Email marketing inbound hours on Twitter…

Who isn’t keen on new digital marketing approaches these days… Well, yesterday I stumbled upon a one hour (?) twitter chat with @litmusapp and other #InboundHour hashtag participants. I did not attend, but it looked like the organizer @HubSpot posted seven frequently asked email marketing questions and @litmusapp as well as others shared their opinions on them.

Is this concept effective? I mean @HubSpot has 498,838 followers and @litmusapp has got 16.741. That’s a lot. Here’s a brief summary of the event, you can decide for yourself: Continue reading

Mapping the email ecosystem

There are more areas and players in the email marketing space than you might expect. Think for example of agile email specialists, append and validation services, blacklist operators, certification bodies, agencies, competitive intelligence and customer intelligence suites, deliverability services, design, testing and rendering tools etc.

Here’s just a overview to give you a quick idea. As the world has alone hundreds of email service providers, it’s without any claim to completeness:
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How animated symbols in Gmail subject lines increased my open rate

As announced in the “Email Gurus” board on LinkedIn, I put Gmail’s animated emoji symbols to the subject line test last Friday:

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Here’s how I did it and what the results were. So much is revealed, they’re like…
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Placing animated Emojis in Gmail Subject Lines? [Cheat Sheet]

Note that Gmail does not support the following anymore:
The emoji subject line cheat sheet and the maps of combined emoji usage from the previous posts are not enough? Well, then how about animating your subject lines like shown in this example:

gmail-animated-emoji-subject

Here’s another table of 703 copy-and-pastable unicode characters with the corresponding images. The best thing about those: they are rendered already in the gmail.com inbox overview, not just in the single email view. Therefore it should be “ok” that they are excluded in the preheader. I highlighted the animated emojis with a yellow background (Note: German visitors might want to read my posting on emailmarketing.de):

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Popular Emoji combinations in email subject lines

Did you download the Email Emoji Cheat Sheet? If so, then you might also remember @dataNeel’s research on combined Emoji usage in subject lines. His map is cool on its own, but even cooler now that he also published a Gephi export of the network in the comments section, so that everyone can play with the data.

Gephi is a popular free network visualization tool. I used it for example to create this and this plot of email experts on Twitter. It’s rather intuitive and comparably fast, so give it a try. Want something more programmatic? Then you should go on to Python and/or R. Followers of this blog already know R and its superb visualization and data shaping capabilities.

Here’s one example of how you can use R to explore @dataNeel’s Emoji network. Continue reading

822 Emoji for your Newsletter Subject Lines: Gmail & Outlook.com Cheat Sheet

Emoji created lots of buzz lately. For example, Google now shows emoji characters on its search engine result pages, and Instagram and MailChimp did some interesting research:
Instagram Emoji Research MailChimp Emoji Research
But what emoji could you use in your subject lines, and how do you use them? Continue reading

Email versus social media (comic)

What If you had to choose between email and social media? Both work pretty well together, but they are also quite different in nature. There has been a long debate (google it) among marketers about which one will have a brighter future. Well… I think I’ve got a rather clear favorite when it comes to selecting the right environment. What about you – do you want to communicate on a personal level or – with an evil twinkle in the eye – … Continue reading

Subscriber Feedback: Learnings from Unsubscribe Reasons

I’m always glad when I get feedback on my email marketing work – feedback from blog readers, from book reviewers, and especially from subscribers to the weekly email marketing roundup.

Open and click rates are good things to have, but sometimes it’s more inspiring to look at non-aggregated, discrete, unstructured, plain, personal and sometimes harsh opinions. Reading replies makes email marketing feel more “one-to-one”, and – even better – there much to learn from them.

To gather comments, I placed several short free text fields, for example

  • during the sign up (“describe the perfect email marketing newsletter”),
  • when rating an email (“what did you like so far, and what not?”),
  • and when unsubscribing from future messages.

I read all answers carefully, and I use compliments as testimonials to convince blog readers of signing up.

But for now let’s have a look at

  1. why people unsubscribed from the weekly email marketing roundup and
  2. why this is interesting information:

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Which list building tactics are effective and yet easy to implement?

There are numerous touchpoints, where one can ask for the email address. Some turn out to be more promising than others. Are the promising ones also harder to implement? Two recent surveys – one from Ascend2 [pdf], one from MarketingSherpa (web) – reveal that this is not necessarily the case: Continue reading

Email Evolution Conference 2015 – Twitter Wrap-up

Last week, Email Evolution Conference 2015 took place in Miami. Besides Guy Kawasaki’s Keynote and the award ceremony, a deliverability panel became one central point of the conference. Here are some interesting thought snippets from #EEC15:

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