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.

When I first started writing this post, it was going to be a comprehensive guide to everything you need to do to get your marketing email messages to the inbox. The modest post quickly turned into a full-length book, and not just any book, but, a highly technical book talking...

In this day and age, digital marketers have the ability to be pickier than ever when it comes to new software. For every marketing problem, there are at least a handful of solutions to choose from; however, they all come with a price attached. One of the most painstaking jobs...

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.

We are an ROI focused email marketing agency. We specialize in email strategy, creative designs, marketing automation and platform integrations. We deploy campaigns using the top email platforms and have partnered with hundreds of B2B and B2C clients since 2001. https://openmoves.com/email/services/

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. 

“I have more than enough time to do everything I want to do to make my email marketing program more effective.”

-- said no email marketer ever 

Bill Belichick is the greatest coach in the history of the National Football League. He’s been to 10 Super Bowls as either a head coach (7) or assistant (3), where his teams have accumulated an incredible 7-3 record. That’s an astounding 19.6% of all Super Bowls! Love him or hate...

Every Friday the Only Influencers members gets to pitch the membership on their latest tools and services. These are the Best of the Week; 

We talk a lot about how to wake up inactive subscribers and customers, but none of the usual strategies and tactics tackle one of the root causes: Your email's personality doesn't appeal to most of your subscribers.

Chris Arrendale says: Inbox Pros now offers a way for email marketing departments to no longer worry about monitoring email campaign replies, using our new service Reply Monitor: What are email marketing replies? When sending marketing emails, it is expected to receive replies such as, unsubscribe requests, out-of-office replies, an...

A lot of the entrepreneurial stories that I read feature the ‘entrepreneur as hero’.  A dashing visionary (maybe wearing a mock turtleneck) has a brilliant idea and through near-supernatural effort creates a new product or a new industry.  In this narrative, the founder hero is the center of the story - everything starts with the hero.  I’m part of the founding team of a ~ $100 million email technology business and my experience couldn’t be further from that narrative.  In my experience, the success of a business isn’t about the brilliance of the founder (or founding team).

Email automation is not the panacea for email marketing that many articles seem to suggest.

The story goes “buy a leading edge automation platform” and your email marketing is no longer spam and strategy is improved double quick.

I’ve never seen this to be true and have certainly spoken to too many email marketers who have found out it’s not true - the hard way.

Email strategy is not created by buying some cool tech.

Every Friday, members of Only Influencers gets to pitch their products and services to the membership. Here are the best pitches from Jan 20th: