$500 million is a big sum by anyone’s measure. Now imagine using email to deliver most of that money in just 18 months. Toby Fallsgraff and his team raised a sum not far off that amount for the Obama campaign last year. In fact, the digital department on the Obama campaign accounted for the bulk of the election funds raised from donors.

The strategy behind this incredible success involved [continue reading…]

Around the internet there was a lot of fooling going on yesterday, on blogs, websites and Google Nose beta on their home search page. A few brands also did a little fooling in their email campaigns.

Here’s a couple of example email creatives, from Boden and Snapfish (HP).

Both of the fool emails sensibly stuck to a fool based around extension of their own product line. The Snapfish email introduced [continue reading…]

Who pays to keep Europe going? In Henning Wehn’s Win a Taste of Germany competition there is a choice of three answers:

• Germany
• Germany
• Germany

I recently enjoyed some great German (yup) stand-up comedy from Henning Wehn on his ‘Henning Knows Bestest’ tour.

As we walked into the venue we were handed a post card to enter the competition. Of course I studied the entry post card more carefully than any normal person – with the kind of zealous attention to detail you’d expect from a German in fact. As well as the tricky competition question above [continue reading…]

Are you really customer centric? Many email marketers talk of being customer centric and wanting to engage customers, yet in most cases its campaigns that are measured and not customers.

How can you know if you are engaging customers if you aren’t measuring them?

In the early years of email marketing with a monthly send campaign metrics did [continue reading…]

Its no wonder that there’s lots of subject line advice around as subject lines really are so important to an email. In testing I’ve found the right subject line can double click rates, though more typically the uplift is a still welcome 25%.

The amount of subject line talk has meant many things are passed off as best practice but in fact are poor advice [continue reading…]

“If I do X” will my emails go to the junk folder is a question I’m often asked by clients. Questions such as “if I put free in the subject line”, “if I don’t use DKIM”, “if my email is all images”.

Email deliverability and spam filtering work like blowing up a balloon,  [continue reading…]

Emails opened on a mobile devices are now averaging 43% of opened emails (source Litmus) with some brands and campaigns much higher than 43%.

There’s advice aplenty for creating a better user experience on mobile devices and use of responsive design in email templates. But just how important is it? Should this be your number one priority? The data suggests  [continue reading…]

How do you decide on the test cell sample size for email splits tests? I’ve often seen discussion about it being important to get right, but seldom seen information on how to do that. If you’ve been waiting for an answer on how to pick test cell size then this post is for you. By the end of this post you will know how to decide on your test cell size [continue reading…]

There have been a couple of heated debates I’ve been part of in the email community just recently, one about open rates and another about subject line length. In this post I’m reflecting on the open rate debate. I’ve added an update to the original post showing more proof that open rate fixation can be misleading.

It may surprise you that the community is very split on the value of the open rate metric, seemingly, a cornerstone metric since the dawn of email marketing. It’s a metric cited in every email marketing book and on every mail marketing course… So why is its value in doubt?

Let me summarise some of the reasons why open rates are not important. [continue reading…]