Smoothing Out the Mobile Email Journey

Because of the slow and uneven adoption of mobile-friendly email and website designs, subscribers are encountering significant challenges as they make the journey from receiving an email to interacting with content on email landing pages. There are currently many instances when subscribers go from a mobile-friendly environment to a mobile-unfriendly one, and…

Praise for the 2nd Edition of Email Marketing Rules

I’m extremely proud of the 2nd Edition of “Email Marketing Rules,” which will be out next week! I’ve shared preview copies with some people that I highly respect—folks in the media, fellow authors, email industry colleagues, and broader digital marketing strategists. This is what they said about it: Jay Baer, President of…

Click-Baiting Is Bad on Facebook and in the Inbox

Facebook made an interesting announcement yesterday and should resonate with email marketers. They said they would be deemphasizing posts that “click-bait,” which is “when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.” Even though…

The Summer of Mobile Email Love

I made a prediction last year that the percentage of brands using mobile-friendly email design would increase from 22% in December 2013 to 70% in December 2014. That prediction was looking more than a little shaky when we gave our April update, but the Summer of Mobile Email Love has got us…

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…

Sneak Peek at the 2nd Edition Cover for Email Marketing Rules

I’m proud to unveil the cover design for the 2nd Edition of Email Marketing Rules, which was designed by my colleague Andrea Smith. I think the retro, blueprint-like cover perfectly captures both the complexity of the email channel and the cool-headed, straightforward style of the book’s advice. Plus, it’s really awesome-looking! Thanks,…

4 Keys to Improving the Subscriber Journey with Progressive Profiling

Subscribers change over time. Their interests change. Their needs change. Their goals change. And change can be very dramatic from one year to another and one season to another. So even if your email program has a wonderful onboarding program where you learn about each subscriber’s preferences, it’s just not enough. Analyzing…

Summer Edition of the Email Marketer’s Holiday Planning Checklist

Holiday planning for retailers is almost a year-round endeavor, but it starts getting serious during the summer months. To help retailers plan their email marketing campaigns, I’m writing a series of holiday planning checklists for Internet Retailer Magazine, the first of which is live now. In it, I advise retailers to: Adopt…

Crowd Favorites from the Swipe File: July 2014

We pin tons of inspiring digital marketing examples to our Swipe File pinboards on Pinterest every month. And each month you tell which ones most inspired you by repinning and liking them. Here are your favorite pins among the ones we uploaded last month: The Email Swipe File’s crowd favorite was… Michaels…

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…