Different Subscriber Segments Require Different Success Metrics

Our subscribers aren’t all the same. They have different goals, which means that marketers should have different strategies for optimizing those relationships and measuring the success of those relationships. Vicky Ge, Marketing Manager, Trade Books, at Amazon.com, is very mindful of the different audiences that the ecommerce giant serves. At The Email…

The Often Missing Element in Email Marketing Success Metrics: Time

Email marketing success metrics are incredibly tricky, in part because it’s very easy to fall into a mindset of evaluating campaign success instead of program or customer success. While individual campaigns are important—some being critical—the collective impact of our campaigns on the engagement of our subscribers is even more important. It’s an…

2015 Top 10 Email Marketing Stats

2015 marked a significant turn in the perception of email marketing in the media and in C-suites. After years of “Email Is Dead” headlines, this year brought renewed interest and headlines like The Triumphant Return of the Email Newsletter and Shop, Play Games, And Check Twitter—From Your Inbox. Ultimately, these predictions of…

5 Reasons External Email Benchmarks Are Less Useful Than You Think

Our competitive nature drives us to want to know how other email marketers are performing. But aggregated, averaged benchmark data can provide false comfort and false alarms. I’m not saying benchmarks are completely unuseful, just that they’re usually only helpful in a very general way for the following reasons: Audience response is…

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…

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…

How Emails Are Evolving into Mailable Microsites

“The emails of the future will be much more like sending subscribers a microsite than a static message,” I say at the end of my book, Email Marketing Rules. Watching videos, browsing product assortments, and even making product purchases will also be possible without leaving the inbox. When the book was published…

Is Email Marketing Cheap or Does It Have a High ROI?

How you and—more importantly—your boss answer that question easily predicts the future success of your email marketing program. In this Email Insider column for MediaPost, talk about: The behaviors that indicate an “email marketing is cheap” mentality vs. an “email marketing’s ROI is high” mentality The results of these two lines of…

6 Retail Email Marketing Priorities for 2015

Getting ready for the holiday season is almost a year-round effort—which is to say you’re preparing for November and December the other 10 months of the year. To help you prep, I discuss 6 retail email marketing priorities in this slide deck, which includes supplemental links to research reports, articles, and real-world…