How to match an email list against a suppression list

Sometimes it’s necessary to select a list of email addresses which are not part of another list of email addresses. One use case would be a publisher matching his subscriber list against a suppression list of an advertiser. The suppression list holds users who don’t want to hear from the advertiser anymore. So it makes perfect sense to exclude them from the upcoming email send.

How can you achieve such an address matching efficiently on your computer? One way would be to use a database like Microsoft Access. A data manipulation tool like R offers another possibility. Here is a quick step-by-step guide for the latter one: Continue reading

A word on the International Email Privacy & Consent Guide from act-on

international-antispam-lawsI generally like tabulated summaries. However, sometimes they tend to provide dangerous superficial knowledge. One example is the new “International Email Privacy & Consent Guide” from act-on (right figure), which is to provide an overview of the quite heterogeneous anti-spam law landscape. I don’t think it does. But decide for yourself… Continue reading

Editorial calendar for saisonal email marketing

Mining email subject lines gives you a pretty good picture of the yearly content marketing calendar: Continue reading

Who are the top email marketing influencers 2014?

By the way of speaking about the most read email marketing blogs: it’s also time to do a quick refresh of my recommended 250 Twitter follows (gleanings). The list is about one and a half year old already; there may be some new influencers, who you should follow, and others, who quit talking about email. Please find the new and condensed overview below: Continue reading

Top email marketing blogs – ranked by the number of subscribers

Every now and then (and then and then and then and… 🙂 ) someone asks for popular email marketing blogs. We all got our preferences. Here is a somewhat different list: one that ranks based on how the number of Feedly.com subscribers developed over time… Continue reading

Litmus Email Design Conference – #TEDC14 Twitter Takeaways

Last week, the Litmus Email Design Conference took place in Boston Harbor. It “… teaches email designers, marketers and strategists how to produce great looking—and performing!—emails.”

As with the Sherpa Email Summit, I wasn’t able to attend. Ok, if you get my weekly newsletter or look at this blog, then you know that I’m not much of an design guy anyway ;-). Nonetheless, I followed the discussion on Twitter and made notes.

Here are some impressions in pictures, popular tweets and web resources, which might be useful to you:

Continue reading

Learnings from testing email signup copy

You might have noticed the banner on top of the emailMarketingTipps.de homepage, which asks visitors to sign up for my weekly email marketing roundup newsletter. That is, if the visitor has not already done so or if her cookie expired, because in that case, the banner is omitted. In the past, I have done some testing on choosing the right words to drive attention and interest.
optin-1
Here are some results: Continue reading

European email usage by country: Wow, 9/10 people use email in NL; not even 3/10 in TR

email-is-not-deadDid you know?

“The world counts x billion email users, with that number expected to increase to y billion by the year z”.

*yawn* Every now and then I stumble upon statements like this, attempting to prove that email is – after more than 43 years – still thriving. In fact, however, those numbers mean close to nothing. At least if they are not put into an adequate perspective. My suggestion: If you need email numbers, don’t look at statistics made up out of thin air, look at Eurostat and the like instead… Continue reading

After 1999 days of blogging about email, it’s time to thank 9 content marketing tools

Today is my 1999th day of email marketing blogging – the “hello world” posting came out on 1 December 2008. Who would have thought back then that I turned a hobby into profession?

Now, a bit more than 1000 postings on emailmarketing.de & emailmarketingtipps.de (and even a > 900 pages book) later, it’s high time to do some shout outs to the “MacGyvers”. I mean to those people who invented my tools of the trade, the content marketers Swiss Army knife.

Some of which are, in no particular order, free & ready for you to install: Continue reading

Email stats on the test stand: typefaces, message weights, mobile readiness & more

I already talked about why I don’t like many email marketing benchmarks and statistics: they too often turn out to be just easy pieces of PR without aiding anyone but the publisher. Marketers crave for quick wins, thus those stats fall on good soil. However, can they keep up against a reality check? I thought I’d check and discuss eight “facts” with you, on which I stumbled in the last weeks: Continue reading