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…

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…

My Time as a MediaPost Email Insider: 8 years, 163 columns

This month was my last as a MediaPost Email Insider. I’ve decided to move on and explore other opportunities, but I wanted to publicly thank MediaPost for sticking with me for 8 years and 3 months through three job changes and three acquisitions. During my time as an Email Insider, I wrote…

Learn the Secrets of Viral Emails at Salesforce Connections on 6/17

Join Justine Jordan and me at Salesforce Connections on June 17 at 2:45pm where we’ll be sharing insights from our upcoming report on The Viral Email. We’ll be sharing benchmarks on email forwarding behavior, insights into what causes subscribers to forward emails, and real-world examples of emails from the top 1% of…