Improve Your Holiday Season Campaign Results by Sending These 3 Emails Now

The email marketing holiday season will kick into overdrive during the week of Thanksgiving. But before we get to that point, here are three emails that B2C brands should be sending now to get their databases in good shape for a successful holiday season: Re-permission Emails for your chronically inactive subscribers Win-Back…

5 Tips to Get Your Triggered Emails Ready for the Holiday Season

Triggered emails are not “set it and forget it”; they are “review and renew.” That’s especially true going into key selling seasons, like retailers are about to do. During November and December, retailers’ transactional emails and triggered emails will be high-performance assets. Here are 5 ways retailers can make their triggered emails…

4 Reasons Broadcast Emails May Be Making Your Email Program Less Competitive in the Future

Mainly driven by increases in broadcast messages, per subscriber email volume has increased at more than a 15% compound annual growth rate over the past decade. It’s an impressive growth streak—and a testament to consumers’ strong preference for brands to communicate with them via email versus other channels. It’s also a streak…

4 Characteristics of Contextually Aware Emails

“Email is the most contextual medium—much more than the web,” Kevin Mandeville, Litmus’ content designer, said during a targeting and hacks workshop at The Email Design Conference in Boston last week. “We know much more about our users.” Kevin was speaking mostly about marketers’ ability to target email clients like Outlook and…

‘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…

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…

Shopping Cart Abandonment Gamesmanship

Consumers are smart. If you play games, they will figure them out, exploit them, and then tell their friends. In this Internet Retailer article, Don Davis looks at the results of a Shop+ survey that shows that shoppers—especially millennials—are crafty deal-seekers. For instance, 47% of consumers ages 18-34, and 37% of all…

The Dangers of Not Regularly Reviewing Your Triggered Emails

Triggered emails have a reputation for being ‘set it and forget it” programs. Unfortunately, that’s just not true, and it’s becoming less and less true every day. As we discuss in our recent “Designed for Success” webinar, there are two compelling reasons to regularly update your triggered emails: (1) quality assurance and…

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…

Try a Cart Abandonment Email ‘Sandwich’

Despite being highly effective, adoption of shopping cart abandonment emails is still low and growing slowly. Only 23% of major retailers sent a shopping cart abandonment email, as of December 2014, according to Salesforce Marketing Cloud research. That’s up from 20% adoption in December 2013. However, what is growing very quickly is…