The Pros & Cons of the New ‘Block’ Button from Gmail
Gmail rolled out new “block” functionality to all Gmail webmail users yesterday, giving consumers yet another option to rid their inboxes of email they don’t want. On the surface, that might not sound like a great thing for marketers, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. This option is just one…
‘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…
How Would An Email Tax Change Email Marketing?
On April Fools’ Day, Forbes ran a story about how Congress was considering a tax on email by amending the Internet Tax Freedom Act the next time it comes up for renewal. It was a great gag, and while I think there’s zero chance of any kind of email tax coming into…
Opens, Clicks, Junks, and Blocks in the Third Age of Email Deliverability
In the First Age of Email Deliverability, there were no rules and few if any consequences for bad behavior. In the Second Age, ISPs armed their users with “report spam” and “junk” buttons and senders that received too many spam complaints had their emails junked or blocked. In the Third Age, which…
Inbox by Gmail: 3 Experts Share Their Thoughts on Its Impact – Part 2
Inbox by Gmail is the latest email innovation by Google to get marketers wringing their hands and worrying about how their programs will be affected. To help determine its impact on marketers, BrightWave CEO Simms Jenkins interviewed Ryan Phelan of Acxiom, Jay Jhun of BrightWave, and myself about the new app. In…
Fall Edition of the Email Marketer’s Holiday Planning Checklist
Hopefully you spent your summer doing some big picture strategic planning for the holiday season. Now that we’re into October, it’s time to get more serious and more focused to the execution of holiday campaigns. In the second of my 3-part Holiday Planning Checklist for Internet Retailer Magazine, I advise retailers to:…
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…
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…