Many exciting trends and developments hit the world of email marketing in 2018 as email turned 40 years old – from the emergence of AMP for Gmail to mobile email reaching its long-awaited tipping point. As we head into 2019 and marketing budgets “refill,” it’s our chance to give our email programs a restart and refocus our efforts on innovation and speed to keep pace with the demanding customer. In 2019 we can expect consumer expectations for quality content to increase – it’s become an annual [...]
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marketingland.com 
Trend
On Monday, Amazon announced some new Alexa capabilities. Chief among them was the ability to read and delete email. The company also is enabling location-based reminders and routines (tied to the smartphone Alexa app) and other incremental local search improvements. However the email capabilities are the most compelling of the announcements. [...]
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marketingland.com
Marketing
Facebook is updating its policies around who can enable its Pixel and event sets, now requiring agencies to confirm their relationship with clients before leveraging either ad-targeting tool for client campaigns. Why marketers should care? Facebook’s Pixel and offline event sets allow marketers to track activity outside of Facebook and then use that data to target ads to users on the platform. Often, it’s a brand’s ad agency or marketing partner that enables a Facebook Pixel or event sets to optimize [...]
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marketingland.com
Segmentation, Social
Facebook has confirmed a TechCrunch report that it is developing a tool for advertisers to verify they have gained consent to use email addresses uploaded via Custom Audiences. Facebook’s Custom Audiences make it possible for advertisers to target users on its platform by uploading lists of emails, phone numbers and other data and cross-referencing it against user profiles. [...]
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marketingland.com
Multichannel, Social
Among the many findings, brands are sending more and more emails, but new subscribers’ share of their lists continued to shrink last year. “Throughout 2017, the share of new subscribers in marketers’ databases consistently declined, falling to its lowest point in Q4 when new subscribers accounted for just 3.5 percent of marketers’ mailable audience,” reports Yes Lifecycle Marketing. [...]
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marketingland.com
Listbuilding, Study
I’m a sucker for a good sound bite, and I heard plenty of great ones at our company’s *conference in Boston a few weeks ago. However, as a researcher and former journalist, I also like to dig into a sound bite and see what substance there is (if any) behind it. Here are my favorite quotes from The Email Design Conference and my take on their deeper meanings: [...]
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marketingland.com
Event
Here’s a new worry that digital marketers can add to their growing list: A recent spate of email list bombings has led international spam fighter Spamhaus to block IP addresses from a number of well-known email service providers (ESPs), including possibly yours. (See below for advice on what you can do.) And here’s the backstory: [...]
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marketingland.com
Listbuilding, Spam, Deliverability
This Banana Republic email is a fairly typical execution of response-aware design. Notice in the mobile rendering that: the preheader text disappears; the top navigation bar links drop down into the bottom navigation section and become vertically stacked; and the links in the bottom navigation become vertically stacked. [...]
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marketingland.com
Mobile
“If you can’t win the game, change the rules.” It’s the mantra of scrappy upstarts, but it’s also the mantra of the underhanded. During the Internet Era, we’ve changed the rules of marketing a lot — and it hasn’t all been in the scrappy upstart way. A huge part of that change has involved the metrics that we use to measure success. For instance, we replaced readership in the world of magazine and newspaper ads with impressions in the world of display ads. And we replaced viewership in the world of [...]
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marketingland.com
Conversionrate
Here are the fears that we need to overcome to be successful in the coming years: 1. Fear of mistakes. Send enough emails, and you’re bound to make a mistake eventually. Even if you have the right tools and a solid checklist in place, email marketing has too many moving parts, and brands send too many emails, to have a zero error rate. [...]
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marketingland.com
Marketing
A good salary isn’t just about the money; it’s about respect. And it’s not just about respect for the individual, but also about respect for the activities that person is involved with. When we surveyed more than 500 US-based email marketers for our State of Email Salaries & Jobs in the US (email registration required), we’d hoped to uncover differences between various geographic regions, industry verticals and company sizes. And we did. But we also uncovered a number of characteristics that identify [...]
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marketingland.com
Marketing
The company claims that email with UGC content leads to an increase in conversions of 30 percent, and an increase in average order value of more than 25 percent. Adobe’s recent purchase of UGC platform Livefyre signals that such content will become an even bigger part of marketing campaigns, including email marketing. A pending question, however, is whether user-supplied content is a trend that will eventually lose its fresh appeal in product marketing. It also remains to be seen whether users, who [...]
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marketingland.com
ESP, Trend
Email marketing teams and email production workflows are incredibly diverse. That’s what we found when we surveyed more than 900 email marketers for our “2016 State of Email Production” report. Most of the report’s findings (email registration required) serve simply to raise questions about whether a brand should consider changing their team composition, planning process, tool usage and approval process to make their workflow more effective. However, some of the findings point to areas where marketer [...]
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marketingland.com
Design
More than 50 percent of all email opens are happening on mobile devices, according to Yesmail, regardless of whether or not the brand is using responsive design. In addition to seeing 24 percent more email clicks, the report found that brands implementing responsive design in all of their emails earn 55 percent higher mobile CTO (click-to-open) rates and 23 percent higher desktop CTO rates. [...]
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marketingland.com
Mobile, Study
In honor of Leap Day this month, Litmus (my employer) asked 20 email experts about their vision for the channel in the year 2020, which is when the next Leap Day will be. Their “Email Marketing in 2020” predictions covered everything from inbox functionality to email service provider functionality and from legislation to personalization. Of course, I have my own vision for what the channel will look like in four years. So here are my predictions, along with info on whether I’m out on a limb by myself [...]
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marketingland.com
Trend
EPiCβ - Rene's daily Email PiCks
