Every Email Version Is Your 'Mobile Version'

Mike Hotz | ClickZ | June 27, 2012

What a difference a year makes.

Return Path reported last month that mobile device email opens increased 82 percent over March 2011. At the same time, email read on the iPad increased 54 percent. Marketers are seeing an average of 30 percent of emails opened on mobile devices, with this rate expected to climb to over 50 percent by the end of 2012.

Some other telling results: 63 percent of U.S. smartphone users say they would delete an email not optimized for their mobile device. Only 2.4 percent of smartphone users said they would open an email on both their mobile devices and computers.

In May 2011, I recommended that you start optimizing your email creative for viewing on mobile devices ("Optimize Your Email for Mobile").

This new research indicates that the time to prepare is behind us. You can no longer think you've done your job if you simply link to a "mobile version" in your preheader.

Every version of your email is now a mobile version with almost nine of every 10 email readers checking messages via mobile devices every day.

It is now imperative to make your email creative easy to view on a mobile device. Your creative needs to adapt whether your subscriber is reading it on a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile device.

Design With Mobile in Mind
As more subscribers use their smartphones to view your email, it becomes even harder to get the subscriber's attention in the mobile inbox. The mobile inbox takes up a third of the viewing space, leaving you only 200px to get your message across.

As a result, the subject line counts as your headline. Mobile users are relying heavily on subject lines to signal messages they should open immediately, so yours needs to be compelling and make an impact.

Consider these tips:

• Keep subject lines to 25 characters.
• Decrease number of navigation items to three.
• Continue to use HTML text. Most mobile email clients default to disabled images.

You also must keep the following creative considerations in mind when you are designing your creative for mobile devices:

• Increase font size. Many designers recommend a minimum of 14 pixels for body text and a minimum of 22 pixels for headlines. Apple will automatically increase small fonts to a minimum of 13 pixels. On Android devices, 16 to 18 scale-independent pixels are considered medium and large text sizes.
• Add contrast. Many factors make reading on a mobile phone challenging: smaller screen, lighting conditions, distractions, etc.
• Add padding between sections. A typical adult finger covers 45 pixels when pressed against a mobile screen. Make sure that your calls-to-action are padded at least 10 to 15 pixels to avoid frustrating tap errors.
• Use distinctive colors for links.
• Create larger buttons and links. Avoid clustering links in lists to make tapping more accurate.
• Design whole sections to be clickable.

Test a Responsive Layout
The ultimate in mobile-friendly emails is created using a responsive layout. Responsive-layout email creative relies on the same HTML code for all versions and uses media queries to style the HTML based on screen size.

Subscribers viewing the creative on larger screens (desktop, tablet) see the full design, while subscribers using native email apps see the smaller mobile version.

REI is an excellent example of a marketer that has gotten this concept right. Its navigation condenses down from four items on the desktop version to two across on the mobile view.

The primary imagery and content in the creative can scale to drop extra space when viewed on a smartphone. Tertiary messages are designed so that the image can be hidden while the overall message stays intact.

Desktop/Tablet version	Smartphone version

The Last Word
If you have been on the fence about getting your email creative in shape for mobile devices, now is the time.

Your subscribers' move toward mobile is not showing any signs of slowing down. You can no longer assume that mobile users are returning to their desktops to get the full email experience.

Don't try to fit everything in your desktop version of an email message into your mobile version. The secret is to plan to streamline content and ensure that your subscribers get your message and take action no matter which device they use to view your content.

Research shows that 63 percent of U.S. consumers who have made a purchase via their smartphone did so in response to a marketing message delivered via mobile email.

If you ensure a good experience across devices, you can bank on a continuing increase in opens, clicks, and conversions.

Original Article...

A 10-Point Strategy to Optimize Your Email Program Part 1

David Daniels | ClickZ | June 4, 2012

Need to improve your email marketing program's performance? Here are the first five of 10 essential email marketing strategies to optimize your program.

1. Begin with the end in mind - incorporate testing and frequency caps. Ensure email marketing mailings focus on goals by incorporating regular testing into marketing campaigns. Tests should focus on variables that are levers (e.g., frequency, time of day, content) for attaining target goals (e.g., conversion). Work backward from a specific goal to ensure optimization practices such as testing are part of the mailing process. Determine the total number of messages subscribers will receive in a given month. Typically, marketers mail once per week. However, develop a contact strategy that incorporates frequency rules to avoid burning out subscribers.

