My 2-part article summarizing the recent Thought Leaders Summit on Email Marketing has now been published on MarketingProfs.com (part 1 and part 2). It is for MarketingProfs premium subscribers only unfortunately, so if you have been thinking about subscribing , now is the time to do it. The Summit panelists included renowned author Jim Sterne, […]

Trying to do effective email marketing without good, reliable metrics by which to measure success, is like flying blind. Yet the reliability of such a key statistic as the open rate of an email campaign has been eroded for various technical and operational reasons. Let’s have a closer look at this issue, with the help […]

Here’s a startling bit of research, done by EmailLabs and written up in MarketingSherpa, for all of you folks responsible for crafting email campaigns and newsletters: This [past] fall tens of millions of emails from permission mailers were tested for a brand new metric: actual read time. Turns out 15-20 seconds was the average. Consider […]

Yesterday I conducted another Thought Leaders Summit for MarketingProfs. This one was on email marketing. I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation between some leading minds in the email marketing space, including Jim Sterne, author of several excellent books on email marketing and a founder of the Web Analytics Association; Shar VanBoskirk, consulting analyst […]

I was trawling through some back issues of email marketing newsletters and came across this little gem by Paul Soltoff. Written on December 2, 2002 – yes, I know that’s a long time in Internet history – Paul’s advice is still relevant today. In essence, he says email marketers ignore preview windows at their peril. […]

Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It’s always fun to talk ethics, but let’s bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers. Let’s look at […]

With the one year anniversary of CAN-SPAM passing into law now past, I am seeing a number of articles (like this one) all concurring that CAN-SPAM has been totally ineffective in stemming the tide of spam emanating from the United States. In fact U.S. orginating spam has grown significantly. I can’t say that I am […]

It wasn’t more than a few weeks ago that I was ribbing Lycos for getting into the search engine optimization business. Well they’ve surprised me again with yet another off-the-wall idea: creating a spam vigilante screensaver called “Make Love Not Spam” that overwhelms spammers’ web servers with garbage traffic. What were they thinking? This idea, […]

I thought this was pretty cool: realsimpleshopping.com allows you to get your shopping offers through RSS. What this means is that personalized cabelas.com email campaigns get posted to realsimpleshopping and then untold numbers of people will start opening and clicking on that email, like this one for example. I wonder if Cabela’s and other online […]

I just unsubscribed to the SharperImage.com’s email specials and, rather than being greeted with the usual unsubscribed page once I clicked on the unsubscribe link, instead I came to a page where I could change my email frequency. I could totally unsubscribe, or alternatively, I could decrease the frequency to 4 special offer emails per […]