A couple of centuries ago, Cal von Clausewitz, a military theorist wrote: "Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war". 

The word strategy is something of a cliche in marketing. Marketers are fond of using the term - rater often - to encompass just about every bit and byte of thinking they do. 

For a marketing department: email, social media, direct mail, advertising are really all tactical 'weapons' that can be deployed separately to win...

Email marketing channel expenses include dollars spent on list rental, email deployment programs, email deliverability expertise, email design, initiatives for list growth, and many more. One of the marketing trends predicted for the coming years is an upward swing in the budget for the email marketing channel.

The budget allocation decision obviously stems from the fact marketers enjoy significant return on investment (ROI) through this channel.

Having said that, who wouldn’t like to raise the...

Here is a glimpse at some real-life trends in the way testing strategies are deployed. These trends have been reported from a survey of 2,735 marketers in the email marketing realm.

Which email elements are the most frequently tested or tweaked? Remember three (somewhat obvious) factors matter: ease of tweaking, time taken for tweaking, and the cause-effect response rate aka speed of getting improved metrics.

Subject lines are the most tested element of an email marketing campaign. Not surprising...

More business, increasing sales, better prospecting and higher conversion rates are frequently discussed business issues facing our clients and many businesses in today's marketplace. It's a topic occupying many business owners' minds today. Do you find you have a list of prospects that you've reached out to - but for some reason or another, they weren't ready to buy?  They liked what you had to offer, acknowledge that there is opportunity down the road, but the timing wasn't quite right?

I have...

Twenty-five years ago, email was available to only a handful of people in what was often referred to as the data processing industry. Few of them probably had any idea of just how prevalent email communication would become.  Fewer still could have foreseen the use of the near-instantaneous communication as a marketing tool.

Are you looking for a higher return on investment for your email marketing and to learn more about making your email marketing efforts successful?

Then join Simons  Bitzer &...

With apologies to all who follow this blog hoping to read some perspective on industry trends, or deliverability best practices, or musings on business from our leader...today's post is primarily for Delivra's clients.

Our technical staff (Development + IT) is constantly making improvements to our software. Sometimes these changes are worthy of fanfare such as press releases, webcasts, and the like. Other changes are infrastructure-related: behind-the-scenes things that, if done right, aren't...

Talking about "thinking outside the box" is one thing; actually getting out of the box is quite another.   To break through the walls of our boxes--a.k.a., "the rules"--it helps know what each wall of the box is made of.   For example, consider this illustration from the authors Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans in their book "Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay," about the constraints managers deal with in trying to retain key employees:

• "Concrete: This wall represents rules...