2. Place value on email addresses. As discussed in this column, without understanding the value of email addresses or email subscribers to the organization, you will have difficulty making a strong case for additional investments in email marketing programs (e.g., dedicating more site real estate to email acquisition, using offline resources to collect and/or reactivate email addresses). Determining the value of an email address requires understanding email acquisition costs and metrics such as average revenue per email subscriber. A more detailed approach can mirror customer lifetime value calculations, incorporating customer-specific recency, frequency, and monetary values.

3. Develop acquisition, retention, and reactivation programs. Although most marketers immediately jump to developing ongoing retention- or newsletter-oriented mailings, my experience indicates that acquisition and reactivation programs are not well thought-out. It's a bummer, but you must anticipate that many email addresses in your file will go bad (i.e., churn), with one-half to two-thirds of lists not being responsive. Surveys and sweepstakes (if brand appropriate) work well to elicit a response from dormant subscribers. Use the value of an email address as an arbiter when determining appropriate and cost-effective reactivation tactics (e.g., call center intervention, postal mailings). Map out a subscriber preference center page to determine the manner in which new addresses and unsubscribe requests will be processed. Keep in mind that you want email to be a two-way conversation with your subscribers. You want to create a dialogue.

4. Develop key performance indicators. Although open, click-through, conversion, and delivery rates are useful, they are also necessary ingredients for developing an engagement metric to track the health of a mailing list or segment over time. Along with these metrics, add unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, new-subscriber rate, and hard bounces to a quotient that directionally indicates the quality and performance of the mailing list. Each metric can be evaluated, but rolling all of them up into one number to review at a glance makes it easier for marketers to gauge the health of subscribers over time.

5. Focus on behavior. Subscribers' behavior should be central to your segmentation strategy. Create engagement rules (e.g., number of subscribers clicking on at least one link during past three or four mailings vs. those clicking more frequently and those not clicking at all). This approach will create a behavioral segmentation framework to drive subsequent mailings and remarketing campaigns, providing an overall effective means of targeting. For example, Travelocity sends subscribers email based on their last action on the site, whether it was saving a trip itinerary for possible future purchase or making a purchase. Ensure that you begin to map out how you will break your subscribers into different buckets and how that will impact the application tools that you require.

Part two, which will be published June 18, 2012, will examine five additional optimization techniques.

Original Article...

Answers to Your Top 11 Questions About Email Marketing

Allyson Galle | HubSpot | June 15, 2012


On Wednesday we hosted our latest webinar, The Science of Email Marketing where our very own Dan Zarrella presented some juicy new email marketing data and insights. So juicy, in fact, that some equally juicy follow-up questions came rolling in from those listening to the webinar.

So we read through them all (yes, we actually read your questions!) and pulled out the 11 questions that were asked most frequently, and we thought everyone would benefit from hearing a little bit more about. So here they are, your top email marketing questions from Wednesday's webinar, answered!

1) Should an email come from a person or a business for a better open rate? 

This is an excellent question because it's the subject of ongoing debate amongst email marketing -- and that's because there's not one right answer that works for everyone. We performed an A/B test of our own, in fact, to see whether emails sent from the lovely Maggie (one of the people responsible for yesterday's webinar, in fact!) performed better than emails sent from HubSpot:



As you can see, the treatment's 0.96% click-through rate beat out the control's 0.73% click-through rate -- which also yielded us 131 more leads than our control. So it seems that for us, emails sent from a real person's name are more likely to get clicked than emails sent by a company's name.

Thing is, there's a case to be made for the fact that your email recipients might know your company better than they know an individual within your company. We get that. That's why it's critical to perform an A/B test like this for yourself to determine which method is best for you.

2) How many characters do you suggest for the subject line of an email?

While some email clients display a bit more subject line characters than others, shoot to keep it under 50 characters, especially because many recipients will be reading on mobile devices that display even less of the subject line -- often 20 characters or less. To deal with this discrepancy, make sure the beginning of your email subject line gives the recipient enough information to understand the contents of your email, just in case your subject line is cut off a bit prematurely.

3) Does using numbers or special characters in an email's subject line impact its open rate?

Yes, though not enormously so. As detailed on the webinar, ampersands, brackets, and parentheses showed slightly higher click-through rates when included in the subject line, while things like question marks and hashtags (pound signs, if you're still living in the 20th century) did appear to have some negative impact. When it comes to symbols like these, it's not something that's going to make or break your open rate, but if you can avoid the overzealous exclamation point, do it -- especially because exclamation points often trigger emails to go into SPAM folders. Your subscribers are likely already desensitized to the typical displays of feigned emotion, so exclamation points and excessive use of capitalization will probably have no positive impact on your email.

