Google’s New Inbox App: What It Means for Marketers

Google continues to place a huge emphasis on innovating around the email inbox, announcing a new email app simply called Inbox. This move follows the wider rollout of a native unsubscribe link, turning on images by default with image caching, introducing grid view, and launching Gmail Tabs—all in the last year and…

Tweetables from Dreamforce 2014

It was a great week at Dreamforce 2014 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 Dreamforce at #DF14. Sears.ca overhauled cart…

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…

Getting Email Out of the Friend Zone

Email may be a fairly mature channel, but it still outshines other newer, sexier channels like mobile and social. In the fact, the emergence of those channels has only strengthened email, cementing it as the power retention marketing channel. In this interview with Elyse Dupre of DM News, I make the case…

5 New Email Marketing Terms

As a former journalist, I love how email marketing is always changing. As an English major, I love language. At the intersection of those is the creation of new terms to describe emerging and existing practices, tactics, and tools in email marketing. Over the past decade, I was in the right place…

Glossary of Common Email Marketing Terms from Email Marketing Rules

Nobody likes jargon, but to effectively communicate with vendors, consultants, and other email marketers, an email marketing vocabulary is essential. To help folks better understand email terminology, I’ve added the glossary from the upcoming 2nd Edition of Email Marketing Rules to my website. You can find it at emailmarketingrules.com/email-marketing-dictionary. This dictionary contains…

Put a Dollar in the #EmailSwearJar

Every other channel wishes they were email. It’s used by nearly everyone. People begin and end their days with it. They carry it with them wherever they go on their smartphones. It’s one-to-one. It can be automated. It’s fairly trackable. People overwhelming prefer to get commercial messages via email than any other…

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…

Gmail’s 10th Anniversary: Its 3 Greatest Contributions

From Day 1, Gmail has had a palpable distain for the status quo. Experimentation and user-centricity are the central pillars of the service, which has consistently been home to marketers’ most desirable subscribers and has regularly given marketers fits and sleepless nights. Beginning as an invitation-only service on Apr. 1, 2004, Gmail’s…