These are all worthy causes. I’m going to suggest to you however that they aren’t the most fruitful pursuits. I’m going to suggest to you that we often bypass the quick-wins in favor of sexier options that we’re more familiar with. If your email marketing program is entirely focused on determining that right moment to [...]

It’s a dilemma we’ve all faced: sales are hurting for the month, and you’re in danger of missing your goal. You know that if you send one more marketing email to your list (or any campaign for that matter), you’ll hit the target. After all, you’ve calculated your averages – a 15% open rate, 30% [...]

Subject lines are the first, and sometimes only, impression an email makes on a customer. Mastering this magical one-liner is not easy. The key here is to diversify your email subject line. Any one of the ideas below, if used too frequently, will lose its efficacy. Compound Topics: I’ve seen this used regularly by Karmaloop. [...]

Email deliverability is a headache. We used to worry about the content of an email blast, and avoid spammy words like free or using ALL CAPS. But with the shift in the last few years towards repuation based SPAM filtering, email deliverability tactics have changed drastically. Now, instead of one isolated email getting stuck in [...]

I suppose I can title this post “25 Email Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made.” But rather than focus on the negative, below I’ve outlined the best practices I’ve come to adopt over the years. Hope you find something here useful. Diversify your Content: If your entire email focuses on one product, service, or topic, you risk [...]

As marketers, we all like to think we know all the answers for our clients. Unfortunately we don’t, which is why we need testing. Especially in regards to email marketing, testing campaigns can be the difference between a moderately successful program and a breakout success. Let me share some variables I’ve tested with my clients [...]

E-commerce has one glaring problem. Because you can’t interact with your customers face to face, you often don’t know what the greatest barriers are that prevent purchases. The savvy e-commerce marketer will do everything in his power to make up for this by interacting with their customer base in other ways. In my experience, the [...]

It’s not often that you are blown away by the customer service of an online retailer. After all, how much of an impression can a company make when the only contact points are usually email or a help page? Recently, I purchased a cream for the Eczema problem I have on my skin from DermaTechRX. Immediately [...]

Transactional and trigger based emails are becoming more effective as generic, mass email blasts are becoming more irrelevant. Why? For one, an transactional email is usually in response to a request or an action a customer takes, therefore it is more inline with a pull marketing strategy rather than push. Below I’ve listed 4 ways I’ve successfully used transactional emails with [...]

 5 years ago, I would have told you the most important tactic for email marketing was building your list. Today, that would probably be the last tactic I would recommend. Email marketing has evolved from a shot-gun approach to highly targeted sharp shooting. In this post, I’ll list some of the best ways to derail [...]