• Email Marketing Workshop - January 31, 2011

  Is your email marketing not delivering the ROI your organization wants or needs? Are you looking for advanced strategies and tactics to improve your bottom line results?\n\nThen join industry heavyweights Tamara Gielen and Jeanne Jennings for this full-day session. You'll not only leave with a framework for taking your results to the next level, you'll have case studies to show you how successful email marketers are doing it.

  tags: events workshop blog

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Check this out:

• All About Email Address Validation
  If you're wondering what SMTP email address validation is, why it is a bad idea, and what your options are, check out Al Iverson's short series on the topic
  (tags: list_hygiene)

• How Email Marketing Will Evolve In 2011
  Email marketing is constantly evolving, with social media, mobile and ISPs driving most of the change right now. Here are five predictions of how things will change in 2011
  (tags: trends design)
• Top tactics for delivering relevant email content
  Which tactics for improving email relevancy are the most effective, the most widely used and the most difficult to execute? From trigger-based email campaigns to behavioral segmentation, see how various tactics line up in this week’s chart.
• MarketingSherpa: Download your 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report Executive Summary
  (tags: study)

• Reportlet: Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2010
  On Cyber Monday, 77% of the top online retailers tracked by the Retail Email Blog sent their subscribers at least one promotional email, setting an all-time record. This was up from 71% in 2009. That increase was preceded by strong growth in email volume on Cyber Sunday, when 56% of retailers sent email, up from 45% in 2009.
  (tags: study holidays)
• Email Trends For 2011 And Beyond
  Some things only change a little, like deliverability, rendering and spam issues. But the marketing world and email's role in it have begun to shift over the last 12 months, and the repercussions from those changes will be felt as trends for the next 12.
  (tags: trends)

Just a quick alert. Be on the look out for malware linked messages purporting to come from our friends over at SPAMHaus. 

Apparently, there is a version of a malware scam targeting ESPs circulating. The message indicates that a company is being blocked by Spamhaus. They can download an app to remediate the problem. The app then installs the malware on the ESP system.

Here is what the email might look like

via blog.deliverability.com

Dogs love you no matter what. Dogs never hold a grudge. They forgive everything. They are miserable when you leave and ecstatic when you return. They think you walk on water and control the heavens and are the greatest creature to ever live. Ever. Dogs adore you.

Cats could not care less about you. They not only ignore you. They disdain you. The don’t care when you leave. They don’t care when you return. They don’t care. Period.

Now, I suspect we all want to believe the people who get our email marketing messages are like dogs. We want to believe that they adore us and can’t wait to hear from us, that we can do no wrong in their eyes.

But the truth is, those folks on our in-house email lists are more likely to be like cats. They really don’t care. We are an annoyance when we show up in the inbox. They never miss us or pine for us.

Read the full article here

Great analogy!

Have you ever tried to become friends with a strange cat? It takes time and effort. Now, treat your subscribers the same way... Take the time to win them over, let them get to know and trust you and eventually they won't run off as soon as you set foot in the door :-)

I see three specific trends that show where email is headed in 2011.  These trends involve (1) delivering real-time value in a real-time marketing world, (2) ESPs becoming a more valuable resource by judiciously differentiating themselves in specific verticals, and (3) maturing ESPs morphing and/or buying into marketing-automation companies.

via blog.deliverability.com

While I hope that we will see more marketers deliver better value in "real-time" to their customer base in 2011, I'm not sure I would say that will be a trend in 2011. Too many marketers are still in the "spray and pray" mode...

It’s a mindset that I don’t see that used often in today’s email marketing world. Even in a marketing society that is being restructured based on the teachings of social media, there is still that one way mentality when it comes to sending out traditional emails:

Step 1:  Collect email address.

Step 2:  Add those addresses to your already moving email marketing train.

Step 3:  Do it again.

Imagine if you had everyone on your email list in a room. If you scanned the crowd, you’d see people that aren’t the same. If you talked to them about their backgrounds, they wouldn’t be all the same. If you said, “You’re all the same,” they would yell “No!”

Then why would you assume they’d all want to hear about the exact same information from you in the exact same manner?

Continue reading here: blog.sendlabs.com