Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}Email subscriber engagement is increasingly important as a determinant of inbox placement and positioning. For email marketers, the challenge is to identify drivers of positive engagement, and applying that knowledge to create campaigns that their subscribers consider informational, educational, or amusing. Success is being measured by important new metrics such as “retrieved from spam”, [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent. One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}Driving home last night, I saw a dead badger on the roadside, and I started ruminating on similarities between dead badgers and email marketing programs ! Not so much from the perspective of being a bit flat, somewhat run down, or showing the first signs of decay ( although all of those are potentially [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}Previously, I wrote an article about the number of different ways that common domain names get mis-spelt. In the case of “Hotmail”, I stopped counting once we got into three figures ! It was a tongue in cheek article, although it did have a serious point to make about the importance of list hygiene. [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’} When Elizabeth Browning penned the immortal lines “How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways” in the mid-1800s, she had some fairly traditional answers in mind : “freely”, “purely”, and “with the breath, smiles and tears of all my life” provides you with the gist of what she was thinking. [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}Given that we are now well into the festive period, I thought that I’d put a seasonal spin on this blog, and have a look at how email marketers tap into the Christmas spirit. I took a look at the thousand-odd marketing emails that I’ve received since the beginning of October, and run some [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}I received an email appeal from Blue Cross, the animal welfare charity this week. They were launching their 2010 Xmas catalogue, and it was the usual combination of fluffy kittens, beseeching brown eyes, and the un-missable opportunity to send “Merry Meerkats” Christmas cards to all of my friends and family this year! However, my [...]

Tweet{lang: ‘en-GB’}One of the more unlikely celebrities to emerge from the recently completed football World Cup was Paul the Octopus. For those of you who are unaware of the background to this story, Paul lives in an aquarium in Germany, and has become an expert predictor of the results of the matches that feature Germany [...]