Two ways to embed dynamic countdowns in your newsletters

Posted on November 28, 2012 by | 2 Comments

I’m seeing more graphical countdowns in emails lately (e.g. TigerDirect’s Black Friday email). No wonder: They are great means to increase the pressure to act today, and not tomorrow (or never).

Marketers use such timers in flash sales and traditionally in their Christmas communication. Typically, around Christmas you see messages like “x days left until xmas” or “y days left until the last order date for punctual delivery”. On every email opening, the countdown image renders the actual time that is left until the offer runs out. Some images even come as animated gifs so that the user sees his time slipping away in realtime.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? So here are two ways, how you can incorporate such timers into your newsletters. Continue reading →

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Welcome to Absurdistan: Did a higher Regional Court just kill double opt-in in Germany?

Posted on November 21, 2012 by | 10 Comments

“There is the catastrophe: double opt-in legally inadmissible” (Dr. Schirmbacher), “one of the most serious und fatal failures of justice in the last 5 years” (Dr. Bahr). Those are just two out of many comments. In fact, I haven’t seen any positive ones among experts until now. And I don’t think there will be any.

What happened? Continue reading →

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358 symbols tested in subject lines – iPhone, Hotmail & more [incl. Cheat sheet]

Posted on November 19, 2012 by | 18 Comments

Many have been debating the use of symbols for months, now. To my knowledge however, one question remains: Which symbols are safe to use, and which ones trigger colorful emojis on iPhones/iPads and in Hotmail/Outlook.com? I put it to the test on emailmarketing.de last week. Here is a summary plus a little add-on. Continue reading →

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RFM for email senders – a step-by-step guide to a more strategic messaging approach

Posted on November 15, 2012 by | 2 Comments

RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value. It’s a simple and yet effective customer scoring algorithm that has been used for about a hundred years, now. Especially in catalogue marketing, because RFM saves costs: The method discriminates possible responders from non-responders before the send out. RFM scores correlate with the likelihoods of responding to the next offer.

Email marketers do also use RFM analysis. Less, to save costs (email is “for free”), but more to predict subscriber values and to: Continue reading →

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Multivariate tests in email marketing – a practical step-by-step guide to boost your response rates

Posted on October 10, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Multivariate testing is a bit underrated. Marketing weblogs mostly focus on A/B or A/B/n tests. Those are quickly set up. But they often provide only incremental gains. MVT are more promising with regards to the outcome. Let’s look at how they work. Continue reading →

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[Split-Test] Email signups doubled AND bounces reduced at the same time – see how

Posted on September 27, 2012 by | 10 Comments

I want to share some testing results with you. For a couple of weeks, I ran a split A/B/C/D test on this website. The goal was to see, if I could convert more visitors to email subscribers. “Which test won”… can you guess it? The results are quite interesting. Continue reading →

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Cinemagraph videos – new inbox trend? Here’s a quick way to create one for your newsletter

Posted on September 19, 2012 by | 4 Comments

Powerful visuals “own”. They can be very effective in activating your subscribers emotionally, and they are much more easily processed than text. Thus, images usually catch the reader’s eyes first after opening an email. This is a completely natural and unconscious reaction – the brain consumes less energy compared to reading.

Only videos can exceed the power of pictures. However, as most email clients don’t like modern web technologies, it’s still a challenge to bring videos into the recipients’ inboxes. Converting them to animated gifs, which work most of the time (except for Outlook 2007/2010/2013), isn’t a perfect solution for several reasons. Cinemagraphs are compromise between images and videos. Logically, they grow in popularity among email marketers. Continue reading →

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History of Spam [Fun Video]

Posted on September 4, 2012 by | 3 Comments

In case you didn’t know: “What is Spam” – new episode on the Glove and Boots Blog … ;-) (Not as good as the Vertical Video Syndrome, but worth watching.)

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Thunderbird wants email advertisers to honor ‘Do Not Track’

Posted on August 29, 2012 by | 5 Comments

After announcing to no longer focus on innovations for their email client, Mozilla now released Thunderbird 15. The last major one comes with a new privacy feature that could possibly have a huge impact on the email industry: Do Not Track for email. That means, the user shall be empowered to opt-out of tracking his user behavior (opens, clicks, …) by ticking a checkbox ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’ in the ‘Security > Web Content’ menu. Continue reading →

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Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo & Co. – webmail usage in the European Union [study]

Posted on August 22, 2012 by | 8 Comments

In the last months, I shared several European ecommerce, internet and email figures. Here’s another interesting one. Ever wondered, how popular cloud-based email services like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail are – e.g. in the U.K., in Germany, or in Sweden? Answers come from a recent comScore study. I just felt like putting some of them into a map. Continue reading →

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