MAKE YOUR EMAIL SMARTER
Experience + Expertise = Smarter Email Starts Here
Rebuilding Your Sender Reputation Takes Time, Even If You Weren’t the Bad Guy in the First Place
Imagine your email marketing program is humming right along, deliverability is about where it should be, and you’re tweaking and testing for those incremental improvements you know will add up–when all of a sudden you’re seeing a 95% bounce rate when emailing subscribers using Gmail. That is practically every single Gmail address on your list. And when your list includes 50,000 Gmail addresses, that’s a lot of bounces—enough to keep a marketer up at night. Not […]
Get the Picture? Use Image Hosting Best Practices Now to Save Hassle Later
When it comes to the images you use in your email marketing, you might not give the hosting of those images much thought. In fact, you probably give a lot more thought to finding or creating the images that will generate the best response to a particular email message, or even the alt text to place on that image. But the hosting? Not so much. Most of the time, that’s fine. However, when the day comes […]
Mobile Is NOT the Answer to the Broken Promises of Business Intelligence
In a recent article, CMSWire touted the mobile functionality of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, powered by the Wave platform, detailing how Salesforce is enabling analytics on the go. Since the article started out being about the “broken promises” of business intelligence, it can lead one to believe that being mobile fixes what ails us and leads to the democratization of data we need. Not so fast. While mobile is interesting and convenient–and there’s admittedly a certain […]
“Half the Money Is Wasted…”–Use Email Analytics, and Know What’s Working
I suspect every marketer has heard this famous line at least once during their careers: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker, an American merchant and the first retailer to place a half-page newspaper ad, which he did in 1874. (A few years later, he was the first retailer to place a full-page ad!) Mr. Wanamaker lived in […]
Why You’re Better off With an Email Expert Than Choosing an ESP on Your Own
The MultiChannel Merchant (part of the Chief Marketer Network) February 2015 Technology Report “Selecting an Email Service Provider” struck a chord with us at ClickMail, for an obvious reason: One of our core competencies is helping clients choose the best email service provider for their needs. And the advice throughout the article is sound, especially the warning that it won’t be easy. In fact, the article states that fact right off the bat with a bold […]
Event-Driven Email Marketing Software Is Pushing the Envelope
If your email marketing program involves simply sending out sales content to lists of subscribers, you are missing out on much of the medium’s potential. Event-driven messages and triggered emails are super powerful when it comes to reaching your audience with personalized content that resonates and converts. This is based on two axes. One is the timing which can be very precise. The other is the content based on data and behavior. The success of this tactic is […]
Spam: What You Should–and Shouldn’t–Do With It
I’ve been in email marketing since 2002, and over the years I have been asked the same question many times: “If I click on the unsubscribe link, will I get more spam?” My response has always been to parrot what my former boss said to me all those years ago: “Any email marketer worth their salt already knows if you’ve received the email. Clicking the unsubscribe link will not ‘let the spammer know’ your email is […]
The Trouble with Email Marketing Best Practices: “Best” Practices Only Make You Average
Good is the enemy of great. So says Jim Collins in his best selling book, “Good to Great.” He is referring to businesses that decide they are good enough, which means they are settling and no longer striving to be the best they can be. And that’s why the term “best practices” is misleading: Adhering to so-called best practices might make you think you’re doing everything that you can to optimize your email marketing, when really […]
Marketers Want Email Analytics–Can the ESPs Deliver?
Here at ClickMail, we have access to some unique data due to the ESPinator. The ESPinator is a free online tool we built a few years ago to help marketers looking for a new email service provider (ESP) to narrow their list of possible ESP choices. As thousands of marketers have used the tool, over 200,000 data points have been created, enabling us to analyze that data and determine what really matters to marketers when shopping for […]