The Whitelist

What do you get when you cross email marketing expertise with a leading email marketing council? A blog worth reading. And now ClickMail Marketing has been recognized for our role as an email solutions provider by becoming the EEC’s newest blogger.

Starting this week, ClickMail CEO Marco Marini is blogging semimonthly for the Email Experience Council’s (EEC’s) blog, joining other leaders of the email marketing industry as one of the voices of email. Look for slightly longer content here from us in the EEC blog, as we delve a little into email marketing tools and best practices than we do in our own email marketing blog.
(more…)

Some email marketers scratch their heads wondering how email fits into the Web 2.0 world. And they cringe to think the age of email might be over with the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. But they should sleep well, because email marketing can be an integral part of social media.

Chad White has a great article on leveraging email marketing to get more from social media to engage customers and start conversations that lead to conversions.
(more…)

The Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the Email Experience Council (EEC) is proposing a new metric be used in the email marketing industry: The Render Rate. The render rate is designed to be a more accurate measurement of a recipient’s engagement with an email as compared to just the open rate. The Roundtable has come up with definitions and standards for different scenarios, including unique and total render rate, unique and total actions that include clicks even when the email doesn’t render, etc.
(more…)

Think you might be making mistakes in your email marketing efforts? You’re not alone, everyone does. But there are a few that you can easily address. Read about them in the newest issue of our email newsletter, now available on the ClickMail Marketing Web site.
(more…)

Email marketing is a funny thing, a mix of art and science, and part of that science is the technology behind it. Without the technology, we wouldn’t be able to measure email delivery, track open rates, or test how our email design renders. But not all technology makes sense all the time. Sometimes a new technology comes along and we as an email marketing company must ask: Is this something we should be encouraging our clients to do?
(more…)

In direct mail, they say success depends on three things: your offer, your creative and your list. The same is true of email marketing. And the best email list is your in-house one. That’s because it’s permission-based email marketing. Those people have some kind of relationship with you already and are more receptive to your emails as a result.

But building that in-house list takes time! It’s tempting to go out and rent a list of 50,000 rather than slowly build a quality list of 500!

(more…)

As an email marketing vendor, our gift to you email marketers this holiday season is advice: During the next couple of weeks, we’re occasionally focusing our email marketing blog on email marketing tools and resources you can use in the coming year to increase your email marketing ROI.

Another email marketing tool we’ve recently discovered is the Email Marketer’s Club Wiki. Don’t worry, you don’t have to belong to the club to benefit from the plentiful resources on this wiki.

Articles and posts cover topics like deliverability, email service providers, metrics, news, spam and legislation, studies and research. And many of these topics have dropdown lists with more granular options.

The wiki also offers links to tests you can run on your own email marketing, and even an RFP template for email provider selection. (Although we as an email marketing vendor would encourage you to use us for that help vs. the time-consuming RFP process!)

Take a look. You might be surprised at how comprehensive it is. I know we were!

Now that we’re in the holiday season, you’re likely busy with your holiday email marketing campaign (if you’re B2C) or understaffed with people taking time off. We don’t want to throw a lot of new information your way this time of year, rather we want to get you in a good place for a successful 2009, one with a higher email marketing ROI. Therefore our gift to you over the next couple of weeks, will be blogs on email marketing tools and resources you can learn from in the coming months.
(more…)

It’s Cyber Monday, the email marketing equivalent of Black Friday, and the perfect day to remind ourselves why email is so cost-effective, especially in a tougher economic climate like we’re experiencing right now. Off the top of my head, I can think of seven reasons our clients appreciate email marketing:

1. Email marketing costs less than direct mail. You create one email message and design and send it to as few or as many people as appropriate, only incrementally increasing your costs. (The price you pay to your email service provider is literally pennies compared to what you’d pay for printing and postage of a direct mail piece!)
(more…)