Are high open rates holding you back?

Our findings last month on the Obama campaign caused a lot of debate but the bare facts of our analysis still stand – had Obama’s team optimized for improved open rates, their send volumes would have dropped and their all-important donations would have followed.

Open rates remain a widely used and hugely misleading measure of performance and engagement in the email industry.… Read more

Avoid these mistaken mobile email head-first tactics

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Jordie van Rijn, the founder of emailmonday.

converge

If you haven’t looked at all your marketing messages on the small screen, now is the time to do so. Mobile email is hot, and not in the sense of a hype, but in the sense that you need to take it into account.… Read more

Stop everything – we need to re-design for mobile devices

There has been a lot of talk over the past few weeks among various groups about whether or not mobiles have become so important that we should all be designing new templates for mobiles either optimised or using responsive design. A recent study by Blue Hornet says that 80% of people will delete an email on a mobile device if it doesn’t look good so this suggests that we should.… Read more

How the Obama campaign succeeded with low open rates

Obama Email Blogs Word Cloud

There is little doubt in my mind that email was the No.1 non-political contributor to Obama’s win in the 2012 US Presidential race.  75% of the $934 million raised by Obama was attributed to digital and nearly all of that $700 million was raised through email1.  That fact alone is phenomenal.

But it’s not until you start to drill down into the data to find out why Obama’s email campaign was significantly more effective than Romney’s that the exciting insights start to appear.… Read more

Is it your time to get engaged with the Email Marketing Council?

The election season is upon us. And it is important to both the DMA and the Email Marketing Council to ensure this is as widely publicised as possible as the work of the EMC requires a full council and one that is as widely representative of all constituent stakeholders as possible.

Over time we have had members that have been very active participants, who for whatever reason have stood down and the election time lends itself to be the perfect time to bring new members to assist with the work of the council.… Read more

The Draft EU Data Protection Regulations and the Other Compliance Obligations

As our series of blogs on the proposed EU Data Protection Regulation is almost at an end, I think it’s fair to say that they made for very informative reading. I hope you would agree with me that many marketers can learn something from them. A lot of the main topics within the proposal have been covered. But what are the changes to the compliance obligations which organisations need to consider in their day to day activities if the proposal was to be passed in its current version?… Read more

Changes to the EU Data Protection Regulation: What are the penalties?

When the updated European Commission’s Draft Data Protection legislation was announced last year, a lot was made of the sweeping changes to the fundamental data principles. Many of the have already been covered in other blog posts but what I want to delve into here, are the changes in financial penalties involved for failure to comply with the rules. There are two separate provisions which could hit your corporate wallet.… Read more