How smart are your email segmentation, automation and personalization/customization strategies? Work on these 3 mini case studies, based on projects I’ve done with my clients, to find out.

It’s lovely to see more organizations consistently testing to boost performance! But it’s sad to see marketers doing tests which are returning inconclusive or just plain useless results. Here are three of the most common testing mistakes my team and I run across working with clients, along with tips for how you and your team can avoid making them in the future!

  The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes the law of the land in the European Union on May 25, 2018. I’ve read a lot of ‘glass half empty’ commentary about current marketing practices that will be difficult or prohibited under the new regulations. But the more I read the more...

In “The Blueprint for Better Performance Testing” I walked you through how I look at an existing email campaign to come up with hypotheses for testing.

But what do you do when you don’t have an existing campaign to look at – what do you do when you’re developing a performance testing plan for a brand-new product or service?

"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.

“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.

“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 

Last week I was honored to be included on a list of ’The 20 Best Email Marketers You Should Follow and Steal From’ published by GetResponse. A colleague asked if that last part, “Steal From,” bothered me at all.

Some of the most effective email marketing campaigns are actually based on very simple ideas. Here’s a campaign that took very little effort but generated nearly $0.75 per email – along with the 5 simple ideas behind the program.

In case you missed it, using email newsletters to do content marketing is a thing. But not everyone is finding it to be effective. Many times the issue is the quality of the content. Here’s a brief overview of the situation along with 3 tips to help you elevate your content!

We continue our series of featuring some of the speakers at the upcoming Email Innovations Summit. Jeanne Jennings will be participating in the "Hanging Out Your Shingle: The Good, Bad, Ugly (and Upside!) of Starting an Email Consultancy" panel. Here are some of her most popular OI blog articles. The Mindset...

The 3Q 2015 Email Trends and Benchmark Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth taking a look at – reading it 3 things struck me.

Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. LinkedIn Pulse. Twitter. Vine. Your Company’s Blog. Your Personal Blog. Your Company’s Email Newsletter. The Email Newsletter for Your Personal Blog. The Article that You Write for that Industry Publication. The Post You Write for the Only Influencers Blog. And Random Other Opportunities that Arise.

DRIP campaigns have been shown to improve open, click-through and conversion rates, as well as deliver higher revenue per sale than business-as usual campaigns. They are also somewhat ‘set it and forget it’ – meaning you set them up once and they require minimal maintenance and time from your team to keep them running.

"As email marketers we often get ‘in the weeds’ – focused on whether or not the opt-in box is checked (if you’re collecting email addresses from Canadians, CASL says it matters), agonizing over where the email sign-up call-to-action appears on your Website and trying to figure out if someone who offers to send your ‘sign up today’ message to 70 million qualified (according to them) prospects around the world is worth the $1,500 they’re going to charge you (hint: it’s likely not)."

I got some great insights on responsive design and coding for non-techies from my colleague Luca Bellavita, a design and HTML manager for Alchemy Worx, which I shared in a recent ClickZ column. But one thing that’s been taking a lot of my head space lately is how and when to leverage responsive design and coding in unconventional ways.

"Epsilon released its Q4 2013 Email Trends and Benchmarks Report earlier this month and there’s some exciting new data here on triggered messages that will help marketers evaluate their email programs." Epsilon released its Q4 2013 Email Trends and Benchmarks Report earlier this month and there’s some exciting new data here...

"The body of knowledge on best practices for email creative has grown exponentially in the time since I started working in online in the late 1980's at Compuserve. Today there are dozens of resources for traditional and cutting edge best practices in email creative. Here are some of my favorites:"

"Personalization is touted in email circles as a positive. I tell clients all the time that including a recipient's first name and other personal details in a message has been shown to increase engagement. But there are times when personalization can be creepy."

"Back in September I wrote a post for this blog about the mindset of great email marketers: that they are always looking at the data and using the quantitative results to improve their future performance."