One of the best things about email marketing is that it’s easy to measure the effectiveness of your effort. But it’s hard to analyze data if the numbers just aren’t there. Sometimes, an email tanks. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still learn from it. There are several types of responses that are useful to measure. Unsubscribe Rate is a good thing because it can tell you that the recipients aren’t interested in your products or […]

Welcome emails are a chance to best way to make a good first impression and also an email deliverability best practice we strongly encourage. But these seemingly harmless automated messages can work against you if you’re not careful in using them, even as a best practice. Remember, a welcome email can help email deliverability by being anticipated, opened and possibly even acted upon. That shows the ISPs engagement, an increasingly important factor in measuring the validity of your email marketing messages. You […]

We probably don’t associate email design and email deliverability. Really, the latter gets us delivered and the former gets us results, right? No connection. Yes connection. Your subscribers get to know the look and feel of your email design and branding over time. They might not open nor click on every email offer, but they still recognize your email in their inbox, no matter your email design. So when you change that up and use a new […]

Want an easy way to great email deliverability? Focus on great content. When people want what you’re sending, they await your emails and open them at a much higher rate than other emails. That engagement looks good in the eyes of the ISPs, improving your sender reputation, and they are more likely to let your emails through their gateways as a result. What is great content? Great content is relative. It could be funny cartoons. Or great […]

When your legitimate emails are blocked or you find your company graylisted, it can be easy to start thinking the ISPs are against you, or maybe against your email service provider. But they’re not against you! The ISPs really are your friends. They want to get your emails delivered to the people that want them, they really do. They are blocking spam in order to serve who? Their customers. And in serving their customers, part of […]

A few years ago, the best-selling self-help book “He’s Just Not That Into You” was all the rage, teaching single women everywhere to recognize the signs of a disinterested man rather than make excuses for him. The book tried to make clear that it wasn’t necessarily that a guy is too busy, or too shy, or too scared after a bad relationship to reciprocate her feelings and attention. Rather, the book explained, often that guy just […]

List fatigue is what happens when people get tired of hearing from you. Their name might be on your in-house email list for a bona fide reason, but they are done with those emails. Bored by them. Don’t want them any longer. Thank you very much but good bye. The other day, we talked about the signs, so you can recognize list fatigue before it gets out of control and leads to a diminishing email marketing […]

It’s easy to play ostrich with email. We can spend all kinds of time upfront on email design and copywriting, refining subject lines and calls to action, crafting strategies and offers, but in the end, it’s what happens at the inbox that really matters. And we need to pay attention. Sure, we still have all the time required upfront on the design and offers, but we also need to spend a lot of time looking at […]

It might be 2012 but there are still marketers emailing like it’s 1999. Yes, the quantity over quality approach to building in-house email lists is still going strong. I know, because I am perusing the emails in my inbox and I see plenty from companies who added my name to their list without asking. These are companies I purchased from as a consumer, or downloaded a whitepaper from as an email marketing consultant. In either case, […]