12 Days of Christmas: Show Some Holiday Hospitality with a Warm Welcome

Being a native New Yorker living in London with a geographically dispersed team of consultants and clients in multiple countries, I do a lot of international travel. As a result, I have learned to cope reasonably well with the various hassles associated with long-haul plane journeys, including the inevitable delays, bad food, cramped seats, turbulence, lengthy lines and jet-lag.

While it’s impossible to ignore the mind-numbingly repetitive, time-consuming and occasionally unpleasant nature of travel these days, one part of the process never fails to put a smile on my face. It happens when I’m on the immigration line at whichever U.S. airport I frequently travel to—JFK, DEN or SFO—and the immigration officer finishes with the questions, stamps my passport and says “Welcome home.” For some reason, that greeting alone makes everything else worth it.

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The 12 Days for Christmas: The Mobile Questions and Answers That Will Impact Your Email Program All Year Long

Some questions asked during the holiday season may be best left unanswered: is Santa Claus real? How old is the fruit cake? Is this a regift? What’s in the egg nog? Why are batteries never included? Who invited the in-laws to stay for two weeks? Why is it OK to play any song by the Chipmunks and pretend it’s music?

However, if you’re an email marketer charged with driving revenue from the email channel and are expecting Q4 to heavily impact your bottom line, there are some questions that you can’t afford not to ask. In particular, questions about mobile email and how many of your subscribers are using their mobile devices to interact with your messages, browse your website and shop.

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The Beauty of a Best-In-Class Email Program

More often than not, the solution for solving the client’s pain – barring any serious sender reputation issues – involves creating a strategy for relevancy. In other words: how to send the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. This includes demonstrating value through the email channel and sending messages that subscribers anticipate and appreciate. Sound like a big ask? It certainly can be, and that’s why it’s especially pleasing to see marketers getting it right. Sephora, the international cosmetics and beauty retailer, does just that with their email program.

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How to Take Your Email Conversion Rates to New Heights

On Tuesday I attended the DMA’s latest Email Customer Lifecycle Series event in London focused on helping email marketers drive conversions, one of the most important metrics and the primary goal for many marketers using the email channel. Sponsored by Silverpop, the theme for the event was clearly one of encouraging marketers to take their email programs to new heights by optimizing various conversion tactics and best practices. This was reinforced by Silverpop’s featured prize draw: an opportunity for attendees to win a helicopter ride for two over London!

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How Two Email Gods and a Goddess Could Create a Golden Age for Email

If we really could have super powers to make the email universe a better place, what would those be and how would we use them?

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How to Be a Great at Ping Pong and Email Marketing

I love ping pong, and that’s probably a bit of an understatement. I may have gotten a blister from playing so much during my last visit, but I will neither confirm nor deny that. Luckily, I’m not the only one who appreciates a good game of ping pong. I’ve had a lot of fun spending time with some terrific Return Path players. As it turns out, ping pong is actually good for you, according to this article sent around by our own Senior Director of People, Cathy Hawley, who beat me the last time I visited. I’m currently in training for the rematch.

So what does ping-pong have to do with email marketing? It turns out that the best practices that apply to optimizing your email marketing campaigns and the skills required to win a game of ping pong are actually very similar. Let me elaborate…

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Part 2 of 3: Integrating Email and Social Media Can Increase Response, But Beware of Common Pitfalls

My colleague, Stephanie Colleton, recently blogged about the fact that email marketing and social media are two very complementary channels. By creating a strategic plan for integration, marketers can boost performance and response. Stephanie compared email and social to chocolate and peanut butter—or two great tastes that taste great together, to paraphrase the tag line from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

To continue with the theme of channel integration—and candy—I’d like to propose that email and social media represent a double pleasure waiting for you. Does the tagline ring a bell? While you enjoy this classic Doublemint Gum commercial (circa 1985) and view some truly questionable hair styles, I’ll make a case for how pleasurable integrating email and social can be, as long as you follow some key best practices and avoid a few common mistakes.

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Give Your Emails Some Comic Relief

In the spirit of Red Nose Day—I’ve been thinking about what makes email funny. Other than two great cartoons, which I have tacked to my office wall, I couldn’t really come up with much. Instead, I’d like to use this post to expound on a few ways to make email fun. Yes, that’s right— fun.

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How Associations Can Use Email to Enhance the “Members Only” Experience

I’m currently working on a complex consulting project for a large US-based membership organization. The goal of the project is to help the client improve engagement with the email program and increase key performance metrics. As I work to finalize my recommendations, I keep coming back to a quote made famous by Groucho Marx: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”

What does this have to do with email best practices? A lot actually.

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An Email Christmas Carol

One of my favourite things about Christmas is watching the film “A Christmas Carol” based on the Charles Dickens classic of the same name. While there have been many film versions over the years, I’m partial to the 1951 version directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, which was always shown on TV on Christmas Eve when I was a child. The actor playing Ebenezer Scrooge (Alastair Sim) is brilliant and the fact that the film is in black-and-white makes it all the more creepy when the spirits of Christmas past, present and future make their visits.

These spirits are tasked with trying to inspire some Christmas spirit in Scrooge in the hopes that he will become a more kind and generous person. One of the best quotes from the book sums up nicely how Scrooge really feels about Christmas: “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” The sprits obviously have their work cut out for them.

So what does “A Christmas Carol” have to do with email?…

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