4) What is considered a decent click-through rate for an email?

This is going to depend on what type of email you're sending. As we've previously reported, transactional emails such as order receipts or confirmations have the highest click-through rate, followed by newsletters, with promotional emails having the lowest CTR of all. It makes sense -- think of how much more engaged a brand new customer is with your brand (someone who might receive an order confirmation email), compared to someone who is just periodically staying up to date on your brand (someone who might receive a newsletter), compared to a lead (someone who might receive a promotional email). So a decent CTR for you is going to vary depending on what type of email you're sending, and to which list.

That being said, eMarketer published the average email click-through rate of emails in North America, and found it was at 5.5% in Q3 of 2011, up slightly from the previous quarter. The thing is, this is across all industries and email types -- so the data isn't necessarily a proper benchmark for every marketer to measure their emails by. The key is to continue testing variables in your emails that will help improve your click-through rate, and I'd start with list segmentation. Segmenting your email lists is some seriously low-hanging fruit, and has shown to improve email relevance by 34%. And you know what more relevant content means -- more clicks!

5) Is the click-through rate of business emails higher on mobile devices than on computers?

According to All Things Digital, in 2011 the average mobile email click-through rate was 4.12% for smartphones, 3.12% for tablets, and only 2.39% for computers. Even with those numbers readily available, believe it or not, not every company has optimized their email marketing for mobile. And mobile optimization is a critical component of your email marketing strategy -- according to Comscore, 70 million Americans utilize mobile email, and 43% of those users are checking their email on their mobiles four or more times per day. If you were listening to the webinar, you remember Dan pointing out that 80% of users in his data indicated they utilize mobile email. If you want to increase your mobile click-through rate, make sure every email you're sending out is optimized for mobile, because your audience IS there.

6) What is considered a decent unsubscribe rate?

The short answer? Under 1%. Aside from being generally trustworthy, you'll be able to achieve this rate by only using opt-in email lists, properly segmenting your lists, only sending relevant content at an appropriate sending frequency, and religiously honoring unsubscribes. Not sure if your practices are considered trustworthy? There's a free service by Return Path called Sender Score that will tell you.

And remember, unsubscribes aren't all bad! When recipients do unsubscribe, consider it a natural list cleanse -- after all, for the health of your Sender Score, you don't want to be sending emails to those who don't want to receive them. If your unsubscribe rate stays under 1%, don't let those disinterested few get you down!

7) When should I be sending my emails? 

There are really three frequency measurements you should consider, backed up by data from HubSpot's Dan Zarrella:

• Time of Day - Dan Zarrella's data showed emails sent at 6 AM had the highest click-through rate. Emails sent from 10 AM-12 PM showed another small spike, and the later the time in the evening, the higher the click-through rate climbed.
• Day of the Week - Experimenting with weekend emails could benefit your business, perhaps due to the lack of other competing emails coming through on Saturday and Sunday. Zarrella's data showed the lowest click-through rate (and highest unsubscribe rate!) occurred on Tuesday, with Wednesday and Friday coming in as the weekdays with the highest click-through rates.
• Number of Days Per Week - Zarrella's data showed that click-through rates decrease the more emails you send in a given campaign, so our best practice here is to "chill" a bit. Space your emails out so your subscribers don't feel bombarded. We've also written a blog post that outlines the steps you can take to perform your own email sending frequency test -- check it out!

8) If there are multiple links in your email copy, how do you balance the attention you give to each of them?

It's never a bad idea to include multiple links in an email, since each link is a call-to-action that could reconvert your email recipient. That said, you don't want those calls-to-action to compete with one another, which is why it's crucial that you decide exactly what it is you want your email recipient to do upon receiving your email. That way, none of the links are competing with one another for attention -- they're all contributing to the same goal! For example, when we send an email, we have multiple links contained therein, but they all help us reach our end goal of reconverting recipients and moving them further down the sales funnel:







The first two links called out in orange both lead to the same landing page, but they are accompanied further down the email with a second call-to-action that encourages the recipient to reconvert on more bottom-of-the-funnel offer -- a free trial of our marketing software. Both of these links work together to help us meet our reconversion goals, so however our recipients choose to interact with this content, we're happy campers!

