In keeping with yesterday’s post on the forgetful From address and vague subject line in an email from a company that should have known better, another example of what not to do—if you’re trying to adhere to email marketing best practices. Today’s email marketing best practice? Don’t be annoying! This morning’s inbox presented me with an email threatening to lock my account. Or rather, saying the company had locked my account because I hadn’t been using […]

This morning I received an email from a company I’ve been doing business with for about four years. Normally one would open such an email, right? But the From name was only “Product Support Group” and the subject line said only “Updates to Google Algorithm.” Looks like spam to me! Which product support group? What about the Google algorithms? Both the From address and subject line were too vague to be real. But I’m an email […]

Want a super easy email marketing best practice? Take five minutes out of your email marketing day to read this latest MarketSherpa case study. This story of a small grocery chain making it big with email is a must-read email marketing case study for several reasons. 1) It shows you can succeed even when your creative is poor…something those of us who live, breathe and eat email marketing on a daily basis tend to forget. (I […]

Whether you’re a dog person or a cat person, you know the difference. As the saying goes, “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” Dogs love you no matter what. Dogs never hold a grudge. They forgive everything. They are miserable when you leave and ecstatic when you return. They think you walk on water and control the heavens and are the greatest creature to ever live. Ever. Dogs adore you. Cats could not care less about […]

In some ways, email marketing is like farming. You can’t just go along from day to day assuming everything will stay the same. If you’re a farmer, you’re dependent on the weather and you absolutely have to know what’s coming so you can adjust. You might know about what to expect, like hot weather in the summer and cold weather in the winter, but on a day-to-day basis, you can get big, costly surprises so you […]

It’s an email marketing best practice we harp on a lot in this blog, I know. But that’s because it’s an idea that’s so steadfastly adhered to, this idea that more names on your email list means more profit. No, it doesn’t. Do you need shocking proof that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to your in-house email list? Then click on through to this MarketingSherpa case study. The Indianapolis Symphony cut their […]

If you send it, they will share…not! Or at least, not necessarily. If your email marketing team has high hopes for the social sharing feature you’ve added to your email design, if you’re all thinking you’ll get all kinds of click throughs and sharing with social networks because people can share, well, hold on… Have you evaluated your content and message to make sure people will want to share it? Just because they can (the function […]