When it comes to the legal basis for sending emails, many marketers differentiate between two types of messages:
The first one, so the thought goes, needs a prior consent, the second one does not. Continue reading
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
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
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
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.
Continue reading
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
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
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.
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
Emojis still gain popularity among email marketers. In November, nearly every 10th subject line in my email inbox – that’s 9.72% out of 8,804 newsletters – used unicode symbols to draw attention. Previous year’s figure was only 6.92%. All the signs are that the trend will continue in 2017… Continue reading
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