Monthly Archives: December 2017

How to personalize newsletter send times (aka “send time optimization”) using AI

Google Trends data suggestes that December and May are customization months. Particularly now, towards the end of the year, there’s a massive seasonal increase in interest for the topic of “personalization”. No wonder, as the end-of-year business is crucial for many, and tailoring emails to subscriber preferences is one of the most effective ways to boost sales.

In fact, email is sort of the mother of digital personalization. Data sovereignty remains in-house and the marketing channel is highly customizable. Basically, all attributes can vary based on subscriber attributes, whether it is the subject line, the offer or timing.

But wait a moment… Is email timing really customizable? Why then do all recipients receive a newsletter at the same time, say 8 o’ clock in the morning? The truth is that although timing is considered a classic success factor, senders still align it more with a rigid standard schedule than with individual recipient preferences.

This post outlines an algorithm to determine subscriber send time preferences.

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The 100 most-read email marketing stories of 2017

Whew, much has happened in the past year. There’s more GIFs, more #emailgeeks, more emojis, more artificial intelligence, more automation, more crosschannel, more customization, more privacy awareness (“GDPR”), more money, more emails, more interactivity in them and so on. In these turbulent times some even forgot to renew their internet domain.

Time to lean back and decelerate a bit. A brief year in review might be just right for this. Therefore I had a look at which newsletter articles (archive) were clicked most frequently. Below you will find the top 100 – enjoy. Continue reading

Trending: Emoji usage in email subject lines increased by more than 40% YOY

Emojis still gain popularity among email marketers. In November, nearly every 10th subject line in my email inbox – that’s 9.72% out of 8,804 newsletters – used unicode symbols to draw attention. Previous year’s figure was only 6.92%. All the signs are that the trend will continue in 2017… Continue reading