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Are You Testy? Count That Among Your Best Practices for Email Marketing
We harp on best practices for email marketing, as you know if you spend any time with this email marketing blog. And among those best practices is testing. As an email marketing vendor, we talk a lot about testing, but we don’t see a whole lot of it really going on. So here’s an idea for encouraging you to implement more testing as a best practice for email marketing: Be testy. I don’t mean be crabby, […]
New Metrics to Add to Your Best Practices for Email Marketing
We’ve discussed email marketing metrics in this blog and in our email marketing newsletter many times, always with the same message: Make sure you’re using the right metrics, because measuring for the sake of measuring doesn’t do you much good. You have to measure the metrics that matter to your own email marketing program, to learn, adjust and improve. Loren McDonald recently published a list of some lesser-known yet insightful email marketing metrics that you might […]
How Email Deliverability Best Practices Are Like a Track Meet
Yesterday afternoon was spent watching kids participating in a track meet. As an email deliverability consultant constantly on the lookout for ways to ways to make my case for better deliverability performance, I spent most of the meet reflecting on the similarities between a track meet and email deliverability best practices. First off, there are many different activities at a track meet. Running, throwing, jumping, sprinting, leaping… Just as there are many different activities you need […]
Scrubbing Your List: An Email Marketing Best Practice to Eliminate the Costly Clutter
A friend has been packing for a big move. And that packing has turned into a lot of sorting and cleaning and dumping and donating as she sorts through 22 years worth of furniture, books, art and all those boxes in the closets. We seem to accumulate a lot of stuff as we go through life. And the longer we stay in one place, the more stuff we gather around us. Then when it’s time to […]
Email Marketing Best Practices Require Honesty
Day dreaming the other day, I started looking at house plans online. Doesn’t everyone dream of building their own home someday? Well, if you’re going to be looking for house plans, you’ll find plenty on the Internet! I like traditional style homes, like four squares and bungalows and shingle style homes. None of that contemporary stuff for me. And when you start looking at the drawings and photos of the houses, you think, “Ah ha, a […]
Email Marketing Best Practices: Go Social With Unsubscribes
As a Marketer, I’m happy to see the “Social is taking over email” articles and blogs go away in place of more reasonable views that they can work together without one necessarily excluding the other. For me, the next step is to join forces with the two channels. One way: When people unsubscribe, give them an option to fan you or follow you instead. Does that sound counter intuitive? After all, they are basically saying “I don’t […]
Legacy Data Can Hurt You if You Ignore this Email Deliverability Best Practice
You do more harm than good when you send to a bad email address. So, again, don’t get caught up in the quantity over quality mentality of in-house email lists. That quantity could come back to haunt you and make your precious list worth about, oh, nothing. And “nothing” isn’t any kind of quantity at all! Here’s the deal: You only get email marketing ROI when you a) get your email into an inbox, b) get […]
Email Marketing Best Practices Include Easy Unsubscribe
Have you ever gone to a dinner party that bored you but felt like you couldn’t leave? Some unsubscribe processes are like that. And they are the opposite of email marketing best practices. A few years ago, I subscribed to an industry newsletter to help me get a better understanding of the industry, as we were taking on a new client, and that knowledge was useful. After a few good years, the client went away. (It was […]
Email Services Provider ClickMail Makes the List, and Another and Another
Email services provider ClickMail Marketing, offering the nation’s largest selection of email service providers (ESPs), has made three different lists! As recognition for our rapid growth over recent years, we’ve been ranked by three separate business publications as being one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States. The San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, and Inc. Magazine have all rated ClickMail Marketing high on their 2009 lists of fastest growing private companies. […]