To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill

Subject lines… the easiest thing to write, the hardest thing to get right. There is just no single best practice, rule or tactic that works every time.

According to a recent study from Exelate, 30% of advertisers and more than half of agencies who reported using lookalike modeling saw double or even triple the results of standard targeting. The only problem is, 25% of of those advertisers don’t know how lookalike modeling actually works.

Journey Designer enables marketing teams to create visually compelling, easy-to-use storyboards of marketing programs and campaigns.

Key to good inbox delivery is having a clean, verified list. Today I'll be unboxing one of the top Email verification services: BriteVerify.

A compendium of articles about learning to be an Email Marketing Professional

People base their decisions on the wisdom of the crowd and their peers. Online 61% of customers read reviews before making a purchase decision. Think about how you choose a restaurant, you go into the one that's busy, not empty, as you think the food must be better. Social proof drives sales in the same way. Social proof is important.

We now provide automatic daily or weekly emails.

This allows online retailers to increase their email send frequency and make more revenue, without doing more work to setup email campaigns manually.

What are the metrics that Email Marketers should be tracking.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has declared “mea culpa” in regards to ad-blocking and has vowed to fix the problem with a new acronym: L.E.A.N. (Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive ads)

This week, we dive deep into how these new principles represent a solution that can work for everyone – publishers, marketers and consumers – without having to all-or-nothing solutions like ad blockers or paywalls. Mom would be so proud.

One question I continually hear from prospects is “we’re looking to hire someone for an email role…but we’re not sure what to look for.”

I’ve had the great fortune of working with some wonderful email marketers. They have delivered incredible value for our brands and have grown into leaders of some excellent email marketing programs. I’ve also worked with a few folks who may have been better off in a different line of work. Luckily, the “n” on this group is much smaller than that first group!

A comendium of articles on changing or replacing your Email Service Provider

A compendium of OI Blog articles on everything you need to know to get started with Drip Marketing.

At AudiencePoint we have been doing some really interesting things with the Welcome/New Customer/Onboarding Series of emails. We just finished the write up on one of these series based emails.

Taxi for Email from Action Rocket calls itself an Enterprise Level Email Content Management system and is designed to streamline design and workflow processes allowing coders, designers, editors and copywriters to work more efficiently while cutting down on iterative testing and saving man hours and cost.

Hey everyone, Greetings from your friends at SendGrid!

We’re proud to announce Threads by SendGrid: bringing triggered, one-to-one communication within reach.

We've added Social Proof for Web and Email Campaigns.

This allows online retailers to easily share with shoppers real-time statistics, showing what products and services have been recently viewed and/or purchased. For example "28 others are viewing this hotel right now!" or "7 recently bought!".

With Halloween come and gone, Only Influencer¹s partner LiveIntent is bringing you 3 terrifying tales based on the scariest trends in digital marketing: Ad Fraud, Viewability and Zombie Cookies.

If my six different inboxes are any indication, retailers and businesses of any type don’t use Halloween as the awesome opportunity it is. I received all of two Halloween inspired emails, which is rather pathetic. It’s a playful, fun, and joyously spooky time of year – why would retailers shy away from such a great opportunity? Are they worried they’ll offend? Seriously?

How did you get started in Email Marketing?

My career has been a series of phases. Early in my career I was all about direct marketing and eLearning. The eLearning side really shaped a lot of my thinking around how people learn, connect and how content can play a role in that. I worked at Franklin Covey during the emergence of the Palm Pilot and online calendaring days, and the transition of ecommerce and online. Imagine taking thousands of hours of offline content and trying to port to self paced courseware.

The following is a list of Quarterly Benchmark Reports suggested the OI membership. Some require registration to download: