MAKE YOUR EMAIL SMARTER
Experience + Expertise = Smarter Email Starts Here
The Email Catch 22: Engagement = Deliverability = Engagement
Is email marketing now a Catch 22? To keep getting your email delivered to inboxes, you must engage the recipients. But to engage the recipients, you must get email delivered to inboxes. Huh? It looks odd to see it spelled out that way, doesn’t it? But it is true. In 2012, your recipients’ interactions with your emails are now an indicator of your worth in the eyes of some ISPs. If the folks you email don’t […]
Emails Gone Missing: The Myth of the Delivered Metric
In this industry, it doesn’t matter if you’re an email expert or an email newbie, you’ll talk about email deliverability! That’s because everything we do–every campaign we plan, message we write, email we design, landing page we formulate—everything is for naught if we don’t get into the inbox in the first place. Deliverability isn’t always a known commodity, however, because the number you get from your ESP might not be the actual number that made it […]
Getting Into the Inbox: 3 Ways to Weather the Waves of Change
As we just wrote about last week, the email marketing industry can be frustrating because so many factors are outside of your control, factors that can keep you out of the inbox. Working with email consultants will definitely help you overcome the challenges of our ever-changing industry, but there are also some tried-and-true email marketing best practices that will help you weather the waves of change and get into the inbox on a consistent basis. These […]
An Email Consultant Can Give You Back Some Control
Lately our email consultant clients have been expressing some frustration with how the industry works, with all the constant flux and change that makes it so hard to keep up. Oftentimes email marketers feel like they are at the mercy of factors they can’t control, from the ISPs to the government to corporate email filters to changes in technology. As email consultants, we are keenly aware that email marketing is a constantly changing landscape, and keeping […]
Study Says 1 in 5 Emails Never Delivered. Ouch
Numbers can be misleading and deceiving, even when they are the same number. Consider six compared to half a dozen. Six sounds smaller, even though the numbers are the same. So sometimes even email consultants like us need to look at the email marketing metrics from a different angle. For example, would it surprise you to learn that around the world, 1 in 5 emails never make it to the inbox? That sounds like an usually […]
Two ClickMail Clients Win eTail Best-In-Class Awards
When eTail announced the Best-In-Class Awards for 2012, we were delighted to see two of our clients among the winners. That’s quite a win/win for an email consultant! First place goes to… Partnering with Smarter Remarketer, we were part of the team behind Footwear Etc., the First Place winner of the email marketing category. Footwear Etc. is a multi-channel retailer of fashion and comfort footwear. They wanted to understand the value of behavioral marketing as a […]
Where Does Email Fit Into Bermuda Triangle of Productivity?
Where does your email marketing fit into your subscriber’s busy day? Any email expert will tell you it’s probably not at the top of their to-do list or priorities. For a reality check on where email does into people’s attention spans, see this wonderful map of the Bermuda Triangle of Productivity by Fuchsia Macaree. If work (i.e. productivity) falls into the void of this legendary triangle of social media distractions, where does your email marketing fit? […]
5 Must-Know Tips to Increase Email Deliverability
There seems to be a lot of rejection these days. No, I’m not talking about your Facebook friend requests. Rather, it’s your email that’s getting the snub. In a March 2012 study by Return Path, only 76.5% of commercial emails reached their intended inbox in the second half of 2011, down from 81% from the first half of the year. Furthermore, in North America, overall inbox placement rates fell from 86.5% to 79.3%, spam increased 30%, […]
Content That Sticks: The Lasting Value of Email
Does email marketing have a hidden value, one not obvious to the metrics seekers and data collectors but important none the less? I would argue yes. And that this hidden value is yet another reason to invest properly in your email marketing program. The hidden value? Longevity. While reading a MarketingSherpa blog about a study, I was particularly struck by the headline: “Twitter has highest amplification rate, email has highest conversion rate.” Other studies I’ve seen […]