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Common Questions: New Email Service Provider (ESP Provider)
If you’re in the process of choosing an email service provider (ESP), you may be experiencing some confusion. That’s because Email Service Provider isn’t a straightforward term, and some companies that provide email services aren’t even aware that they are Email Service Providers. So, before you choose an email service provider, ask yourself these questions: What do I need [...]
7 Hidden Costs of Switching Email Service Providers (ESP)
If you’re switching email service providers, one of the questions that’s likely top of mind is, what will it cost to move from one ESP to another? Although there are steps you can take to make the ESP migration easier, you still might not understand the real costs. Based on anecdotal evidence from watching—and helping—clients switch email service providers, [...]
Avoid These 5 Bad Email Habits in 2023
It's fair to say that none of us in email marketing are in it to annoy our subscribers with our email newsletters. We have all read articles about why subscribers leave your email program. This article about five bad email practices to avoid in 2023 is no exception. In addition to frequency and lack of personalization in emails, some [...]
Doing an ESP Migration? Avoid These 7 Pitfalls
For Basic ESP Q & A, refer to this previous post for What is an ESP?. You thought going through the ESP selection process was hard? It might look like a walk in the park compared to the actual ESP migration. Moving from one ESP to another involves many different people and parts, and how well you do the [...]
5 reasons email copywriting is different
Email marketers & business owners usually assume email copywriting is easy. Or they assume it’s like writing any other kind of marketing copy. But they’re wrong. If you want to succeed with email marketing in 2022 and beyond, it’s time to start learning how to write killer emails. To really learn email copywriting, it takes a lot of experience, [...]
Are Long Emails Bad? How Long Should an Email Be?
Are Long Emails Bad? You Have Been Mislead. In recent years people in the email industry have led you to believe that you should stop writing long emails because email subscribers don't read long emails anymore. Email marketing strategists and thought leaders have subsequently encouraged you to write shorter emails (50 to 125 words - 200 words) or image-heavy [...]
Silent Marketing Solution: Use Email Analytics to Best Engage Silent Subscribers
What are the best email analytics to help determine which subscribers are bringing you down? As digital consumers, we’ve all been through this scenario of disillusionment: You land at a website and you like what you see. You subscribe to the brand’s emails because you’re thinking this is the start of something. Then the emails start coming. They fail [...]
Gmail Inbox Deliverability – Prevent Gmail Spam
GMAIL IS EMAIL KING. Gmail is a big deal for B2C email marketers. Gmail email addresses can make up 40-80% of your list and cause headaches for marketers who need to have high inbox placement to be successful. Gmail has over 1.5 billion users, a vast email client market share, and is always innovating around the email experience while [...]
What Makes a SOC 2 Audit Successful?
What happens after you receive your SOC 2 audit report? You’ve just used many resources – maybe even some that you were strapped to allocate – to go through a gap analysis, remediate the findings, and then begin the Type I and/or Type 2 audit. It’s a massive project that you should be proud to finish…but what now? What makes a SOC 2 audit successful? How do you make the most out of your compliance for service organizations? Let’s look at four ways to prove that your SOC 2 audit was successful using one of our client’s SOC 2 audit journeys as an example. iPost’s SOC 2 Compliance Journey iPost is a flexible and dynamic marketing [...]
![Expert Level Email Marketing Execution [Like You're in a Spy Novel]](https://i0.wp.com/www.ipost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ipost-curiosity-eyes.jpg?resize=320%2C202&ssl=1)
Expert Level Email Marketing Execution [Like You’re in a Spy Novel]
Spending a few weeks on vacation and reading my fill of spy novels makes me reflect on my years in the online business. Spy novels and movies feature cool gadgets that work exactly when you need them, with the ability to adapt to any situation. Sounds like a perfect metaphor for online advertising/marketing. After poring through eight of Vince Flynn’s books in two weeks, I found a few themes that I think are really important for effective email marketing campaigns and online advertising in general. Every aspect of a successful spy operation has three key traits. There is an amazing amount of intelligence informing every decision. The speed at which decisions are made is near real-time. [...]
