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...

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...

Every shopper prefers a well-fitting and comfortable accessory rather than mass-produced one-size-fits-all kind of stuff. The same is true for email marketing. However generalized the content in your email marketing campaign, it is foolish to expect your target market to embrace it fully. That is, unless you tailor the content to look good not only within inboxes and full-size browser pages, but also on the more popular but smaller screens of mobile phones and tablets.

The marketing community...

How do you track your email marketing performance? Your answer is likely to be “XYZ specialist analytics software” or “I use metrics returned by my ISP / ESP”. 

How many performance metrics do you get on your desktop for campaign analysis? Your answer may be “5” or “7” or “10”, or more, or less, depending on what the software or the SP makes available.

Theoretically, you can identify as many as 17 performance metrics that can help you to assess your campaign’s performance and eventually your...

Keeping your audience in your email list is one of the major challenges faced by every email marketer. With your competitors vying for their attention, an ill-crafted or irrelevant email campaign can easily make your audience lose interest and click the unsubscribe option. Mentioned below are some ways by which you can reduce unsubscribe rates:

Targeted segmentation: Perform a better list segmentation so you can send relevant and customized mails to your subscribers. When the content is specific...

As a marketer, you have to be careful about the emails you send. With aggressive Spam filters everywhere, your email can easily land in the Spam folder. Your reputation as a sender is critical in authenticating your emails, ensuring its deliverability, and increasing your open and click-through rates. Here are a few tips to ensure your emails reach your reader's inbox and not the Spam folder: 

Maintain Your Email List: Having a big database is not enough. You should periodically run an email...

You have nicely segmented your email list into smaller lists. You have used your judgement and evaluated available metrics, user preferences and habits to categorize the main email list. Now you know, your next task is to customize your email message to target each separate list, so that the content, the timing and the frequency suit the identified characteristics of each segmented list.

Segmentation gives a great impetus to the responses from your recipients and the numbers will show up in the...

Yes, I’m talking about Email List Management. In this age of data, acquiring accurate information (email addresses, names, etc.) is crucial. The more accurate information you have about your subscribers, the better you can segment them and send them relevant emails they will respond to.

Cleanliness is just as important. How many times has a subscriber signed up for a mailing to never actually open the email received? How many times has a subscriber opened a message only to quickly delete it and...