Email Deliverability Requires New Solutions To Old Problems In 2016
Looking to increase your deliverability rate? Columnist Tom Sather has some advice for how to keep your emails out of the spam box and get more opens and clicks.
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Tom Sather's latest articles
How Email Marketers Can Make The Most Of Gmail Postmaster Tools
Google announced Postmaster Tools last month, but many email marketers aren't fully utilizing it yet. Columnist Tom Sather explains how you can use the data it provides to overcome common deliverability issues.
Email Frequency Matters For Path To The White House
In the second piece of this four-part series, columnist Tom Sather takes a look at the email campaigns of the presidential contenders and explains why overmailing and undermailing both carry risks.
Why These Email Marketing Tactics Are Important For The Presidential Campaigns (And Your Email Campaigns, Too)
In the first of this four-part series, columnist Tom Sather reveals three key factors in determining a successful email marketing strategy.
Text-Only Subject Lines That Perform, Now That Gmail Grid View Is History
There's "still time" to optimize your email subject lines! Contributor Tom Sather shares stats on what kind of text drives opens in today's environment.
Everything Marketers Need To Know About Engagement-Based Spam Filtering
Could your promotional emails end up in the "spam" folder, even if the subscriber opted in? Columnist Tom Sather explains how email providers use subscriber behavior signals to determine email placement.
How Welcome Emails Help Predict Future Subscriber Engagement & Value
Columnist Tom Sather analyzed the first emails 100 retailers sent to new subscribers. He shares the results here.
What’s Inside Consumers’ Inboxes & What That Means For Email Marketing
There's been a lot of talk about email fatigue lately, but is this fear overblown? Columnist Tom Sather thinks so, and he has the data to prove it.
How Email Marketers Can Prepare For Inbox By Google
That mobile email app that Google released (in beta, by invitation only) has a desktop counterpart. Contributor Tom Sather shares tips on how marketers can prepare for its adoption.
The Email Year In Review: Data, Data Breaches & Multi-Screen Consumers
What developments have we seen in 2014 that promise to have a big impact on email marketing? Contributor Tom Sather details the trends to watch.
Why Reputation Matters In Email Marketing & How You Can Change Yours
How many of your emails are reaching your customers' inboxes? According to columnist Tom Sather, it may be fewer than you think.
Email Marketers: Take Your List And Check It Twice
Don't let email blacklists ruin your holidays! Columnist Tom Sather provides some advice on how to stay on Santa's "nice" list this year.
Study: Email Deliverability Not Getting Any Easier
Legit permission-based emailers still have a hard time making it into the inbox. Contributor Tom Sather shares the latest research from Return Path.
Pre-Holiday Email Frequency: Too Much Or Too Little?
A Return Path analysis shows some retailers are getting the frequency equation just right. Learn from their example.
Email Deliverability: 4 Horrible Myths On The Rise
As email deliverability continues to evolve, the myths surrounding it continue to persist: confusing “delivered” with “inbox placement,” insisting that the best time to send is at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, and avoiding the word “free” in all caps are oldies, but still goodies. Here are some other myths I hear more and more today. […]
How Blacklists Ruin Christmas For Email Marketers
A blacklist is a way of blocking IP addresses or domains of email servers sending out identified spam. Once a spam source has been identified, the blacklist owner will place the domain and/or IP address onto a list so that anyone can query it and block these spam sources, whether you’re an email provider like […]
Everything You Need to Know About The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation
The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) has been long in the works and will finally be enforced starting on July 1st, 2014. But what is it exactly, and why should anyone outside of Canada care? Read on for some frequently asked questions and available resources to help comply with the upcoming CASL enforcement date. CASL is […]
Email Win-Back Programs: Do They Work?
