Jeanne Jennings is a recognized expert in the email marketing industry and a consultant who helps medium- to enterprise-sized organizations make their email marketing efforts more effective and more profitable. She is Founder and Chief Strategist at Email Optimization Shop, a boutique consultancy focused on optimizing bottom-line email marketing performance with strategic testing....

I hate to say it, but we are now at the end of October and Christmas is almost upon us (the marketing is starting to ramp up in earnest)! For most businesses out there, email marketing planning for the holiday season would have started months ago, if not the beginning of...

When I was in high school our history teacher, Mr. Holt, shared his theory-of-life with us: when in doubt, the answer is seven. A few weeks later we had a pop quiz in math, with an especially difficult problem at the end. At the one-minute warning, students who either hadn’t gotten...

Everyone loves Halloween! Well perhaps not everyone but, judging by the number of Halloween themed offers and Subject Lines to be found at this time of year, marketers certainly seem to. There seems to be consensus that incorporating the Halloween theme in a Subject Line is a good thing. But what...

When you're trying to sort out your deliverability issues, it's so easy to think that fixing one thing will automatically solve all of your problems, especially with email services like Gmail. But I've learned over the 14 years that I’ve been resolving deliverability issues, that deliverability is a complex issue. Everything...

In the days leading up to this year’s Email Innovations Summit, in London, I’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on my own email career, and what’s led me to be innovative along the way. When I began my career in email, in 2011, the resources available to help me were few and...

Email has undergone a lot of changes over the last few years - but it’s likely that the changes we’ve already weathered have simply been laying the foundations for what’s to come. For email marketing, these are interesting times. The most important people in any consideration about the future are, of...

Last week, Rising Media, the company I partner with to produce the Email Innovations Summit, acquired Only Influencers, the Email Marketing Community I created in 2010. I will be transitioning the company over the next 6 months and then retiring for good from this industry that has been so good to...

Have you previously considered moving between the agency-side to the brand-side? Or vice-versa? Having made the switch a few times myself (most recently back to agency), I wanted to share two of the biggest thoughts I have when considering both. If you are having similar thoughts, hopefully these help provide a...

Jenna Tiffany:  I’m excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on this week’s discussion topic: Is it time to shift our focus from email open rates?  Interested to hear everyone’s experience and the challenge in moving away from relying heavily on email open rates when defining email marketing success.  If you missed my...

Current Best Practice When it comes to your inactive subscribers, best practitioners have always advocated that you stop mailing them. Following this advice will have the immediate effect of improving your open rates without you having to do anything difficult like write better subject lines or improve your content and/or creative....

Way back in 2004 when eDataSource first launched, it was conceived of as a competitive email tracking tool, the first of its kind. But they quickly discovered that clients really had no insight or intelligence into their own email campaigns, let alone their competitors. There was certainly no 3rd party monitoring...

Last month's opportunity to deliver the opening keynote address at the fourth annual Email Innovation Summit helped me bring together many of the principles that have guided me in my own marketing journey. What I've learned is that it's not enough just to focus on innovation. We also must help marketers...

Ask ten different marketers to define personalization, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. Personalization in marketing has become a catch-all term—a grab bag of endless tactics that includes name merge tags, behavioral targeting, email triggers, content recommendations and so on. Traditionally, these tactics have also been pigeonholed into different industries...

Performance analysis is an absolutely vital aspect of any strategy. I may even go so far as to say that it’s the most important aspect. It’s what keeps you attuned to the pulse of your market, tells you what’s going down well and what’s less appealing. It’s how you weed out...

Jenna Tiffany:  It's a pleasure to host another OI discussion with a topic that I’m sure all of you will have thoughts on as well as experiences to share.  Artificial Intelligence in email marketing So let's start with, have you used AI in your email marketing activities? What did you learn...

I’ve recently been working on two interesting projects which have put me either side of the brand and vendor perspective. Having worked agency, vendor and client side it’s a very useful juxtaposition from which to develop my own consultancy delivery experience. Project 1. I’ve been working with a marketing platform solution...

Over the last few years, the email industry has been increasingly focused on accessibility. That’s a good thing, especially considering that such a large percentage of the world’s population suffers from some sort of disability, whether it’s permanent or temporary. For example, the World Health Organization counts around 1.3 billion people...

2017 was probably AI’s breakout year in email marketing. It's from then on that I started to witness the results that AI can bring to the channel primarily when used in combination with Machine Learning and Automation. Change has been rapid and ongoing since then, and it doesn’t look like slowing...

How well does your email marketing program align with your customer’s lifecycle? Put another way, are you practicing lifecycle marketing? This is one of the first things I investigate when I’m working with a new client, because often the answer provides the basis for recommendations to boost performance (which is the...