Monthly Archives: January 2013

Meet the top 250 Email Experts on Twitter [Infographic+List] – are you connected?

Twitter is growing. Although I myself haven’t posted very much, I do check tweets regularly. If you follow the right people, Twitter is a great way to be the first to know about important news & updates in email marketing.

But who are the right ones? I’m not sure if I know them all. But the machine knows – by doing some nifty calculations. Thus, it’s time to look closer at all the email experts: “Who’s hot, and who’s not?” 😉

Here is what I found: Continue reading

Golden newsletter rule: First things first!

I had a look at my newsletter results lately. For example, I wondered how link position (top vs. bottom) affects click rates for certain links. Do people only click on what they can see directly in the preview pane, or do they also scroll down to the bottom to find more juice? A heat map sheds some light on this.

First, here’s the info-graphical representation of what I found: Continue reading

Every marketing email must answer four questions instantly


… if any of these questions remains unanswered, or if the tought sequence is ansticipated wrongly, recipients could break off their silent dialog with the sender at once. It’s also important that they can find answers immdediately during the orientation phase. It usually lasts no longer than three to five seconds according to neuroscience. That’s just as much as a single breath of air, so there is little time to convince. A good friendly name, subject line, pre-header, and preview pane area can make the difference.

I suggest you to perform a quick FiveSecondTest.com. (I love this service.) You will see, how difficult it really is, to provide the answers:
>>Do the 5-second-test <<

#EmailRocks – 41 years old, 2.2 billion users worldwide, and growing!

Two days ago, Pingdom published their latest “Internet in numbers” end-of-year review. It contains some very interesting facts & figures – lead by email: Continue reading

Outperforming your industry? Check out new email benchmark data from MailChimp

Are you looking for your industry averages? Then have a look at MailChimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks. They just updated their data.

The company is probably one of the most popular email service providers, serving more than two million users which range from startups to Fortune 500 companies. So the numbers are somewhat significant. A former study dates from 2010 – I mentioned it a while ago. The new one again pulls open rates, clicks, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribe rates. It includes 669 million sends, that’s 65,000 campaigns, which went at least to 1000 subscribers each.

However, if the table looks like a data cemetery to you, check out the following two figures. I condensed the numbers and put them into an interactive graph using the wonderful rgl. This way, you can better compare all the different industries.
Continue reading