Category Archives: english

358 symbols tested in subject lines – iPhone, Hotmail & more [incl. Cheat sheet]

Posted on November 19, 2012 by | 41 Comments

Many have been debating the use of symbols for months, now. To my knowledge however, one question remains: Which symbols are safe to use, and which ones trigger colorful emojis on iPhones/iPads and in Hotmail/Outlook.com? I put it to the test on emailmarketing.de last week. Here is a summary plus a little add-on. Continue reading →

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Multivariate tests in email marketing – a practical step-by-step guide to boost your response rates

Posted on October 10, 2012 by | 14 Comments

Multivariate testing is a bit underrated. Marketing weblogs mostly focus on A/B or A/B/n tests. Those are quickly set up. But they often provide only incremental gains. MVT are more promising with regards to the outcome. Let’s look at how they work. Continue reading →

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[Split-Test] Email signups doubled AND bounces reduced at the same time – see how

Posted on September 27, 2012 by | 10 Comments

I want to share some testing results with you. For a couple of weeks, I ran a split A/B/C/D test on this website. The goal was to see, if I could convert more visitors to email subscribers. “Which test won”… can you guess it? The results are quite interesting. Continue reading →

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Cinemagraph videos – new inbox trend? Here’s a quick way to create one for your newsletter

Posted on September 19, 2012 by | 5 Comments

Powerful visuals “own”. They can be very effective in activating your subscribers emotionally, and they are much more easily processed than text. Thus, images usually catch the reader’s eyes first after opening an email. This is a completely natural and unconscious reaction – the brain consumes less energy compared to reading.

Only videos can exceed the power of pictures. However, as most email clients don’t like modern web technologies, it’s still a challenge to bring videos into the recipients’ inboxes. Converting them to animated gifs, which work most of the time (except for Outlook 2007/2010/2013), isn’t a perfect solution for several reasons. Cinemagraphs are a compromise between images and videos. Logically, they grow in popularity among email marketers. Continue reading →

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History of Spam [Fun Video]

Posted on September 4, 2012 by | 3 Comments

In case you didn’t know: “What is Spam” – new episode on the Glove and Boots Blog … 😉 (Not as good as the Vertical Video Syndrome, but worth watching.)

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Thunderbird wants email advertisers to honor ‘Do Not Track’

Posted on August 29, 2012 by | 5 Comments

After announcing to no longer focus on innovations for their email client, Mozilla now released Thunderbird 15. The last major one comes with a new privacy feature that could possibly have a huge impact on the email industry: Do Not Track for email. That means, the user shall be empowered to opt-out of tracking his user behavior (opens, clicks, …) by ticking a checkbox ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’ in the ‘Security > Web Content’ menu. Continue reading →

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Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo & Co. – webmail usage in the European Union [study]

Posted on August 22, 2012 by | 9 Comments

In the last months, I shared several European ecommerce, internet and email figures. Here’s another interesting one. Ever wondered, how popular cloud-based email services like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail are – e.g. in the U.K., in Germany, or in Sweden? Answers come from a recent comScore study. I just felt like putting some of them into a map. Continue reading →

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[Tool] Bypassing image suppression in emails: Mozify!

Posted on August 17, 2012 by | 12 Comments

I was pretty much amazed when I opened yesterday’s Email on Acid newsletter. The company’s email marketing blog rocks, and it seems their new feature Mozify is just as great. Take a look at my screenshots from their email below and you’ll know what I mean – the left one is captured with image blocking enabled (!), the right one with images loaded: Continue reading →

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Can seed lists measure email deliverability? A practical guide by the numbers.

Posted on July 19, 2012 by | 5 Comments

A seed list is a set of artificial email addresses, which are meant to be interspersed into campaign dispatches. The underlying seed list inboxes are then checked automatically by software after a certain time. Marketers use seed lists in order to monitor their deliverability. If all emails to the seed list accounts hit the junk folder or got lost, there is a certain probability that this was the case for the subscribers’ accounts, too. However, the reliability factor is often forgotten. I want to shed some light onto the question, under what circumstances seed list results allow good estimations of inbox placement rates or spam filtering rates for a whole campaign… Continue reading →

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New email benchmark data for your records

Posted on July 16, 2012 by | 2 Comments

I just stumbled over “The myth of the Email Newsletter” – an interesting blogpost from Kelly Lorenz. She shares some thoughts on email marketing differences between Nordic countries and the United States. Let’s bump my ecommerce statistics from the European Commission into the discussion. In addition, I want to enrich them with brand new email benchmarks coming from one U.S. based and one European email service provider… Continue reading →

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