MAKE YOUR EMAIL SMARTER
Experience + Expertise = Smarter Email Starts Here
Is There Really Any Good Reason to Switch Email Service Providers? Yes!
Recently in a LinkedIn group, a member challenged ESPs to give good reasons to switch, because of the high financial and time costs of doing so. He stated that he had yet to see a succinct reason to switch, and wondered if there were any. Well, of course I had something to say to that! Two things actually… Point #1: Have the right reasons to switch I recently presented at both MarketingSherpa’s 2015 Email Summit in […]
Does Email Equal Free Money?
We regularly hear about the ROI of email, and how it still dominates in the marketing space as the leading way to generate the highest return per dollar spent. But does that mean email equals free money? Hardly. Like anything else, you get out of email what you put into it. The reality is, the more time and money you invest into your email marketing program, the higher your return on investment will be. Simply buying […]
Are Marketers Asking Too Much of the Call to Action?
New research from Ascend2 shows increasing click through rates is a constant challenge for marketers. Yet it also shows that marketers might be misguided in their attempts to improve CTRs. In responding to the survey questions for this report, 63% of marketers responded that increasing engagement is one of the most important objectives of an email marketing strategy. When asked the most useful metric for measuring email marketing success, the click-through rate (CTR) scored highest at […]
Unsubscribing From Spam: Sometimes It Works!
Prompted by this cartoon that we recently shared on our Facebook page, I made a decision to deliberately tackle all of the spam in my inbox…with results that were surprising to me. It turned out that unsubscribing actually worked! The time waster that is spam I chuckled when I first saw the cartoon, with St. Peter telling someone how many years of their life they had spent dealing with spam. And then it hit me: Wait, […]
There’s No Crying in Baseball—and No “It Depends” in Email…Any More
For years you could ask virtually any ESP or email industry expert a question about best practices and get the answer, “It depends.” What’s the best subject line length? It depends. What’s the best send time? It depends. What’s the best call to action? It depends. And that answer used to be an accurate one, although it was always frustrating. “Can I have an answer with some specificity in it?” “That depends.” Arrggh! Yet that used […]
Why the “What’s Next in Email” Won’t Come From Email
Email is surely evolving. All kinds of articles and blog posts predict what its future will hold. From increased personalization in both timing and content to cross-channel marketing that seamlessly moves from email to social to web, email as a marketing medium is becoming so much more than email. Interestingly, however, the “what’s next in email” likely won’t come from email—meaning email service providers. Instead, the evolution/revolution in email seems to be coming from third-party vendors […]
6 Problems You Can’t Fix With a New Email Service Provider
ClickMail’s Michael Kelly spoke this month at Fashion Digital in Los Angeles on a much-anticipated topic (judging by all of the tweets before, during and after): What switching ESPs won’t fix. Since email marketing is a key part of almost any industry’s marketing makeup, not just fashion’s, and because the topic was so anticipated and well-received at Fashion Digital, we present the highlights from Michael’s presentation below. If you’re considering a new email service provider because […]
How to Improve Your Relationship With Your Email Service Provider (Instead of Ditching Them Altogether)
Experts say companies switch email service providers (ESPs) on average about every two years. If you’ve been through such a grueling process as this, you might wonder why switching is such a common occurrence when it can be so costly and time-consuming. Obviously, if a poor choice was made the first time around (perhaps due to Shiny Things Syndrome), then it’s harder to make the existing ESP work. Ditto if your organization has simply (and unexpectedly) […]
New Dedicated IP Address? Use These Tips to Warm Up Your New IP Address the Right Way
When sending from a new dedicated IP address, it is important to “warm up” that IP in order to establish a good reputation as a legitimate email sender with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!. You might have been an established sender with your old IP address, but now that you have a new one, you must build your reputation all over again. And your sender reputation plays a big role in […]