As the tech industry takes a step forward in actively recruiting more female talent, it often takes two steps back when we hear about Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins or Susan Fowler’s blog post about her very strange year at UBER. While they sympathize and often empathize with these all too common tech stories, women in email marketing often find themselves caught in the middle of this discussion because they straddle the line between marketing and IT. They need to be both technical and creative to effectively do their jobs, and that becomes even more daunting if they have executive management who have little knowledge about their role or who aren’t as supportive as they could be.

By Ryan Brelje, Content Marketing Manager at Iterable

More than 10,000 ambitious companies fiercely compete inside the expanding subscription retail space—with the industry more than validated by the successes of pioneers like Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club, brick and mortar mega stores like Sephora and Walmart have entered the arena and vie for rival market share. In a high-stakes game where customer churn is only one click away, how are these companies keeping their customers engaged while they await their deliveries?

Because email marketers are under resourced, busy people – and often new to the profession or have nobody to show them the ropes – they look to "best practices" as silver bullets that will fix their problems or keep them on the right side the law

Coupled with our history of being associated with spam, it's easy to see why marketers are so focused on following best practices. They use it as a solution to a common problem. The solution becomes a trend, and before you know it, it's promoted to a best practice.

However, I see too many marketers rushing to implement best practices without questioning whether something is truly a best practice, a trend or a bad habit that has evolved into a rule.

The concepts of Retention and Predictive Marketing have been around for quite some time; however, at its inception, only the largest stores could afford to invest in this type of data warehouse and management. Over the past few years, solutions have evolved to help retailers gain access to their data and enable retention and predictive marketing, but adoption has been mostly exhibited by innovators and early adopters. Over the past three years, we’ve conducted the Retention and Predictive Marketing survey to better understand trends in the marketplace, adoption of retention and predictive marketing, and barriers and successes retailers, who’ve invested in this technology, are experiencing. This year’s survey was completed by hundreds of retailers, spanning industries and revenue levels. Here’s a breakdown of the results from the 2017 Retention & Predictive Marketing Report.

Anyone who has been in the email marketing industry for any length of time has had this experience: that sinking feeling when you realize that something has gone wrong. Very wrong. Email can be one of the more complicated marketing channels strictly from a technical sense and when your program does something unexpected, or catastrophic, how do you recover? 

If you work in B2B, getting spam is a daily occurrence. Not just the typical spam that vanishes into your junk file, but unsolicited one-to-one emails that are just as worthless.  

"It’s just not pony enough.”

Marketing Manager
My Little Pony

The quote above was the full extent of creative feedback to an email my creative team and I developed for Hasbro’s My Little Pony group back in the early aughts.

Today we are excited to give you an Only Influencers EXCLUSIVE: the first look at eDataSource’s Delivery Index tool which is launching this week. Delivery Index is similar to products such as Return Path’s excellent Sender Score tool, which has been an industry standard for many years. I sat down this week with eDataSource CEO, G.B. Heidarsson who gave me a pre-launch walkthrough of the product.

List size is a metric that is ridiculous on its own. As every Email Marketer knows, it’s not about the size of the list, but the quality.

The battle over when to suppress users is age old, commonly fought between those who are focused on the size of the list, and those on the email side who understand that inactives hurt deliverability.

Your customer data is a goldmine of information just waiting to be discovered. You know that emails which reflect a customer's data are more relevant and likely to be acted on, but too many marketers stop at basics like name, gender or location.  

Each week, the Only Influencers members get to pitch the membership on their latest and greatest tools, services, and studies. Here is the June edition of the Best of the Friday Pitches:

Being an email marketer is a wonderful career choice. Email marketers are usually key drivers of a company’s revenue and – even more importantly - marginal profit. Being part of a team that continually captures the sentiment and actions of the consumer is a fun space to occupy. Plus, there are enough new technologies in play that make email marketing invigorating.

“The most important work in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.”

David Ogilvy
Founder, Ogilvy and Mather
Considered the Father of Advertising

Sending an email marketing message is easy. But boosting bottom line performance from send-to-send -- that’s a little more difficult. The key to success here is testing.

If you’re not doing any performance testing, now’s the time to start. If you are already doing regular testing, commit to upping your game. Either way, here’s a quick walk through the process my team and I follow to help guide you.

What if you could guarantee that you would have 100% deliverability and 3x the open rate for your email marketing programs? That is the promise of some new technology being developed to help marketers deliver the content of their emails in the format preferred by a large segment of the population: chatbots. 

Every Friday, the OI Membership gets to pitch the community on their latest and greatest innovations. Here is the latest set of innovations: 

The following are the results of a recent poll by Marketing Democracy and Only Influencers: what are marketers opt-in practices following an Online Purchase: