Email + Social: Appetizing Integration

To get the creative juices flowing, let’s take a look at two examples of marketing campaigns from this spring and summer that leveraged an email and social media integrated model. Warning: Beware the power of suggestion. If you were planning on a salad for lunch, don’t read on.

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How Your Email Deliverability is Affecting Your Overall Revenue

In the perfect world, 100% of your emails would make it to your subscribers’ inboxes with no trouble at all. Your subscribers would receive your beautifully designed emails with all images and links enabled, and would spend all morning reading and clicking on your emails.

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Word of the Week – Typography

I’ll admit that I am a fan of typography. I have three shelves on a bookshelf dedicated to the topic, I enjoy creating my own fonts, and yes, I even own a copy of a documentary about one of the greatest typefaces ever created, Helvetica. Naturally, I became rather giddy when I ran across three recent articles about typography for email.

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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 Email Marketers Can Start Preparing for Google+ Now

As an email marketer (or any marketer), you can’t seem to go anywhere without hearing about Google+. From how fast it has grown (25 million+) to what it is (a new way to share) and what it isn’t (a Facebook killer). Google+ is everywhere.

And yet, it can be difficult to determine if Google+ is the next big thing or just the newest social media kid on the block.

So, what does Google+ mean for email marketers? Should you care? While I can’t predict the future, here’s why email marketers should care and what they can start doing to prepare for Google+ or the next big thing.

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Word of the Week: Email Tools

This week had three new email and inbox application announcements that appeal to users of both ends of the email spectrum, namely business and consumer, which help to save email users time writing emails, making email more interactive, and another connecting publisher to advertisers.

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KISS (The Email Marketing Version)

I was recently reminded of one of the first marketing lessons I learned over 12 years ago: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). With technology so rapidly changing, it’s gotten easier and easier to overwhelm ourselves and our subscribers with communication: Newsletters! Triggered Alerts! Facebook Offers! Twitter Tips! So, I took this reminder as a point of inspiration to create an email marketing version of the long-time marketing rule.

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Word of the Week: Metrics

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” goes the saying and marketers live and die by their numbers. What we measure helps determine how successful our email program really is. These metrics include bounces, opens, clicks, inbox placement, render, delivered, rejected, unknown user, spam trap, inactive, conversions, unsubscribe, deliverability, and the list goes on. I’ve gathered articles from the past couple of weeks that discuss email marketing metrics and how to measure and use them.

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Helpful Resources for Email Marketers in the Age of Mobile

My husband recently got a new smartphone (yes, I’m completely jealous). Not surprisingly, email was the first application he got up and running on the new phone. Email is the last item he checks on the phone before bed and the first item he opens in the morning. While his behavior may have been unique a few years ago, Return Path’s recent study finds there has been an 81% growth in mobile email viewership.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Gmail Inboxes

Gmail has had a relatively short life compared to the other large webmail providers such as Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL. Gmail launched in beta in 2004, became available to the general public in 2007 and officially launched out of beta in July 2009. According to our research Gmail closed 2010 with 193 million users, which is less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it is adding new users at a much faster rate than these two providers.

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