Anyone who has been in the email marketing industry for any length of time has had this experience: that sinking feeling when you realize that something has gone wrong. Very wrong. Email can be one of the more complicated marketing channels strictly from a technical sense and when your program does something unexpected, or catastrophic, how do you recover? 

If you work in B2B, getting spam is a daily occurrence. Not just the typical spam that vanishes into your junk file, but unsolicited one-to-one emails that are just as worthless.  

"It’s just not pony enough.”

Marketing Manager
My Little Pony

The quote above was the full extent of creative feedback to an email my creative team and I developed for Hasbro’s My Little Pony group back in the early aughts.

Today we are excited to give you an Only Influencers EXCLUSIVE: the first look at eDataSource’s Delivery Index tool which is launching this week. Delivery Index is similar to products such as Return Path’s excellent Sender Score tool, which has been an industry standard for many years. I sat down this week with eDataSource CEO, G.B. Heidarsson who gave me a pre-launch walkthrough of the product.

We know that email is a money-printing machine. (Flash to the hundreds of articles that quote the outrageous and unbeatable Return on Marketing Investment.) As I often say with clients and at conferences, “Why wouldn’t you stand in front of the email marketing machine and just put in all your money?”...

List size is a metric that is ridiculous on its own. As every Email Marketer knows, it’s not about the size of the list, but the quality.

The battle over when to suppress users is age old, commonly fought between those who are focused on the size of the list, and those on the email side who understand that inactives hurt deliverability.

Your customer data is a goldmine of information just waiting to be discovered. You know that emails which reflect a customer's data are more relevant and likely to be acted on, but too many marketers stop at basics like name, gender or location.  

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. 

Shown to be 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined, email remains a top priority for marketers across industries. Engaging users with relevant, personalized messaging is more important than ever when it comes to this essential channel. However, recent research shows that even the top online...

  Last month Only Influencers and Rising Media produced the 3rd Email Innovations Summit, our second one in Las Vegas. It was an incredible gathering of email marketers from around the world at what is becoming the email marketing industry’s family reunion. As the first conference for email marketers that’s created...

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.

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 about...

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 that...

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: