• On the classification of bounces
  -It is astonishing to see how even large ISPs obfuscate a simple “user unknown” with descriptions such as “unrouteable address”, “no such mail drop defined” or “unsupported mail destination”. This makes it almost impossible to automatically classify bounces without frequent adaptation to newly encountered descriptions. How can these ISPs expect senders to properly maintain their database that way?-
  (tags: bounce_management)
• E-mail Marketing Tool Changes Ads Based on Location, Time
  -A New York City startup has developed a service that delivers advertising creative in an e-mail marketing message on the fly - depending on when or where it's opened-
  (tags: tools)
• Why Email Marketing Is Still In Vogue
  -cool infograph on email marketing-
  (tags: infograph stats)

• A Plan? Who Needs a Plan?
  -We all need a plan -- not always exciting or fun, but necessary to accomplish your goals and objectives. Not only will it help you determine what factors are going to drive a program's success, it will also help you avoid best practice mistakes and errors-
  (tags: planning strategy)
• 100+ free HTML email templates from Campaign Monitor
  -thankyou-thankyou-thankyou-thankyou-
  (tags: templates)

• A/B Split Test - Sample Size Estimation
  -this tool allows you to analyze your A/B split and multivariate testing results in addition to doing sample size estimation using the sample size calculator-
  (tags: tools testing)
• Powerfully Simple Facebook Applications | North Social
  -Easy-to-use applications that enable anyone to quickly create & manage a custom Facebook page-
  (tags: facebook social_media)
• Facebook Marketing: The Busy Person’s Cheat Sheet
  -you’ll look like a Facebook marketing genius after taking one look at this page-
  (tags: facebook social_media)
• Understanding Delivery Problems: When to Contact an ISP
  - in 90% of the cases deliverability issues can be solved without having to contact the ISP or blacklist owner. However, if you have fixed everything you can possibly can on your end and you're still getting blacklisted, then George Bilbrey has some tips on how to present your issues to the ISP or blacklist owner -
  (tags: deliverability)
• Top 10 Tips for Email Marketing – #ProSEO Seminar 2010 - State of Search
  - a blog post about a presentation I gave at the Pro SEO seminar in London this week.
• Outlook 2011 for Mac to render HTML email via Webkit?
  - a Microsoft employee revealed:

  “that instead of using the Word HTML rendering that previous versions of Mac Office used (and the PC version as well), Microsoft has moved over to Apple’s Webkit rendering engine to render HTML mails. Outlook 2011 also uses WebKit to create HTML mail.” - would be great if they'd also start using this for the Windows version -

  
  
  (tags: outlook rendering)
  
  

On Tuesday, I gave a presentation about email marketing to an audience of SEO professionals at the Pro SEO seminar in London. They asked me to share 10 tips on how email can help SEO. It was an interesting way to look at email marketing and I have learned a lot from it - so I thought I'd share it here with you. I hope to find some time to record audio over these slides in the next couple of days. 

• What has 5 feet and plays music really loud?
  - Dan Naden discusses an email he received from Yamaha - We recognize the familiar: A car with four wheels; a coffee maker with an on/off switch; a football game with two teams in different colored jerseys. What happens when things are different? When something seems out of the ordinary?
  (tags: subject_lines)

• How to Resolve Common Deliverability Challenges
  -- More than 80% of all delivery issues arise because of a problem with your sending reputation. Your sending reputation is based upon your sending patterns and volumes, mailing infrastructure, list hygiene (spam traps and unknown users), and subscriber complaints. George Bilbrey explains how you can resolve the reputation issues and get your email back to the inbox. --
  (tags: deliverability)
• The Content Marketing Playbook
  - 42 ways to connect with customers -
  (tags: content-marketing content-strategy)
• 3 Good Welcome Email Examples
  - In this article, Crystal Gouldey looks at three businesses that have done an excellent job in setting up their welcome message -
  (tags: welcome_emails)
• Back to the Basics - online writing vs old school journalism
  - Online readers typically have less time, they scan the writing instead of read it, and for the most part are not big on delayed gratification. They want their information right now, thank you very much. And if you don't give it to them, they'll navigate away to someone else who will -
  (tags: copywriting)

• Death of Forward-to-a-Friend
  - forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) has some fatal flaws. Among them: it's still easier just to click the "forward" button and fill in a friend's e-mail address. And, there's the trust issue, because some subscribers don't trust marketers to behave responsibly with their own e-mail addresses, much less their friends' addresses -
  (tags: ftaf social swyn)
• The Dangers of Freemium (Video)
  - Ben Chestnut from @Mailchimp discusses the difference between "fuzzy spam" and "spammy spam" - interesting presentation on dealing with abuse -
• Email Use Is Not -- I Repeat, NOT-- Decreasing
  - "Nielsen only tracks email accessed through a website." This was a direct quote from Nielsen's Vice President of Media Analytics. The way Nielsen measures the time spent on email use is by looking at website traffic. If someone opens a browser and goes to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or something similar, they are "using email." This measure takes no account for the time spent using email through Outlook, MacMail, Thunderbird or any other desktop client. -
  (tags: stats)
• False idols: four beliefs that can hurt your email marketing
  - 1. don't overestimate the relationship - 2. you can't increase frequency - 3. people use email like us - 4. we’re the only people who send this kind of offer/content to our subscribers -
  (tags: strategy frequency)

• Windows Live Hotmail still breaks some email headers
  - Do you send foreign-language campaigns? Have you seen a string of characters that starts off with "=?utf-8?Q?..." in your subject lines? Yes, here we go again with the email glitches: Hotmail doesn't like some UTF-8 encoded characters in email headers.
  (tags: coding hotmail)

• 7 "profit practices" any e-mail marketer should follow
  - let's throw out the best practices rule book and look at seven "profit practices" any e-mail marketer should follow -
  (tags: strategy)
• Statistics for Email Use on Smartphones
  - 94% are checking the same email on both their mobile device and their PC.
• The Best Day and Time to Send an Email
  - There is no universal best day/time to send. However, senders may discover—by analyzing their own performance data—certain windows that perform better than others. The only way to know what the best date and time for you to send an email is to test your email campaigns.
  (tags: timing)

• Feeling blue over Yahoo email?
  Those of you in the email coding world may have noticed a recent change from Yahoo. If your links are all appearing blue, here is the work-around. Simply add a tag with the color directly inside the <a> tag.
  (tags: coding)
• If you do this in an email, I hate you - The Oatmeal
  (tags: fun unsubscribe)

• New Data: Want More Leads? Offer Downloadable Content
  the folks over at Hubspot conducted a survey asking people to rank a handful of offer types. The results show that people prefer content-based offers rather than "demo" type offers which imply a more sales-oriented process. If you want leads, try offering a downloadable kit, or a free trial of your product.
  (tags: call-to-action lead_generation)