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: 

Talk of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and not only in Silicon Valley. It’s impossible to avoid news stories of how AI will change entire industries (and potentially leave many of us unemployed in the process).

The most visible of these industries is transportation, where you can already see self-driving cars being tested (at least in California) and brands like Tesla have already included some self-driving functionality in their production models.

There is also talk in marketing circles about how AI is already impacting our efforts. For the most part, however, we’ve found this to be wishful thinking. Don’t get us wrong—AI will indeed come to marketing and will have a big impact. But today’s hype is mostly that, as very few marketers are set up to take advantage of AI. We are, unfortunately, still in a world where consumers feel they get too much email and marketers feel like few, if any, of their messages are read.

Consumer digital consumption has changed a ton over recent years. While consumers are Snapchatting on iPhones and shopping on iPads while watching connected TVs, the email experience hasn’t changed a lot, outside of location.  Looking through rose colored glasses tells us the ROI is still significant, and a mainstay for virtually every marketer that has a digital presence, which has led to a consistent, but not that impressive industry growth over the last decade.   The bad news is, it’s not grown proportionate to other advertising channels as a percentage of total marketing spend.

Every Friday, Members of Only Influencers get to pitch their latest tools and products to the OI membership. Here are this week's best pitches: 

It’s now 2017. We marketers have been chanting for “More data!” for years… and I think we can agree: we got it. Marketers use between 3 and 15 (!) data sources in their marketing, and the problem more often than not is that it doesn’t all live somewhere we can get to it or make sense of it.

From time to time, the discussion on the Only Influencers' Email list turns to whether we as marketers need to be complex or not. Some email marketers say "Blast away!" Others say, "Let's be smarter than the average bear."

Let's get one thing straight right away: if you see yourself as a button-pusher, and if your email strategy is just to blast out campaign after campaign, this article is not for you. Unless you hunger for more. In which case, stick around.

This month marks my 14-year anniversary of self-employment with Synchronicity Marketing and represents an important milestone: my own company is now the one I’ve worked for the longest.

In the middle of rushing to send the latest announcement, update, sale email or whatever, it can be easy to forget the “who” and the “why”. But to maximize results, marketers need to know their audience well enough to know who they are sending to, and why that message will be important to that person. Do this by creating a customer journey for each segment of your audience.

The Email Innovations Summit is just weeks away. And this year we've been able to assemble a world class lineup of speakers to take your email marketing career to the next level. Here is just a small sample of this year’s incredible list of instructors and speakers. Register Early to Save and use the promo Code "ONLY" to get a additional discount just for readers of the OI newsletter

Paul Airy is the author of "A Type of Email: A handbook for working with HTML typography in email" and will be presenting a Post-Conference Workshop in HTML Typography in Email (Advanced) at this year's Email Innovations Summit.