the Influencers blog, I thought it good karma to write a systems check post in order to show a fundamental, systematic process for improving the customer experience from hard data - in turn, making email marketing more fun, and definitely more rewarding. Email marketing is a craft; an art form, melding technical precision and emotively-artistic talents. The reward for appreciating this craft is a profitable, interactive email channel. The customer experience is ultimately relational, data or no data, trigger or no trigger - every email needs to relate to the recipient.

After nearly 20 years in the industry, it still astonishes me to find how many email marketers aren't doing everything they can – legally! – to acquire high-quality subscribers.

I’ve been in email marketing for 9 years now, the latest iteration of a digital marketing career that I have had going for over 20 years. During this time, I have seen interesting new technologies emerge—from Send Time Optimization, to Machine Learning, to AI being leveraged for content and subject line suggestions. And yet, I look in my own inbox and am forced to ask, “What the hell is going on?”

In today’s Unboxing article we look at Ongage, a seven year old profitable email marketing technology company based in Israel with corporate offices in New York City. Ongage has carved out a very unique niche for themselves in the email technology universe as an independent front end for ESP’s and SMTP’s with their sweet spot being the SMTP/MTA world which often lacks a front end of their own. It also allows you to integrate multiple SMTP’s into a single common interface. Let’s open it up and look under the hood, starting with the list of recommended vendors that Ongage has integrated with: 

Email Marketing continues to prove its value on a regular basis. When a brand sends an Email they know who opened, clicked, purchased, even down to what they purchased. This data helps in developing targeted Email segmentation plans.   Does this mean Email Marketing is easy? If you are doing batch and blast it can appear easy but Email is complex when done right. However, the payoff is worth the effort. Some people believe that Social is easier since in real time you can post content and get instant likes.   But is this really the same thing?

"Interactive email" and "AI” (artificial intelligence) are all the rage in email these days because they offer lots of promise to keep email's future bright. But, they're tops on my list of overhyped trends. So let’s step back for a moment and look at where we are now and where we should go with them in the future.

A few days ago, I posted a link on my Facebook page to a blog post I'd written about an American Airlines year-end recap email. I praised AA for going above and beyond the call of email duty because it used my own data to hyper-personalize the message.

Then, a friend commented on that post, saying, "Does it ever bother you that we've been preaching the same things for the last 10 years?"