Satisfaction Surveys in Transactional Emails From a German Legal Perspective

When it comes to the legal basis for sending emails, many marketers differentiate between two types of messages:

  1. commercial emails, which advertise or promote a commercial product, service, or content – e.g. a newsletter.
  2. transactional emails, which facilitate an agreed-upon transaction or update a customer about an ongoing transaction – e.g. an electronic receipt.

The first one, so the thought goes, needs a prior consent, the second one does not. Continue reading

Enhance your emails with a self-coded live twitter feed

How about some realtime content in your emails? It has been a trend for years now. Think of complex applications like personalized product recommendations. Or simpler: latest blog posts, the nearest store, animated countdowns, live tweets around an event. No matter what, the content will always auto-update itself when the recipients opens her newsletter.

This post demonstrates one way to code your own live tweets widget, ready to include them in your emails to promote events, or your channel. Continue reading

How to personalize newsletter send times (aka STO) – example code + data

This is a brief follow-up to my previous post “How to personalize newsletter send times (aka “send time optimization”) using AI”. I received a lot of nice feedback since it has been published a few months ago. When questions came in, they were mostly of a technical nature – no wonder, because the subject is technical, too. But instead of providing more and more piecework in the blog’s comments section, I thought I’d better add a full code example including example data. So here it is. If you are interested in that kind of analytics, you should be able to run everything in the free software environment for statistical computing named R.

Have fun reproducing the results and optimizing your own email send times. And don’t forget to share results. 🙂 Continue reading

Re-permissioning ideas for GDPR compliance

77 days to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force. Advertisers all over the world will need to make adjustments to their data processing strategies when targeting Europeans. This also applies to many email senders, from whom I therefore expect re-permissioning campaigns. Continue reading

German email legislation: opt-in expiration & multichannel opt-ins

The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof aka BGH) published a ruling, which is interesting in two ways. First, it says a consent usually does not expire over time. And secondly, it is possible for marketers to obtain consent for several channels with only a single checkbox. In the light of the strict jurisdiction, this may come as a surprise to some. Continue reading

AMP for Email: Google brings interactive real-time content to Gmail – but reactions are mixed

A few days ago, Google announced a plan to enable “more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences” by bringing AMP to email. While interactive email and real-time content are supposedly big trends in the email industry, feedback from developers was modest, to say the least – for good reasons.
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Prevent Gmail from shortening your subject lines at the beginning (square brackets issue)

There is a lot of information about develping newsletters for Gmail. These range from rendering quirks to unique goomoji and clipping issues. However, one thing seems to be less well known. Or were you aware that Gmail does not only cut off subject lines at the end, like most email clients do, but also at the beginning? Continue reading

Email remains essential among Europeans

A few days ago, the European Statistical Office Eurostat has updated their figures on email and social network usage (see blog post from 2014). To my surprise, the proportion of email users continues to rise – despite the large base and the many competing communication channels. Continue reading

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