For any marketer, not just email marketers, retaining customers is an important yet challenging task. Inactive subscribers present two problems to email marketers: one is obviously the lack of conversions or purchases that are the lifeblood of businesses; the other is reduced deliverability. As spam filters rely more and more on subscriber engagement, having a […]
How To Mark Up Email Messages For Gmail’s New Grid View
Google just transformed the inbox again with Gmail Grid View that turns the Promotions tab into a visual shopping mall of marketing emails. For marketers, the question is: how do I get it to work, and what will my emails look like if I don’t do anything at all? I did some testing and noticed some […]
Everything You Need To Know About Gmail’s Auto-Unsubscribe
Gmail recently announced the addition of an auto-unsubscribe feature to promotional messages, making it easier for Gmail users to unsubscribe from messages they no longer want to receive. On most promotional messages with unsubscribe options, Gmail users are seeing a more prominent link at the top of the email beside the sender’s name, allowing them […]
6 Things To Watch For Better Gmail Deliverability
For most email marketers, reaching the inbox at Gmail is difficult, and trying to discover why emails aren’t reaching the inbox is downright confusing, if not nearly impossible. (Though Google is reportedly piloting a feedback loop program for email service providers (ESPs) that might help address this.) For now, Gmail’s Bulk Sender Guidelines offer general […]
How Gmail Improved Security & Email Analytics by Caching Images
Google officially announced that images in Gmail would be enabled for all webmail users on December 12th (with iOS and Android Gmail apps following suit sometime in January), regardless of whether or not the recipient clicked “display images below.” This change should prove to be a boon for email marketers, but not without some tradeoffs. […]
4 Data-Fueled Insights On How People Are Using Gmail’s Tabbed Inbox This Holiday Season
The Christmas shopping season is officially upon us. Inboxes are stuffed with special email promotions that will hopefully result in stuffed stockings on Christmas day. Maybe not Gmail inboxes, though. Will Gmail’s new tabs be the Grinch that stole Christmas from email marketers this year? Some businesses have publicly speculated and decried the new interface, […]
Lies, Damned Lies & Email Best Practices
It isn’t often that one challenges best practices. They are called best practices because they are apparently the best. In 2008, Return Path conducted a subscriber experience study to see which businesses were following the best practices at the time, like personalizing messages and honoring unsubscribe requests within a reasonable timeframe. Flash forward five years, […]
Gmail’s Tabbed Inbox: The Good News & The Bad News
Reactions to Google’s new tabbed inbox in Gmail are reminiscent of past changes to some of our favorite inboxes. A quick Google search shows dozens of articles on how to survive major inbox overhauls like Google Wave, Gmail Priority Inbox, and Hotmail’s Sweep. These changes to the inbox pale in comparison to the threat that […]
Measuring Brand Perception & Strength With “This Is Not Spam”
Measuring the strength of one’s brand is an important part of marketing, albeit somewhat difficult and sometimes expensive as it traditionally relies on tactics like surveys. However, marketers now have everything they need to measure brand perception using email marketing analytics. Specifically the rate that users indicate “this is spam” (TIS) or “this is not […]
Analyzing Subscriber Complaints For Better Inbox Placement & Response
It’s summertime, which means marketers are starting to think about and plan for Christmas email campaigns. As most marketers realize, subscriber reach — specifically inbox placement — can truly make or break an email campaign. To avoid the spam folder this holiday season and beyond, marketers should analyze subscriber complaints. A subscriber complaint is marked […]
2 Ways To Use Competitive Intelligence On Email Subscriber Lists
If you’re like most email marketers, the size of your email list is an important metric to measure. The problem is that there’s no perfect size for an email list. It varies based on industry, audience and business. However, most marketers can, and do, measure the monthly rate of growth using their own numbers as […]
3 New Ways To Measure Email Campaign Effectiveness
Almost 70% of all messages in people’s inboxes are non-personal, meaning they are marketing offers, social updates, receipts and more. This is both good news and bad news for marketers. The good news is the inbox is now more of a marketing channel than ever before. The bad news is there is more competition, and […]
How Mobile Is Making Us Rethink Email Marketing
Thanks to smartphones and tablets, email marketing has fundamentally changed. Best practices surrounding design and when to send are seeing some of the first major shifts since webmail clients were the dominant email platform. The good news for marketers is that people consume more email now. The bad news is that without the right analytics, […]