Persuasion: It's not just the title of a Jane Austen novel. Persuasion is at the heart of all effective advertising and marketing. I’m not talking about dodgy tactics that trick customers into opening and clicking on emails. Instead, I mean the persuasive principles and tactics that help customers to make decisions...

The long tail isn't just for sales and SEO anymore! That's probably what you think about when someone mentions "long tail" strategy. It began with author Chris Anderson, who wrote The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More in 2004 about the profit potential in selling...

I'm not exaggerating (much) when I say email testing is my life. Whenever I meet with a new email marketing team, one of my first questions is "What kind of email testing do you do?" That's why I ran  a poll on LinkedIn where I asked people, "What is your main...

The latest round of tech layoffs hit home recently. In a call with a marketing team, I discovered half the team had been quietly laid off the week before. It seems every week brings news that a past colleague or fellow member of the email community is looking for new opportunities,...

Now that it's autumn, it's time for email advisers to send out their annual lists of the automated email programs a sensible email marketer needs to employ to maximize revenue. What's on the list? The usual: welcome emails, abandoned-cart reminders, win-back messages. All three are helpful because they address customers at...

The Holistic team and I discovered something unexpected recently while analyzing activity in a client's customer database. This surprising information shed new light on how we segment customers and how we message them based on what our data is telling us. Although our program is still a work in progress, I'm...

In my previous Only Influencers post (When "One to Everyone" Email Messages Make Sense), I urged you to send “catch-all” campaigns to scoop up customers and subscribers who do not fit your segmentation criteria or triggered touch points. I am by no means saying that you should scrap your highly personalised...

First, the good news: For many years, experienced marketers have been preaching the advantages of targeting messages and using advanced segmentation for greater relevance, engagement and conversions, and marketers finally seem to be using these helpful tactics. Hooray! Now, the bad news: Some marketers are taking the segmented-and-triggered approach a little...

When your email program doesn't deliver the results you expect or help you achieve your marketing goals, where do you look first to fix the problem? You probably don't have a big red warning light on your ESP dashboard alerting you to problems, the way your car warns you about engine...

Customer journey mapping helps you understand how your customers interact with your brand and website. But it has another use as well – setting up useful and relevant automated messages. Journey mapping has also proved to be one of the biggest challenges many of my clients face. The whole process needs...

Data is at the heart of everything we do in email marketing, whether we're building relationships or selling. A healthy and growing database is your most important factor to succeed in every aspect of email. Building a healthy base and growing that base are two separate but related functions. Although you...

Whenever I ask people for examples of emails they love, most are quick to show messages from brands with gorgeous images, great design, amazing personalisation or cutting-edge technology. Hardly anyone says, "I love the copywriting in [Brand X's] emails!" Unless, of course, I'm talking to a copywriter. This is a shame...

It's easy to focus on the negatives that 2020 has brought us, like the economic, political, and social disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic and all the uncertainty that has created in our marketing programs. But I've observed a major positive development this year as well: Marketers have paused doing business as...

One of the silver linings of this crazy 2020 has been getting to chat more often with far-flung marketing friends - the people I would normally see several times a year at industry conferences but now view weekly on my computer screen. These virtual happy hours began informally when we were...

One good thing to come out of the coronavirus pandemic is that marketers are rediscovering how to be marketers again, and the evidence is all over the inbox. Email open rates have been going up since COVID-19 lockdowns, quarantines and "safer at home" orders went into effect in mid-March. Granted, more...

Testing is as essential to your email success as an up-to-date and accurate email address database. It can give you enormous insights into your audience across channels and makes you far more efficient when building campaigns. The increased revenue you will earn from testing will help you create better marketing messages...

Tactics are easy. Strategy is hard. Maybe that's why 55% of email marketers in a 2018 study by Holistic Email Marketing for Tripolis said they don't follow a definitive written strategy for their marketing programs. I have to admit I was not surprised by that finding. Coming up with a game...

Kath Pay: Bill asked me to lead a discussion based on my article/case study: 0% to 100% in Gmail? Yes, It Happened, and Here's How! We tend to treat deliverability as a dirty secret and more often than not only ever hear bad stories - so let's flip it and share our successes....

When you're trying to sort out your deliverability issues, it's so easy to think that fixing one thing will automatically solve all of your problems, especially with email services like Gmail. But I've learned over the 14 years that I’ve been resolving deliverability issues, that deliverability is a complex issue. Everything...

Last month's opportunity to deliver the opening keynote address at the fourth annual Email Innovation Summit helped me bring together many of the principles that have guided me in my own marketing journey. What I've learned is that it's not enough just to focus on innovation. We also must help marketers...