How to use buyer-typologies for email creation and segmentation

Posted on February 17, 2012 by | 1 Comment

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 →

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

Posted on February 14, 2012 by | 2 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on February 13, 2012 by | 2 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on February 10, 2012 by | 3 Comments

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 →

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“Maximizing email”

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 1 Comment

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

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What does it take to be an email marketer?

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 1 Comment

On emailmarketing.de I recently mined about 550 job offers from TheEmailGuide.com to extract the common denominator. From the numerous results I pretty much liked this one: Continue reading →

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DMARC can make emails more trustworthy

Posted on February 8, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Last week, a workinggroup of 15 notable members presented DMARC to the public. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message
Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. It’s a further step forward towards making email-spoofing less attractive for fraudsters. Continue reading →

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Fingerprinting + Security Warning = 2 reasons for placing email-trackingpixels on HTTPS

Posted on February 7, 2012 by | Leave a comment

About three years ago I wrote a posting about how to determine what email clients (“mail user agents”) your subscribers are using. Including a Referrer-list for webmailers, User-Agents for desktop clients and a simple tracking pixel code. This so called fingerprinting providers senders with interesting stats about their subscribers like those shown in the figure to the right. Though it needs some update. But first: Why do so? Continue reading →

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How to add an email-sign-up-tab to your facebook page – revisited, once again

Posted on February 6, 2012 by | 2 Comments

One thing that really amazes me about Facebook is: what worked yesterday is out of date in a few weeks. Take Static FBML or iFrame-Tabs for example. I wrote several guides in the past for email senders to explain how they put a signup form to their Facebook pages. And guess what, the last one seems again no longer up-to-date.

For marketers, including myself, it consumes more time and nerves than necessary to maintain basic functionalities at F. Also because many things are not documented very well. Do Zuckerberg and “friends” perhaps use lemures in their usability-labs? 😉 “Timeline”, which they soon want to impose on users against their will, seems to corroborate that impression. But ‘nough trash-talk – here’s a quick walkthrough that shows … Continue reading →

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Ugly: Gmail turns your black email-links into blue ones. Here’s a solution.

Posted on February 2, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Gmail is on the rise. With 350 million active users it would be close in on hotmail. Which is remarkable; not only because Gmail started nearly a decade later than “HoTMail”. (I doubt that Microsoft can win-back some with “switch from gmail to hotmail“-campaigns.) Also here in Germany, Gmail nearly duplicated its market shares year-on-year (see market-shares).

So … the more email recipients use gmail, the more important is it to make sure everything looks fine. But the devil is often in the detail – e.g. in the link color … Continue reading →

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