Picture this scenario: The marketing team at your scrappy little company huddles for days hashing out the brand guidelines for a critical new product launch. The results, everyone agrees, are brilliant. The name is snappy, memorable and perfect. The tag line says it all. With all-hands-on-deck intensity everything quickly goes public...

Jim Barksdale, co-founder of Netscape, is credited with saying ‘there are only two ways to make money in business. One is by bundling. The other is by unbundling.’  That casual-sounding insight is like a high-powered X-ray view for the changing fortunes of businesses — especially, it seems, digital businesses.  You could...

The noise surrounding AI has drowned out darn near everything for a year, but there are market shifts not AI worth some attention. This post covers one that could have as much impact on email-marketing teams (and vendors) in the short term: Apple and RCS. First, a quick primer on RCS...

When a new subscriber adds themselves to your company’s email list, what events and records are triggered? That signup process seems like such a little, commonplace thing — a few lines of text, a few fields, another record or two somewhere — that it tends to be set up once and...

Last month Jacob Wenger, co-founder of Shortwave, was a guest on The Future Of Email podcast series, hosted by yours truly. Shortwave provides a mobile and web email client — “Intelligent email, powered by AI.”  Jacob and his colleagues have been working on this for several years — before ChatGPT blew...

For at least a decade, posts and pundits have pushed the notion that personalization is a key — maybe “the” key — to email marketing. Personalization in digital channels seems like a logical, natural goal. People say they like being treated “more personally”.  So, marketing content that is more personal should deliver...

DALL·E 2022-11-09 08.58.01 - An email message soaring over a mountain valley in the style of Maxfield Parrish. In the next year or three, expect to see the look of marketing content — including email — to change more than it has in at least a decade, because of AI-generated art....

While movie Westerns have largely gone out of style (replaced by superhero films?), they’ve left a useful collection of archetypes floating around the meme-o-sphere. When the news of Google’s offer to route authorized political emails to the inbox started breaking, the cliché of the ‘Bad Sheriff’ popped to mind. If you’ve...

At some invisible horizon-line future moment, marketing systems and practices of today will look as quaint, convoluted, and fragile as the mechanical systems immortalized by Rube Goldberg do to us. Goldberg’s whimsical machines — and more than a few real-world machines — amuse because they expend so much design and effort...

In this uneasy post-MPP-launch period (early 2022), one consistent theme to email marketing articles/tweets/punditing is “we should be focused on clicks anyway.” Makes sense; clicks are a big signal. Your relationship with the recipient, and your campaign content, have inspired them to act, exiting the email client for the actionable, scriptable,...

  "Imagine, for instance, if you can make sure that any link that is in an email didn’t actually get executed on your local computer but instead got executed in an isolated browser, which was running out at our edge. We have all the components to be able to do that....

Will AMP for Email survive the Privacy Wave — consumer awareness, public scrutiny, regulatory action, and changes in the technical landscape around data and control? I think not. Being in email is a bit like driving an old car. You love the thing — admit it — but the big screens...

Apple announced Email Privacy Protection at their 2021 WWDC. Because the announced changes directly affect ‘tracking pixels’ — used nearly-universally in email marketing — the announcement kicked off considerable discussion in various email communities. Articles range from cheers to yawns to outright consternation, depending on the impact. Working through the impacts...

Apple’s ‘Pixelgeddon’ announcement at their 2021 WWDC event (plus the rumored possibility that other companies in a similar position in the digital world could follow) is one of those before-and-after moments. How people and companies are handling it now — that’s one thing. How they will actually adapt their practices and...

Internet advertising started with email. In 1978, a Digital Equipment Corp employee sent an Arpanet email promoting DEC computers. It was successful but didn’t open an advertising flood. This may have been because the National Science Foundation’s officially-unofficial position into the early 1990’s was that commercial activity on the Internet was...

Communications Decency Act of 1996, §230(c)Protection for "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. FADE IN:  EXTERNAL WESTERN STREET - DUSK Townsfolk peer through...

On opening one of my more-than-a-few email accounts, that little red number by Inbox — or the marching rank-on-rank of boldfaced unreads — sparks a tiny twinge and a little wave of fatigue. Yes, Mom, I know I haven’t read them all. (No, Mom, I’m never going to read them all.)...

Email is the most widely used personal communication channel on the globe, with over 3.8 billion people sending more than 280 billion messages each day. The technical standards that enable this massive message exchange are not ‘owned’ by anyone; by and large, they remain open Internet standards. Google currently provides the...

Some of us have enough years (or miles) to fill in the sound-bite “You’ve Got Mail!” mentally. In a galaxy far, far away, that sound was an endorphin-jolt — the click of the digital mail-slot with a message from someone you knew. (I’d embed the sound patch here but OI doesn’t...