9) What is the difference between a paid and organic email contact? Is one better than the other?

An "organic" email contact is someone who chose to subscribe to emails from your company by clicking on a subscribe button on your website, filling out a form on one of your landing pages, or otherwise indicating their willingness to receive your emails. A paid email contact is someone who didn't indicate they wanted to receive email from you, but whose contact information you purchased.

As for whether one is better than the other ... yes, organic email contacts are way better than those you pay for. We've written an entire blog post on this subject, but in a nutshell, those who opt in to receive your email communications are more interested in your company than those you pay for, are less likely to mark you as SPAM, will unsubscribe at a far lower rate, and as such, your email deliverability rates and sender reputation won't get totally annihilated.

10) Any tips on how to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act?

Definitely. There are four main points that are important for email marketers to remain compliant with CAN-SPAM:

• Don't use misleading, deceptive, or falsified information in your 'From,' 'To,' or 'Reply-to' fields, email subject line, or routing information. Clearly identify who the email is coming from -- be it your company or a specific employee within your organization -- and make sure your subject line accurately describes the contents of the email.
• Include your company's physical address in every single email you send out. These are typically placed in an email's footer.
• Include an easy to find unsubscribe link in every single email, and make sure to honor unsubscribes promptly and completely. "Promptly" is defined as within ten business days (but try to be speedier than that), and "completely" means that you do not sell or transfer their email address to any other lists after the unsubscribe is complete.
• Make sure the Email Service Provider (ESP) you're using is reputable. If something illegal does go down with your emails, both your ESP and your company can be held responsible.

Check out our blog post on the laws marketers need to know to avoid legal backlash if you want to learn more about CAN-SPAM.

11) What are marketing automation tools? Is there a particular marketing automation tool that HubSpot recommends?

When referring to email marketing, marketing automation tools help marketing departments like yours carry out automated email campaigns efficiently. They can integrate with your CRM to track the actions and behaviors of your leads, and can launch email campaigns based on these behaviors or other triggers you set, such as download history or other forms of lead intelligence. Marketing automation tools are critical to carrying out your lead-nurturing campaigns, and they can also help you monitor the performance of your email campaigns so you can continue to make adjustments that improve your performance. As to whether we recommend any marketing automation tools, well, we're obviously partial to our own marketing automation software ;-)

Original Ariticle...

Marketing in the Mobile Email Revolution

Tal Nathan | ClickZ | June 12, 2012

Falling prices have made smartphones extremely common. According to the Pew Research Center, 46 percent of U.S. adults owned a smartphone as of February 2012. With those kinds of numbers, widespread smartphone and tablet adoption is undeniable. Unsurprisingly, smartphone ownership remains more common among young adults and those with high income and higher education. However, smartphone adoption does not have a gender bias, which is unusual for technology adoption. The smartphone adoption has been primarily on Android and Apple iOS devices, with 80 percent of the audience using those operating systems.

What are people actually doing with their mobile phones? Text messaging and taking pictures are still the most common uses. However, sending and receiving email is also being done commonly. And when people do engage with email on mobile, they engage at a much higher rate than people who engage with email on desktop.

What does this mean if you're trying to reach people via email? First, people are on the run. Consumers don't read emails the same way on phones as they do on desktops. Understanding these differences will inform your design. For example, mobile email users don't scan email, they prioritize it. They categorize their email into "read now," "read later," or "delete."

How do you make the cut to help ensure that your emails are read now or at least saved for later? First, start with the subject line and concentrate on the first 20 characters: keep it short and keep it recognizable. That means getting the offer in first and being mindful of the sender name. Secondly, make sure that your key information is visible above the fold (duh) and make the call to action clear and conspicuous.

Now, given that many of you are likely working with limited resources, here are some tools and tricks for understanding your eligible audience and optimizing your email template. Several engagement tools in the marketplace, including Pivotal Veracity Mailbox IQ, allow for the marketer to get row-level detail on the email rendering device. Knowing the size of your mobile audience will help you justify the budget to optimize your template for this on-the-go audience. Getting the template right should be left to the professionals; people who have learned from months of trial and error. If possible, you should consider outsourcing your first few templates and let somebody teach you the ropes.

Your current email template may be great for customers using Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, but you're going to significantly reduce the potential of the impact of your campaigns by serving up the same template on a three-inch screen. If you're going to ask them to pay attention to your message, you should make it easy for them to read, interact, and respond to it.