Big Data: New Analytics or New Decisioning
There is a lot of talk about big data technology these days: Data Management...How do you possibly store, manage and derive intelligence from the flood of transient data and sources, online, offline, and market-level data? Analyzing volumes of data and types of data can be daunting for those not proclaimed as high-level data scientists. Big data is a new way of exposing flaws in how marketers make campaign, program, brand, market, and financial decisions. We are a product of our own success. The industry has masked scale problems and hidden behind terms like “attribution” or “optimization.” The challenge is, we have the same amount of resources we had last year, and while data science technology has [...]
Managing Data: Making sense of features that help
iPost wrote a Whitepaper “Email Marketing Maturity Model: From Bait Shop to Revolutionary” recently striving to help marketers think about the relative stages of maturity for an email marketer. One of the most important considerations when looking at your maturity is how you look at creating actionable segments and ultimately how you operate within those data sets. Below are a few not so often talked about segmentation types that can help your email marketing program: Active Segments include: Master and Control Segments: Creating a master record is critical for understanding the underlying growth and churn tactics, yet it's critical that when creating these master accounts, you create a series of control segments within your core audience [...]
From Automation to Journeys — 5 Key Tips
Most every digital marketing professional has basic automated email journeys in place, usually a welcome series. But the time has come for these email marketing automation programs to grow in maturity, to evolve from email automation to well-thought-out email journeys. Why? One reason: customer experience. Customer experience is the new competitive advantage We’re entering a new age, one in which customer experience will be the key competitive differentiator for those who send emails. And brands have some work to do to master the customer experience because they are falling short. According to an article at Forbes.com, almost all companies (89%) say they are competing based on customer experience. But are they really when 80% think they [...]
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Post-Promotion Email Marketing
For months now, you’ve been hearing all the hype leading up to the big shopping spree that now envelops the Thanksgiving weekend, like a fog rolling in off the bay to surround the buildings of San Francisco. And you might think your work here is through because your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails were done and sent out in a timely fashion, generating some serious revenue as a result. But just as the feasting of Thanksgiving can stay with you as leftovers that need to be cleverly concocted into new meals, so too should your Black Friday and Cyber Mondays have some follow-up. You can build on and even sustain that holiday weekend momentum with [...]
How My Name Was Changed for Me—the Ethics of Data Collection in the Age of GDPR
This post was written by Per Caroe, Head of Sales and Business Development at iPost. For ethnic reasons, my family decided two names were perfectly fine for me and my sister when we were born. Three names? “Nah, we’re good. Also, can we find a short name that’s Danish and starts with a P?” When your parents are named Peter and Poula, this seems like a clever idea. “We’ll all be able to use the same initials on luggage,” my mother once quipped. (Note: There were never any monogrammed initials.) Fast forward many years to 1992. I started dating my now wife and we decided to go camping. We needed a tent and off to JC [...]
Restaurant Email Marketing
The Dangers of Stale Restaurant Email Marketing—and How to Make It Fresh Again Would you eat stale bread? Old fish? Over-cooked vegetables? Not by choice, right? Nor would your restaurant serve up such sub-standard food to their customers. But you might be serving up stale, sub-standard emails—through no fault of your own. To make sure your restaurant email marketing strategies match the quality of your restaurant chain’s food or table service, let’s take a look at how customer email technology has changed in recent years. A Fresh Approach to Restaurant Email Marketing You already know email marketing is unique among other marketing tools. It delivers a higher ROI for one thing, and it acts like a [...]
How to Create a Powerful Behavioral Targeting Email Strategy
Email marketing is becoming more difficult to do. Social media marketing, video marketing, and content marketing are competing with email to capture attention. But, for most digital marketers, email is still the bread and butter of their online business. That said, those who adapt to a more modern behavior based email marketing strategy will separate themselves from the competition. Improve Your Marketing - Behavioral Email Examples Are you still email marketing the old way? You narrow down your focus to a product you want to showcase and push that out to everyone on your list? FAIL. Sorry, Charlie, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. Your open, click, and conversion rates will all suffer if this [...]
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 [...]
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