It's easy to focus on the negatives that 2020 has brought us, like the economic, political, and social disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic and all the uncertainty that has created in our marketing programs. But I've observed a major positive development this year as well: Marketers have paused doing business as...

One of the silver linings of this crazy 2020 has been getting to chat more often with far-flung marketing friends - the people I would normally see several times a year at industry conferences but now view weekly on my computer screen. These virtual happy hours began informally when we were...

One good thing to come out of the coronavirus pandemic is that marketers are rediscovering how to be marketers again, and the evidence is all over the inbox. Email open rates have been going up since COVID-19 lockdowns, quarantines and "safer at home" orders went into effect in mid-March. Granted, more...

Testing is as essential to your email success as an up-to-date and accurate email address database. It can give you enormous insights into your audience across channels and makes you far more efficient when building campaigns. The increased revenue you will earn from testing will help you create better marketing messages...

Tactics are easy. Strategy is hard. Maybe that's why 55% of email marketers in a 2018 study by Holistic Email Marketing for Tripolis said they don't follow a definitive written strategy for their marketing programs. I have to admit I was not surprised by that finding. Coming up with a game...

Kath Pay: Bill asked me to lead a discussion based on my article/case study: 0% to 100% in Gmail? Yes, It Happened, and Here's How! We tend to treat deliverability as a dirty secret and more often than not only ever hear bad stories - so let's flip it and share our successes....

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...

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...

We marketers like to say we are customer-centric. We give "customer centricity" and "customer experience" the nod in our public commentaries. The Google Trends search trend pictured below shows a marked increase in "customer-centric" searches, which indicates that many of us are on board with this concept.  Source: Google Trends. Search...

Kath Pay: Welcome to the second of the new format weekly Influencer discussions!  Absolutely chuffed to be leading this discussion and I really hope we all get to share our trials and tribulations when it comes to both accurately measuring and attributing success for email. My thoughts are that by sharing...

Attribution is a problem as old as email, and it’s a huge topic – much too big to fully address in a simple blog article. And, sadly, I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I’m not sure that anyone does. But it is a topic that deserves much more attention....

One of the recent topics on the Only Influencers email discussion group is whether to resend marketing emails to non-openers. (To read this or any OI past discussion, consider becoming a member of Only Influencers. If you are a brand, you might even qualify for a free membership.)  The benefits are...

Around this time last year, I asked you all to think differently about email marketing, to envision "marketing as helpful customer service, not a means to an end." In other words, to build your email marketing around creating a better customer experience – Customer Experience Email Marketing. CX Email Marketing is...

On rare occasions Only Influencers publishes an article so important to the future of email marketing and its stakeholders that we label it "Must Read". Todays rebuttal, written by Kath Pay and Tim Watson, of a recent CNBC article is one of those rare occasions.

After nearly 20 years in the industry, it still astonishes me to find how many email marketers aren't doing everything they can – legally! – to acquire high-quality subscribers.

Everybody talks about being "customer-centric" in their marketing plans. "Putting the customer first" is a popular session at email conferences. "Aligning marketing with the customer journey," "improving the customer experience through email" and "adding value for our customers" are three goals people say they're trying to achieve with their marketing. Given...

Because email marketers are under resourced, busy people – and often new to the profession or have nobody to show them the ropes – they look to "best practices" as silver bullets that will fix their problems or keep them on the right side the law

Coupled with our history of being associated with spam, it's easy to see why marketers are so focused on following best practices. They use it as a solution to a common problem. The solution becomes a trend, and before you know it, it's promoted to a best practice.

However, I see too many marketers rushing to implement best practices without questioning whether something is truly a best practice, a trend or a bad habit that has evolved into a rule.

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.  

We talk a lot about how to wake up inactive subscribers and customers, but none of the usual strategies and tactics tackle one of the root causes: Your email's personality doesn't appeal to most of your subscribers.

We already know that email can form the hub of your digital marketing program, with the email address housing all of your information about each customer in your database. Now, I want you to think how email testing can also drive your multichannel testing program to gain insights across your entire customer database.