Email Is Vital to a Sharing Strategy

When you want your customers to share their experiences with your brand, you should not just be thinking about social. You should think about email as well. In Getting the Most from Your Email Content, ClickZ’s Susan Kuchinskas shares details from Sperry’s Odyssey Project, which created individually tailored adventures for nearly 80…

Infographic: Creating Memorable, Shareworthy Email Experiences

All marketers want to create relevant experiences for their email subscribers, but unfortunately the vast majority are not succeeding on a regular basis, according to joint research by Litmus and Fluent. We asked US consumers if they’d received a memorable promotional email in the past 2 months from any of the brands…

4 Characteristics of Contextually Aware Emails

“Email is the most contextual medium—much more than the web,” Kevin Mandeville, Litmus’ content designer, said during a targeting and hacks workshop at The Email Design Conference in Boston last week. “We know much more about our users.” Kevin was speaking mostly about marketers’ ability to target email clients like Outlook and…

‘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…

The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs: Are You Satisfying All 4?

Everyone wants to send more “relevant” emails, right? That’s been the buzzword of the email industry for a few years now. However, typically relevance is discussed in narrow terms, generally in regards to content. But relevance is much more than that. Just think about all the reasons that people mark your emails…

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…