Creating the right email experience based on the rendering device has always been a priority for the email marketer. Focusing a larger proportion of effort on the smartphone experience is money well spent. And there is no excuse for not getting started - smartphone adoption is only going to increase.

Original Article...

Email As a Mobile Call to Action

By: Jack Aaronson | ClickZ | June 8, 2012

With so many more interesting ways to communicate with customers, I honestly never thought I'd be excited to write a column about email. Sorry to email lovers out there, but it's true. However, as we've been designing user experiences centered around mobile devices, email has reared its aging head and has become a viable, and extremely interesting call to action. To be clear, I'm not talking about outbound email from your company, but inbound email from users.

To set the stage, let's identify the problem we were trying to solve. On a desktop or laptop, it's a trivial idea to see a link on a website or in a PDF, click it, and put the resulting browser window or tab in the background so you can look at it later. It's also very easy to fill out forms on the PC because of the existence of a keyboard.

On mobile devices, however, typing is always a pain, and there's no simple way of saving a URL for later reading. On the iPhone and iPad (sorry Android folks, you'll have to write in and let me know how things work in your world), once you click on a link, you're escorted to a new tab in Safari. This is a disruptive user experience, especially if your intent is to keep the user doing whatever they were doing before clicking the link. If the link was on a web page, it's fairly easy for the user to return to the original site because they're already in the web browser and can just switch tabs. But if the link was in an iBook, a PDF, an application, or anywhere else, the user is whisked away, out of that program and into the web browser, with no simple way to get back.

Enter email. Last time I wrote about using iBooks in your business. Each link in an iBook, however, takes the user out of the iBook and into Safari. But we can use a part of the native iOS user experience to help us here.

Remember, computers know how to respond to an anchor tag that is a "mailto" instead of an "http" URL.

On a computer, if a link launches a mail message (instead of a URL), the system will open up your default mail program (Outlook, Mail, etc.) and open up a new message. If there's no default mail program (for instance, you only use Gmail via a web browser), the behavior is undefined (it will probably try to open up Outlook and ask you to set it up).

But on mobile devices, there's always a default mail program. When you click on a "mailto" link in iOS, a new email message "slides" over whatever you're currently doing. Once you press "Send," the message slides out and you're left wherever you were when you clicked the link. This user experience is "continuous," as it doesn't break the user away from where she was.

Now, the interesting part. The mailto protocol allows you to prepopulate the To, Subject, and Body fields of an email. Imagine I'm reading your whitepaper. It's a PDF and I'm reading it on a mobile device (though reading it on the PC would have a similar effect). There's a link that says "Like this whitepaper? Subscribe to our mailing list today." If the good folks at ClickZ have correctly created the link in the previous sentence, you should be able to click "Subscribe." Go ahead and try it. Better yet, try it on a mobile device.

This test could easily be sent to your newsletter system, which would automatically subscribe the user. Her email is verified, so there's no more verification needed before she can simply be added to the database. It doesn't stop there, however. We've worked with one of our clients to create an email reader that will parse out parts of the email in order to let the user:

• Subscribe to a mailing test
• Get a coupon code emailed to her for products
• Enter a sweepstakes
• Send to a colleague (from within an iBook or PDF)
• Respond to a survey
• Get a free trial account created for her (she is emailed a temporary password and her email address is her username)

By using inbound email as a call to action, we accomplish two important things. First, we don't remove the user from her existing user experience, as the email message pops up and then goes away, leaving her exactly where she is. Second, this is a "one-click" sign-up because we aren't making users enter in their email addresses, enter it a second time for validation, etc. They are emailing us, so we can grab their name and validated email address from the email they are sending us.

In a world of new technologies, it's interesting to rediscover new uses for an old technology. While users on a PC can easily multi-task and type things quickly, using pre-filled emails on mobile devices is a very interesting way to create easier "one-click" calls to action without disturbing the user.

Thoughts, comments? Please leave them below.

Until next time…
 Jack

Original Article...

29% of Businesses Have Increased Email Subscribers via Mobile Marketing

By: Jason Hahn | DM Confidential May 30, 2012

A recent StrongMail survey conducted with Zoomerang in April took the pulse of 802 business leaders regarding “mobile marketing adoption, budgets, techniques, challenges, benefits and integration with other channels.” Among the findings is that nearly 3 out of 10 businesses have been able to increase their email subscriber base with the help of mobile marketing.

