It’s finally happened. The Twitter enthusiast’s biggest fear; hashtags have officially made it to Facebook. Regardless of the fact that your newsfeed has surely been littered with status updates complaining about this latest edition (#hashtagsarenotforfacebook, for example), this new trend will end up being an important tactic to use in marketing and advertising campaigns. With social media booming, it is important as a marketer to know what’s new, what people are talking about, and how you...

Email design is perhaps the most important task in an email marketing campaign. Here are some very basic tips for email marketers to keep in mind, and on a post-it on your laptop, while designing the email.

Use HTML and text. Readers prefer to be given a choice of HTML and text versions of the email. If you are on the receiving end and have a slow connection, you might feel the need for basic text versions.

Include the company logo. The upper left corner is a favorite location.

Be brief. The...

Conventional email marketing strategies never needed to focus on the kind of PC or laptop on which users accessed the Internet and their precious mailboxes, but only on the software application(s) used for the purpose. In fact, a report from a survey of email marketers revealed that the last and least tested element when launching or tweaking a campaign is mobile layout and images. That is, whether the email renders well on mobile phones.

If you guessed that this element will move up in the...

This headline's concept may sound crazy, but the two really are very different.  I have highlighted a few of the distinct differences below:

1. Purchasing addresses is simply the nature of direct mail while purchasing lists for email is strongly discouraged and can many times do more harm than good.
2. Unsolicited mail is welcomed by the recipient while unsolicited emails are considered spam.
3. Direct mail has a shelf life while an email's need for time relevance many times supercedes all other elements.

Thi...

Inbound marketing expert, Hubspot, is everywhere and for good reason.  They do fun stuff and provide nice products.  But what they really do well is to use ‘business as usual’ for comedic effect while making the same point as a ‘business as usual’ approach may typically make.  An example of this is a recent Unsubscribe video that recently went up.  When people clicked unsubscribe on an email, instead of simply completing the action and telling you they are sorry to see you go, they make fun of...

In the world of email marketing, a substantial amount of time is spent discussing email design, list management and strategy. While all of those topics are indeed important, the most frequently asked question I receive from my clients is “What day of the week and what time of the day should I send my emails? What should I put in my subject lines?”

To the frustration of my clients, I always reply, “It depends!” Now don’t roll your eyes and stop reading my blog post just yet, there is an answer to...

What keeps email marketers up at night? Sure, there are lots of worries. What if my copy has a typo? What if I get flagged as spam? What if people unsubscribe in droves?

But what they should be worrying about is a big word with an important meaning: deliverability.

That means that emails messages are actually getting to the recipients mailbox. The Delivra blog has covered this topic quite often recently, discussing an overall email marketing deliverability plan as well as focusing on reputation...

Rush rush rush, many marketers are faced with an ever expanding job description, print, web, social… EMAIL! When will you get it all done with so little time and less resources? That is a question that many of my clients face every day. I hear so often after sharing my recommendations of what the program could be doing, I love that feature but I just do not have time to implement. You are not alone! Remember back to yesterday's post I wrote about the ROI of your email program. Understanding...

Do you have an answer to that question? If you don’t you are not alone. Tracking the ROI of your email program can be difficult if you don’t know where to start. So, where do you start? What will you track and how do you determine the results? What is the value of an email subscriber? How much do I spend in time and money to use my email service provider? These are all things you need to know to understand the ROI. Here are a few examples of how to get started!

First of all, the easiest way to...