Online Marketing for Marketers

One out of five US email marketers send additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request, according to the new study Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me”  from Return Path.  A very poor practice, indeed, and a lesson for marketers in every nation. If someone requests off your file, please let them off without any troubles. Further the study found that 11% of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request - a violation of the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. Read more

Anybody feeling good about the economy these days?  With so much pressure to perform, it’s hard to “envision the future” or even get your arms around 2009 planning.

Here’s two things you can do now, in Q4, for immediate impact, that will not only help you improve results, but will help you feel good about your planning efforts (and keep your job safe).  Read more

Never a very reliable metric, open rates now tell us even less about the actual behavior of our email subscribers.  With image suppression the default setting for nearly 100% of email clients, tracking of open rates with any accuracy is nearly impossible.

However, don’t use that as an excuse to ignore what sharply declining open rates are telling us!   Open rates declined nearly 25% over the last year. At the same time, however, click through rates and conversions (e.g. to purchase) both rose over that same time period.  (Source: DMA 2007)  That means we can’t entirely blame unreliable tracking. Read more

Isn’t this the best tour ever?  Well, maybe the Rolling Stones summer tour was more mobbed than Aaron, but the OMS is just as ecclectic - we’ve got email marketers, search marketers, social media mavens and analytics wonks. What could be cooler?

I’ve only been at a couple of shows - Return Path was in Milwaukee, Northern New Jersey, Chicago and Houston.   Read more

Oh I know that social media is hot. It’s new and evasive, very high tech and extremely whiz bang. Makes your heart thump. However, my business is email marketing—and even though by comparison email feels old-school and boring—I believe that email is the key driver that makes all social networking work.

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