4 Fears Email Marketers Need to Conquer

When Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers came out in 2008, everyone was really taken by the “10,000 Hour Rule,” which said that it took roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. At the time, I worked at the email marketing agency Smith-Harmon and we liked the concept so much that we created…

Email Marketing’s ROI Doesn’t Matter

We love email marketing here at Litmus, and are frankly often frustrated that some companies don’t see its value. To try to convince them, we frequently tout email marketing’s stellar return on investment, which is 38-to-1, according to research by the Direct Marketing Association. We’ve mentioned it in this report and this…

2 New Reasons Email Attribution Will Get Even Messier

Email has long had a reputation as a highly trackable channel. Marketers love it because you can see a subscriber open an email, click on links in the body content, visit their website, and convert. The problem is that for many brands, this linear A-to-B-to-C-to-D email interaction is increasingly rare—and already rare…

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…