Email Marketing Rules

While most brands have been steadily increasing their investments in their email marketing programs, many email marketers don’t feel adequately supported. That’s unfortunate for both marketers and brands, because resourcing levels are highly predictive of email program success.

But the concerns go beyond email marketers just feeling under-supported. In some cases, they feel disrespected by the management at their companies. Too many have been forced to do things in their email program that they strongly disagree with, and a shocking number personally know someone who has been fired over an email marketing mistake.

In exploring this issue, we polled marketers about how well resourced their email programs are, how well staffed they are, whether they’d been forced by management to do things they strongly disagreed with, and how well leadership at their company understands email marketing. Plus, we spoke with marketing experts from Adesta, Email Optimization Shop, Merkle, and Shaw + Scott to try to better understand the causes of these problems and how they can be fixed.

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

Although being data-driven is the aspiration, the majority of companies are pretty far off from that due to a myriad of challenges, from bad data to poor integration to cultural issues. The result is that budgets and projects are driven by many factors other than any kind of return on investment calculation or forecast.

Litmus reached out to marketing experts at eMailMonday, Shaw + Scott, Adobe, Merkle, Barkley, Oracle, RAPP, and Red Pill Email for their advice on how to get buy-in for email marketing projects and they recommended:

1. Promoting sexier adjacent activities
2. Positioning email more broadly
3. Leveraging transformative initiatives
4. Leveraging regulatory and brand compliance requirements
5. Collecting case studies
6. Establishing proof of concept
7. Celebrating your successes
8. Finding champions

For all the details on each of those tactics…

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

In the wake of a rocky transition of verizon.net email accounts over to AOL, which included many accounts simply being shut down, there are now questions about how Verizon will handle Yahoo Mail. Will Yahoo Mail users also be migrated over to AOL accounts? Will these users lose their yahoo.com email addresses?

I recently spoke with Jess Nelson of MediaPost, who wanted to know: What Will Happen to Yahoo Mail? This is what I told her:

“The Verizon email service didn’t have a lot of features or good spam filtering. It also didn’t have many users, compared to AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail, which are now both part of Verizon. So it made a lot of sense to migrate verizon.net email accounts to AOL, which delivers a much better user experience. That said, the transition could have been much smoother and less threatening for users.

Yahoo Mail should be a completely different story. While neglected and tainted by being hacked in recent years, Yahoo Mail has decent capabilities, a ton of brand recognition, and a much larger user base of accounts. I would be shocked if Verizon did a forced migration of Yahoo Mail accounts.

Instead, I expect Verizon to consolidate backend systems, merging the systems of AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail into one email system and user interface. They will then use that single backend system to service both AOL and Yahoo email accounts. On the surface, those will have different branding, but under the hood, they’ll be one system.

Although Verizon says there won’t be oath.com email addresses, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did just that once that consolidation of email infrastructure is complete—perhaps as part of an effort to service corporate email needs to match Gmail’s success with business users. But even then, I expect Yahoo Mail to live on for a long time.”

For all the details and additional perspective…

>> Read the full article on MediaPost.com