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…

7 Years as a MediaPost Email Insider Columnist and Counting

It was seven years ago this month that I started regularly writing for MediaPost’s Email Insider blog. My column tomorrow will be my 149th and I’m particularly excited about the concept I discuss in it, so I hope you’ll check it out. But I wanted to take this opportunity to share five…

The Questions My #EEC14 Panel Didn’t Get to

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel last week at the Email Evolution Conference with fellow email marketing book author Simms Jenkins. We crowdsourced questions online for our session, in addition to taking questions from attendees—but, of course, we didn’t get through them all. So I wanted to go ahead…

The State of Email Marketing Is…

…strong, but could be stronger, according to the finding of our 2014 State of Marketing report, which surveyed more than 2,500 marketers. First, the testaments to email’s strength: Eighty-eight percent of marketers use email marketing and another 9% said they plan to launch an email program this year. Only 3% said they…