The All-in-One Marketing Cloud vs. Integrated Best-in-Breed Solution
Are you considering a marketing cloud solution? One that combines all kinds of disparate technologies and features into one package? Many companies are going that route. And it might be that it’s a good solution for you…and it might be that it’s not. A bundled solution has its downsides, as you’ll see below. And there’s a lot to be said for one customized exactly to your needs. The marketing cloud as a bundled solution A marketing cloud solution typically bundles together a variety of technologies onto one platform for you—technologies such as CRM, eCommerce, social media marketing, analytics, and possibly more. When you want your marketing solution offered to you as a total package in one [...]
How a Relational Database Can Help Stop Email From Falling Flat
Do you know where your email marketing is headed? Ideally, it’s headed down the path of hyper-personalized, one-to-one marketing. But hyper-personalized is only going to happen if your ESP supports a relational database. Relational vs. flat file systems Although many marketers have recognized the benefits of relational databases for several years now, surprisingly few email service providers (ESPs) support them—although iPost does. If you’re planning to take your segmentation to a new level this year, or to increase the sophistication of your email marketing, you need to know how a relational database differs from the usual flat-file one—and how critical this might turn out to be when choosing your new Email Service Provider. So… what’s the difference? [...]
Email Open Rate Meaning – Why You Shouldn’t Worry
Email open rates (the number of emails opened). We love them. We hate them. We obsess over them. They are typically one of the first email marketing benchmarks we check in our email reporting (after the total number of emails delivered.) We anxiously compare them to industry standards. And we’re constantly trying to get average email open rates ever higher. However, maybe we’re obsessing a little too much about open rates as open rates. There is much that we can learn from our email open rates beyond the basic question, “How many people opened our email?” Avoid only looking at email opens as opens With your digital marketing efforts aiming to improve, your open rate might [...]
10 Annoying Emails You Should Stop Sending in 2025
We all do things we wouldn’t like someone to do to us. We cut people off in traffic, pay bills late, and forget birthdays and anniversaries. It’s not because we’re bad people! We’re only human, and sometimes we get impatient, careless, busy, "hangry", or absentminded—or all of the above. We overlook, forget about or even ignore the Golden Rule that says do unto others as you want them to do unto you. Sometimes, we do this as email marketers, too, and we do unto others—our subscribers and customers—what we definitely do not want to be done unto us. Are you guilty of that occasional violation of the Golden Rule? Are you “that guy”—or gal? Are you sending annoying emails? [...]
Your Competitors’ Emails Are Better Than Yours
OK, I went out on a limb with that post title, I confess. Maybe your competitors’ emails aren’t better than yours. But do you know? Do you know how they compare? Do you know how your emails stack up against the emails of “those other guys”? It’s surprising to me how many marketers don’t subscribe to their competitors’ emails in order to see what they are up against. We’re all trying to stand out in the inbox. Shouldn’t we know what we are being compared to? I say yes, we should. The easiest and cheapest marketing research you’ll ever do Doing this kind of comparison won’t cost you a dime, nor take up much time. You [...]
15 Ways to Improve Automated Email Content
There’s a lot of logic that goes into wanting better email content while developing ways to improve automated email content in your email campaigns. However, when it comes to the email content, logic sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. We suspect that’s due in part to crafting these email messages as one-offs, and focusing more on the email campaign as a whole and not on the pieces and how they should work together. Yet, this email content has to be good in order to realize the benefits automated email content can provide. The content must be great as standalone messages and as messages working together as a coherent whole. How’s your automated email content? Does it [...]
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