Inbox by Gmail: 3 Experts Share Their Thoughts on Its Impact – Part 2

Inbox by Gmail is the latest email innovation by Google to get marketers wringing their hands and worrying about how their programs will be affected. To help determine its impact on marketers, BrightWave CEO Simms Jenkins interviewed Ryan Phelan of Acxiom, Jay Jhun of BrightWave, and myself about the new app. In…

Fall Edition of the Email Marketer’s Holiday Planning Checklist

Hopefully you spent your summer doing some big picture strategic planning for the holiday season. Now that we’re into October, it’s time to get more serious and more focused to the execution of holiday campaigns. In the second of my 3-part Holiday Planning Checklist for Internet Retailer Magazine, I advise retailers to:…

Tweetables from Connections 2014

It was a great week at Connections and I found plenty of great content to tweet about. In case you missed them, here are all the tidbits, factoids, and stats that I shared this week from the conference. You can find all the tweets from Connections at #CNX14. Watch the Digital Marketing…

Gmail’s Native Unsubscribe Link: The Upside and Downside

Gmail is making email marketers sweat again. In the last year alone, the debut of Tabs caused all-out panic, image caching set new open rate baselines, and grid view led to rendering concerns. Now Gmail is following up with a partial rollout of a highly visible native unsubscribe link in March with…

COI or COIL: Every Opt-In Should Be Confirmed

No, this is not a rant in favor of universal usage of double or confirmed opt-in (COI), although it certainly has its place. I’ve been a long-time supporter of single opt-in as “good enough” for most permissioning scenarios—especially when there’s active consent—and nothing has changed my view on that. However, risks around…

Unroll.Me Is a Promotions Tab in an Email

Unroll.Me is the kind of service that makes email marketers nervous. It facilitates unsubscribes and bundles messages from multiple brands into a single daily email digest, and its user base has quickly grown to more than 720,000. However, there’s no reason for alarm. We’ve seen this before. Unroll.Me is quite similar to…

Gmail’s Decade-Long Evolution

In the approach to Gmail’s 10-year anniversary, I spoke with Direct Marketing News Associate Editor Elyse Dupre about Gmail’s impact on the email industry. One of the things that I told her is that Gmail has been a pretty tireless innovator—perhaps a little too much so for some marketers. From her discussions…

7 Years as a MediaPost Email Insider Columnist and Counting

It was seven years ago this month that I started regularly writing for MediaPost’s Email Insider blog. My column tomorrow will be my 149th and I’m particularly excited about the concept I discuss in it, so I hope you’ll check it out. But I wanted to take this opportunity to share five…

Gmail’s Native ‘Unsubscribe’ Link: Should I Use It?

Gmail has made their native unsubscribe functionality much more prominent, moving their “unsubscribe” link so that it’s right after the “from” name in the inbox. Previously, it was usually hidden behind a dropdown menu. As before, Gmail only adds the native “unsubscribe” link to emails that include the list-unsubscribe header and—critically—only if…

Gmail’s New Inbox: Our Take on Tabs

The inbox is a dynamic place. The latest change comes from Gmail, which debuted its new tabbed interface two months ago and is now nearly done rolling it out to all their users. With every change that comes along, there’s understandable concern by marketers that their efforts will be undermined and, in…