According to the “Mobile Marketing Survey 2012,” 45 percent of respondents are using mobile as a marketing channel. Twenty-six percent said they have been using mobile marketing for six months or less, while 31 percent said they have been using it for 6-12 months, 29 percent said they have been using it for 1-2 years and 14 percent said they have been using it for 3+ years.

For the 55 percent of respondents who haven’t yet leveraged mobile marketing, 37 percent said that while they see the value in mobile, they haven’t determined the right strategy yet. Meanwhile, 22 percent pointed to a lack of resources/staff, 19 percent said it’s not an appropriate fit for their business, 12 percent pointed to lack of funding/budget and 3 percent said they don’t see any value in mobile marketing.

The survey also found that 43 percent of businesses using mobile marketing have integrated their email marketing and mobile marketing programs. Of this group, 32 percent have used mobile-optimized landing pages or websites, while 25 percent have captured mobile numbers during email signups, 22 percent have used mobile-optimized templates, and 21 percent have used cross-channel email/SMS campaigns.

Twenty-nine percent of businesses using mobile marketing said they have been able to increase email subscribers using the channel, while 27 percent said they have not.

Meanwhile, 37 percent of respondents said mobile marketing is managed by the online/interactive marketing department, followed by 14 percent that said it was managed by the email marketing department, 7 percent that said it was managed by a dedicated mobile marketing department and 6 percent that said it was managed by the direct marketing department.

Of businesses who partake in mobile marketing, 13 percent said 20 percent or more of their email subscribers access their email messages on mobile devices, while 11 percent said 5 percent or less do, 11 percent said 5-10 percent do, 10 percent said 10-15 percent do, and 8 percent said 15-20 percent do. Forty-six percent of these respondents said they don’t know this percentage.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they have optimized their email marketing templates for mobile viewing, while 31 percent said they have not. Of the latter segment, 77 percent said they plan to optimize their email marketing templates for mobile viewing in the next 12 months.

Original Article...

27 Ways to Slice & Dice Your Email List for Better Segmentation

Why segment your email distribution list?  Because it provides results.  This article provides a number of ways to further segment your email list so you can provide more meaningful and targeted information.

Article Written By: Corey Eridon on May 31, 2012 at Hub Spot

"We've already made the case for list segmentation in email marketing, and we sure hope you've bought in. Still in need of a little refresher on the merits of email list segmentation? How about the fact that, according to eMarketer, 39% of email marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates; 28% see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates; and 24% see better email deliverability, increased sales leads, and greater revenue. You know your ol' pal revenue -- he's the whole reason you're doing email marketing in the first place, right?

Alright, now that you're undoubtedly on board with list segmentation, you're probably asking yourself how you should slice and dice your own list. Well, the bad news is that it totally depends on the nature of your business and the goals associated with your email marketing and lead nurturing -- so I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer. The good news, however, is that there are tons of creative ways you can segment your email list that empower you to run innovative and effective campaigns! All you need to do is collect the right information. So to get your creative juices flowing, take a look at this ultimate list of ways you could segment your email lists!"

Read Article...

Why Purchasing Email Lists Is Always a Bad Idea

Five simple reminders on why purchasing an email list is not a good decision.

Article Written By: Corey Eridon on May 22, 2012 at HubSpot

"You need people to email, and you need them quickly. Oh, and if you could make them pretty cheap, that'd be great, too.

That's the mindset many marketers find themselves in when they're on the phone with a list-purchasing company. Acting on that moment of desperation, however, will cause them more long-term (and short-term) harm than good.

5 Proven Ways to Improve Email Marketing With Social Media

Social media can offer the antidote to waning consumer engagement with email.

Article Written By: Sundeep Kapur on May 3, 2012 at ClickZ

"Email marketing managers are looking for ways to increase their reach and enhance their engagement. If done correctly, social media offers an antidote to fix waning engagement. Here are five specific things you should be doing with social media to improve your email marketing."

Read Article...

The 9 Must-Have Components of Compelling Email Copy

Nine helpful tips on creating better email communications.

Article Written By: Corey Eridon on May 1, 2012 at Hubspot

"Email marketing has come a long way in just the past few years, but with all the fancy new functionality brands are utilizing, you know what’s kind of funny? A well-written plain text email can perform just as well, if not better, than a highly designed email with tons of bells and whistles. In fact, no matter how fancy your marketing emails look, if they’re devoid of well-written content, your subscribers will stop opening and start deleting your messages, and your list will quickly dwindle in value."

Read Article...