Come on in, the water’s fine…maybe. It depends on whether that “water” is your own pool or one you share. And by pool, we mean IP addresses. As an email marketer, there are two routes you can go: You can pay for your own dedicated IP address that only your organization will use. Or you can spend less money and be part of a shared pool of IP addresses. Typically, if you are a high volume […]

All this talk about Content Marketing is probably a) making your head spin if you’re a marketer wondering how you’re going to generate all that content, or b) making you breathe a sigh of relieve because you’re in email and you don’t have to worry about all that. Ah, but email marketer, you can help out your marketing companion! You have a role to play in this Content Marketing game, as the email marketer. First see […]

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 […]

We all hate to say goodbye. It’s hard! And as email marketers, we particularly hate to say goodbye to a subscriber. We’ve worked hard to slowly grow that in-house email list! Everyone who opts out is, well, like a little defeat, working against all of our efforts to make that number go up, not down. But that doesn’t mean we make it hard for them to say goodbye. Yet we do. Ask yourself, how long does […]

Rarely a day goes by now that we don’t see something about content marketing. It might be the subject of a blog post, an article or a new book, but it’s definitely a hot topic right now! Which begs the question, how does email marketing fit with content marketing? Quite well, thank you very much!! Content marketing is new enough that there isn’t yet one agreed upon definition. One marketer might tell you it means acting […]

A thought for 2011: Make your email newsletter more real. The world is increasingly social and connected. I predict we’re starting to expect that we’ll only hear from real people and buy from businesses we can associate with names and faces. It’s only a prediction, mind you. Most websites I visit and email newsletters I receive remain generic. Only blogs are typically personal, meaning you see a name and a photo of a real person. Websites […]