I’ve helped a lot of my consulting clients create or improve subscriber preference centers over the years. The key to success is to create one with options that meet both the subscribers' needs for content and your business goals. Here are a few of the most common preference center mistakes I’ve...

This week Webbula published our latest special report, ‘The State of Appends,’ to expand the discussion around appends in the email industry. This report is based on non-email appends, the information you can add to your database in addition to email. (If you haven’t already read the report, you can download it...

The tough part is consistent execution and achieving that goal.  So how do we use email marketing to acquire a customer and satisfy that customer? Let’s start at the beginning.  When you have a problem, where is the first place you look for a solution? Google? Facebook? Youtube? You and I...

On a recent OI-members-only Live Zoom discussion we spent some time talking about how to leverage video in email campaigns. The conversation was spurred by Tejas Pitkar’s (Netcore) recent OI blog post and there were a lot of great ideas brought up by the group. So, I thought it would make...

In the email marketing world we are lucky to have an abundance of click rates to choose from when evaluating our campaigns. Here I want to talk about three of them – and when each is most and least useful. Definitions The first is the most commonly used metric in the...

Analytics done well can lead to better customer service and bigger bottom lines (for example, my client used analytics insights to increase sales 250%) -- done poorly it can be a complete waste of time. This article provides a quick and easy analytics roadmap specifically for email marketers. My aim is...

What a crazy time in our lives, when we get hit with three historic events at the same time: pandemic, racial tensions and financial crisis. At no other time in history have we been in this perfect storm: something equivalent to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, racial tensions mirror that of...

I've been working in the industry for some 17 years now. I fell into it totally by accident; it was a time when people referred to email as spam. It was soul-destroying. But despite the hard times email has established itself as an essential part of any marketers box of tricks....

The only right answer to ‘what is a good open rate?’ or ‘what should my open rates be?’ is: ‘it depends’. It’s also a lazy and useless answer when left at that because it ignores all the important contextual factors and provides no information. The truth is that if you are...

The holiday season is the most important time of year for retailers, with a large portion of sales being done at this time. MasterCard SpendingPulse reported that holiday ecommerce sales account for an average of 14.6% of total retail spending (and much more in some cases).   When Deloitte asked people...

Any discussion of the features and functionality of ESPs vs. CDPs needs to start with the ESP platforms. ESPs have been around in one form or another for over 20 years, and it should be well-estalbished these days as to what constitutes an ESP. Ah, if only it were so easy....

Every once in a while, during our careers, we get to do something truly exciting. Launch a new product. Solve a business problem in a novel way. Build a new system. On rare occasions, we get to do all these things at once. This is one of those stories. These situations...

Historically, ISPs have kept the way that they operate a closely guarded secret. Sure, we could make a few educated guesses drawing on what we've learned from testing, but could any of us say for sure why (for example) Gmail sends some emails to 'Promotions' and others straight to the inbox?...

One of the silver linings of this crazy 2020 has been getting to chat more often with far-flung marketing friends - the people I would normally see several times a year at industry conferences but now view weekly on my computer screen. These virtual happy hours began informally when we were...

You’re not getting the readership you hoped for? Your open rates and click-throughs are generally poor. And you’re wondering what’s wrong? Read on to learn why.  Assuming that you don’t have an inbox-placement issue, your customers aren’t reading your emails because:  Your copy doesn’t provide valuable content – Yes, there are...

One of the foundations of marketing is to test, learn and improve. The learning that comes from constantly trying and testing new approaches and tactics is one of the aspects of marketing that makes it exciting and interesting, even for grizzled veterans like me. “We learn wisdom from failure much more...

Email is the most widely used personal communication channel on the globe, with over 3.8 billion people sending more than 280 billion messages each day. The technical standards that enable this massive message exchange are not ‘owned’ by anyone; by and large, they remain open Internet standards. Google currently provides the...

As email marketers, most of us are focused on how our campaigns perform. Even if our emails aren’t specifically designed to drive leads, sales, or other recipient actions, we still monitor key metrics like Open Rate to at least determine if recipients are looking at the message.  For those email marketers...

Earlier this month during the Email Innovations Summit 2020, we had some fun; we played Family Feud: Email Edition. Armed with the results of our late May survey of the industry, we set out to see who would win a Family Feud game based on email industry survey topics. You may...

In the past, marketers have had a negative opinion about data appending, especially regarding appending of email. Marketers would often find providers giving significant amounts of inaccurate or falsely positioned data, creating a fair amount of distrust. The reasons: Data providers did not have the technology, talent, and time to invest...