Their Welcome message does what a Welcome message should - confirms the sign up, makes the subscriber feel delighted to have signed up and gets recipients shopping. And all this in a well-designed format similar to the regular messages Sephora sends.

Shop.org was so so close to a perfect execution of an email re-engagement campaign. Timing, subject line, copy, creative, calls-to-action, welcome message - all were brilliant.

Too many email newsletters have fantastic design and useful content, but then they just suddenly...stop. The designer and author forgot to give people something to do once they are finished reading...

ISPs typically block (or junk mail) your e-mail due to four simple reasons: Technical sending problems, Excessive invalid addresses, Excessive spam complaints, Spammy-looking content. There are other reasons, but these are the most common.

Most importantly for marketers, the law has been amended to be opt-in based, where prior permission is required to send commercial e-mail, according to the report.

video in email is not reliable in the way that website based video is. It won’t work for all your recipients, and those it does work for, may well not be happy it did. Extensive inbox testing is essential if you are embedding video.

Marketing to 3rd party lists does not perform as well as to your own lists. Here are some guidelines to using 3rd party lists successfully.

if you don’t have a custom DNS and a unique IP address, you will not be able to participate in sender verification, white listing and reputation management programs.

A new Reputation Benchmark Report from Return Path (http://www.returnpath.net/downloads/Q2BenchmarkReport.pdf ) shows that the top tier of email marketers enjoy delivered rates more than 30 points higher than other legitimate senders.

Here’s a compilation by Guy Kawasaki of silly and stupid ways companies are hindering adoption of their products and services.

and Matt shares a few of the highlights.

When shopping for an email service provider, you need to be prepared to answer questions too. By providing the right information up front, you can lay the groundwork for successful campaigns in the future.