‘The Email Episode’ of Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloudcast
I was honored to be one of the first guests on Salesforce’s new podcast, the Marketing Cloudcast, which is hosted by my friends Heike Young and Joel Book. The podcast is available on Soundcloud and via iTunes. In “The Email Episode: Giving Email a Little Respect,” we talk about: What I do…
The Benefits and Challenges of Interactive Emails
How to bring interactivity to email—and whether we should—was a major topic at The Email Design Conference last month. In this article, Fast Company talks with Justine Jordan and I and others in the industry about the benefits and challenges of interactive emails. I summed up the benefits of bringing video, carousels,…
The Savvy, Time-Saving Responsive-Aware Approach to Email Design
While responsive email design is seeing the highest adoption rate among B2C marketers, responsive-aware may be the savviest and most time-efficient approach to creating a mobile-friendly subscriber experience. What’s responsive-aware design? It’s an email design approach that uses responsive design for the headers and footers, while using mobile-aware design for the remaining…
The 5 Levels of Mobile-Friendly Email Design
Sometimes being mobile-friendly can seem black and white. You’re either using responsive design or you’re not. But there are actually gradations of mobile-friendliness, especially in emails. In my latest Marketing Land column, I discuss the 5 levels of mobile-friendly email design: 5. Responsive email design: Email content and layout adjust to user’s…
Infographic: 2015 Mobile-Friendly Email & Landing Page Trends
We’ve been beating the drum on the need to be more mobile-friendly for years as email reading has shifted from desktop and webmail to mobile devices. According to data from Litmus Email Analytics, mobile email reading has plateaued at around 50%. However, new joint research from Litmus and Salesforce shows that marketers…
Tactics Used by the Top 1% of Viral Emails
“One of the key drivers of sharing is social capital. Sharing something of interest to our network is a way of showing that we’re in the know. It is a means to build our professional, cultural or social standing among our circles,” said Alfred Hermida, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of…
5 Secrets to Getting Subscribers to Forward Your Emails
Social sharing gets a lot of attention—in large part, because it’s relatively easy to measure—but the all but invisible email forward can be just as powerful for brands. Whereas social sharing is public, diffuse, and powerful at driving top-of-the-funnel awareness, email forwards are private, targeted, and excel at driving bottom-of-the-funnel action. To…
8 Keys to Making Your Emails Go Viral
“It’s the scatter shot of social versus that sniper bullet of the forward.” That’s how I described the difference between the reach-maximizing social share and the conversion-maximizing email forward in an interview with Elyse Dupré of Direct Marketing News about the findings of our Viral Email report. We spoke at length about…
The Viral Email Report: How to Make Your Emails Go Viral
We tend to associate “going viral” with social media—in part because it’s relatively easy to see and measure the very public noise of social sharing in terms of likes, favorites, and retweets. However, the much quieter email forward is often a much more powerful influencer. In our latest research report, The Viral…