Monthly Archives: February 2012

5 quick ideas on combining Pinterest and Email: Followers, SWYN & more

You have probably heard it: Pinterest recently cut off most SEO benefits by changing doFollow links to noFollow, as everyone expected – accidental (?) leftovers laid out. Nevertheless, good pinboards are also a valuable source for word of mouth and new website visitors. This is where the newsletter comes into play.

Still, the sudden arise of Pinterest from nothing in the U.S. numbs marketers. And apart from legal copyright issues, to which Pinterest offers webmasters an opt-out  -tag, all signs indicate that the network will become even more important in the near future. If your target group is on Pinterest, integrating this newly risen gallery with email could leverage your overall marketing efforts. Continue reading

“Email marketing” defined – more than meets the eye …

You, a decent email guru, are on a party and someone asks you: “And what do you do for a living?“. Boom. “Email Marketing?! Oh so you are one of those …“. Know that? Well, if so, you surely wouldn’t be alone. Even worse, when you start stuttering and can’t explain it more exactly. Because you never really thought it to the end; you just did it. At least you thought so … 😉 Continue reading

Ebook: Practical tips on doing digital dialogue marketing [PDF, German]

A must read for the German-speaking readers: the new „Praxistipps Digitaler Dialog“ (“practical tips for digital dialogue”) is out. It’s another free eBook from publisher Dr. Torsten Schwarz, also known as the “email marketing pope” here in Germany, which contains 25 inspiring case studies covering important aspects in modern email marketing & more.

Three examples: Continue reading

Specials characters and symbols in email subject lines – does it work?

Did you notice a raft of hearts in your inbox around Valentine’s Day? If so, this may also be a good sign that something “special” works in email subject lines. Namely special characters, like the ♥ (♥). So – are such symbols generally safe to use in emails and email subject lines? Continue reading

Double opt-in – why and when? [1/2]

It is generally a good idea to grow your list using double opt-in. As a little refresher – Continue reading

How to use buyer-typologies for email creation and segmentation

If you would want to follow a German online retailer’s email communication, I’d suggest OTTO (subscribe). OTTO is always in the forefront when it comes to experimenting with new things. Like e.g. PlayUp! Video-Mails (here), Employee-generated Content (see here & here), image personalization (here), interactive email creatives (here) and more. The latest strike: a psychological personality-profiling questionnaire. Continue reading

Spam filter effectiveness: Hotmail vs. Gmail vs. Yahoo! Mail

Interesting insights from Cascade Insights, a company specialized in competitive intelligence. The goal of the study “Web Mail Provider: SPAM Filtering Effectiveness Research” [full-PDF] was to quantify and compare the spam filtering capabilities of Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail.
Continue reading

12 valuable (yet free!) tools to refine your email marketing efforts

The internet is full of free tools & tricks. Some of which can save marketers a lot of time and work. Others offer deeper insights into how successful things really went. Email senders might want to click through the following list: Continue reading

Quo vadis, email? About apps, dynamic inboxes and network externalities

The users inbox experience will change. For about 40 (Thomlinson) to 46 (Morris /Van Vleck) years, email has been a rather static place to be. But the internet currently goes through some dramatic transformations – think of the cloud, legislation, social, mobile & apps. Email, the one most important internet-application, maybe follows this trend partly: About three years ago Google started Gmail Contextual Gadgets. Hotmail brought usActive Views with the Wave 4 relaunch. Yahoo offers Yahoo! Mail Applications. GroupVine extends email by survey-functionality. LiveIntent and MovableInk enhance it with dynamic images – picked in realtime when opening the email, and taking into account the subscriber’s local time and place for instance. But there is more to come. Continue reading

“Maximizing email”

Quite an interesting read on dmmnews.com: Maximizing email. An excerpt: Continue reading