As an email marketer, your goal is to increase your overall ROI, and that’s accomplished by improving not just email deliverability but also open rates. And as we wrote in July,  while email deliverability rates improved, from 93% to 95%, email open rates fell 9 percentage points to 17% in 2010, resulting in hundreds of millions of emails that were delivered to inboxes and never opened. We’ve been considering reasons for this decline, and more importantly, […]

I shouldn’t say “oldie but goodie” but I think something six months old is actually old in the email marketing world. I am referring to a MarketingSherpa chart published in February 2011  showing tactics used to improve the relevancy of emails. I looked it up again as I’ve been thinking on making email not only more relevant, but more, shall we say, personal? And by personal, I mean customer-centric. In a way, personal is what we […]

We push testing in this email marketing blog. A lot. For good reason. Testing is how you learn what works and what doesn’t. Testing is how you continually improve your email marketing. However, there’s an aspect I hadn’t considered before with the seemingly simple A/B split test: knowing you can trust your results! Is a 2% difference really a 2% difference or only an anomaly? Did you test a large enough sample size to get an […]

What does a global economy mean to a U.S. email marketer? It means you need help. And the DMA has it. Yes, spam might be a distinctly American food, but as unsolicited email, it’s known the world over. And you want to avoid being seen as spam by making sure you know the rules and regulations for countries other than your own. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) partnered with the Email Experience Council (EEC) to put […]

…it’s about them. Them being the person getting those emails your team is sending out in the hopes of getting opens, click throughs and sales. I have seen a couple of articles lately driving this point home which reminds me that although it’s common sense to make our emails about the recipient, we often lose sight of that. This customer-centric attitude goes beyond email marketing best practices. All marketing needs to be customer-centric. Perhaps in email, […]

It’s that time of year, time to take stock of the past year, assess your email marketing program, and plan for a better year ahead. OK, really it’s not. It’s July. But halfway through the year is a perfect time to look back and learn. Six months gives you enough data to look for trends and react to them. Ideally you’re following email marketing best practices and conducting ongoing assessments. Spotting trends, however, requires a few […]