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...

With 2022 speeding along at a breakneck pace, I wanted to take a moment and consider the outlook for the email channel in the overall marketing mix this year. Over the course of the last two years, digital marketing, in general, took on more importance than ever before, as real-world business...

I've been working in email for 18 years now, and I love it. It's allowed me to travel the world, speak on stage, work with some incredible clients, and most importantly, meet so many beautiful people. But, I have to say I'm not a fan of that; I can’t look at...

Not long ago, my inbox stood at over 25k emails. Of those, around 2k were usually unread at any one time. An inbox like that is stressful. It was certainly stressing me out. I used to close my email overwhelmed, dreaming of ‘Inbox Zero’ - a nice, neat, tidy dashboard with...

In my two earlier Only Influencers (OI) blog posts on customer loyalty and email (find them here and here), I focused mainly on converting B2C subscribers into loyal customers. But loyalty is a major concern for B2B marketers, too, especially for "Software as a Service" (SaaS) brands, where you are selling...

Now that we’re almost a half-year into the rollout of iOS 15 and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) – which protects user privacy by proactively loading all the images in users emails so as to reduce the utility of these pixels for tracking users and user activity – it seems like...

In this uneasy post-MPP-launch period (early 2022), one consistent theme to email marketing articles/tweets/punditing is “we should be focused on clicks anyway.” Makes sense; clicks are a big signal. Your relationship with the recipient, and your campaign content, have inspired them to act, exiting the email client for the actionable, scriptable,...

What is the best way of increasing revenue from email? Pop onto LinkedIn and you’ll see endless claims and case studies of what works with very specific strategies and approaches. But sometimes it’s useful to simplify the ideas and think more broadly about the best approach. Assuming we only have the...