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Kath lives and breathes email marketing, she is not only a world-renowned speaker and trainer but practices her art with her boutique consultancy, Holistic Email Marketing, where she is Founder and CEO. Regarded as one of the leading authorities in email marketing, she has authored "Holistic Email Marketing: A practical philosophy to revolutionise your business and delight your customers" which is available on Amazon.

Want more event attendees? Test your email invitation!

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I just got results back from a test we ran on the email invitations we send to subscribers on our Email & More, A Q&A with ... list, and I wanted to share them with you, my fellow Only Influencers, because so many of us sponsor webinar series and other events....

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How AI amplifies 'fauxthenticity'

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Chad is quickly becoming a valuable member of my agency's team for our planning, creative development and optimization. You won't find his photo on our company website, however. That's because "Chad" is the name we've given to our private version of ChatGPT. Plus, he's still a work in progress. We're training...

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Want better email results? Invest more and demand more

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We email marketers can argue about everything, from acquisition to frequency, AI to organic content, and even what to call the emails we send. (I will go on record now and forever to maintain that we must never, ever, call email campaigns "blasts.") But one thing we can all agree on...

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Using Persuasion to Move Customers Along on Their Journey

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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...

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Track your email's long tail to find your true results

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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...

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5 ways to use advanced testing for better email results

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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...

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Economic bad news refocuses attention on strategy over tactics

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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,...

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5 overlooked email automations to add to your ecommerce lifecycle email program

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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...

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An open mind is one of your most important data tools

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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...

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How Serendipity Enhances the Art of Personalisation

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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...

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When "One to Everyone" Email Messages Make Sense

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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...

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How an email audit can put your email program on the right path

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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...

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Overcome the 3 Challenges to Successful Journey Mapping

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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...

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New Approaches for Building a Healthy and Growing Email List

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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...

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Email Copywriting – the Overlooked Art and Asset

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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...

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How 2020's pains can lead to 2021 gains

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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...

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How Empathy is Making Us Better Email Marketers

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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...

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More than ever, Helpful Marketing is good marketing

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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...

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5 Things You're Probably Doing Wrong with Email Testing and How to Fix Them

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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...

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Kath Pay: Lead with Strategy, Not Tactics

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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...

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