No surprise, the 2020 holiday ecommerce season is shaping up to be the biggest ever. Beyond the normal increase in online holiday shopping, COVID-19 will shift many former brick-and-mortar purchases to online. However ecommerce companies are nervous this year about the ability of the shipping carriers to keep up with demand...

In my last blog post, I provided a quick and easy roadmap to analytics for email marketers. In this post, I’ll continue the discussion on analytics by taking a deeper look at predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning solutions in email marketing. [Moving forward, I’ll refer to the group...

So often I speak to companies that are working away in earnest at their email strategy, with the aim of meeting targets set by line managers and directors higher up in the company, without truly understanding why they are doing it. Even worse, they’re tasked with ‘improving open and click rates’ generally...

Earlier this year many of you took our Career Journeys in the Email Industry survey -- thank you! And thanks to our sponsors, Origin Email Agency and Red Pill Email, as well as our committee chairman, Ryan Phelan, and members, Kate Barrett and Anthony Chiulli.  We are excited to be publishing...

Digital Transformation is back. You would be right to wonder, “Where did it go?” I've worked in the email marketing industry for a little more than twenty years. Before that, I earned a master’s degree in Technology Management at Mercer University in Atlanta. That was in the late 90s and, I...

Summary What’s the purpose of your newsletter? Often one of the largest and most frequent sends from a brand, but often a compilation of message and objective, as it tries to do all things for all stakeholders. When trying to speak to all of your audience at the same time, what...

80/20 rule - Engaging with the engaged The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule states that in very many situations 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort. This principle is very widely accepted and holds true in many cases, for example in IT, 80% of system crashes are...

On opening one of my more-than-a-few email accounts, that little red number by Inbox — or the marching rank-on-rank of boldfaced unreads — sparks a tiny twinge and a little wave of fatigue. Yes, Mom, I know I haven’t read them all. (No, Mom, I’m never going to read them all.)...

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 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?...