Think about it, how do you send your friend an article that really interested you?  Probably by email or as a post on their wall, right?

Email complements most marketing tactics perfectly, whether it is to acquire, retain or convert prospects.  Email has the ability to mass target but also to segment, to deliver fresh content but also to deliver engagement and most importantly it is an opt-in vehicle.  Social networks are opt-in too, which is why they are so potent, to get the content you either have to follow, fan or friend the content source.  This is not like lay back and be served display or tv ads, both email and social pages are telling you to go find what you are looking for or requested to ... Read More

Designing emails is kind of like watching the food channel, everything is spelled out for you, but you actually have to taste it to make sure you get it right and serve it to make sure others agree.  Same thing goes for email, you can follow the process, but until you test everything across browsers yourself, you may not get it right.

Recently, Yahoo and Hotmail made changes to their coding, changes that modified the way the emails appeared to recipients (now with blue links and left aligned instead of centered).  This wasn't announced so the only way to know this was to be an insider or a good email marketer, one who tests repeatedly before deploying any emails.  These changes do happen every so often ... Read More

You desperately want to play the role of alluring song siren to the leads...but just as in the Homeric world, the online world is as elusive with many distractions and obstacles that make qualified leads hard to come by.

You are starting off from scratch; the only people that are currently interested in receiving the product that is your email marketing initiative are you and your secretary... so the question becomes where to start and how to get more people into the database?

The more people you send to, the bigger the chance of success = a common misconception of email marketing.  You could be sending emails promoting cars to an audience only interested in planes of which 1/1000 will convert, or you ... Read More

Let's say that you have just redesigned your website and installed GA.  Now, you are brain storming of ways to drive traffic to your site and gain leads.  You have considered various marketing vehicles and your mind has locked in on email marketing.  Now you face the dilemma of how to send emails and how to track their performance in order to determine whether email marketing is a worthwhile investment for your business or not.

Google Analytics tracks campaigns through links and it looks for certain values in those links to differentiate one campaign from another.  If you do not have campaign tracking, you won't be able to attribute visits to particular campaigns, your visitors will show up as direct ... Read More

Two years ago you wouldn't dream of getting emails with videos embedded in them.  Today, you may be seeing more and more of this and who knows, in a year or so we might be moving towards HD and 3-D videos in our emails altogether.  We can only dream...for now, it is a hot topic that is still aggregating data in order to support it as the new evolution of email marketing.  

Online video views in the US doubled to 33.2 billion views a month last year, according to the February 2010 Comscore report.  That is a hefty number of play buttons clicked.  With companies looking to save a dollar here and there in their marketing efforts, a bell should immediately sound.  The number of people watching ... Read More