Adding an Email Preheader Increased My Inbox Placement Rate by 15%

Email delivery is stupid. I’m not kidding. It’s been around for over 20 years but we still have 50+ email clients that all display the same code differently. And we tens of thousands of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who all basically have their own rules around managing SPAM. We have ESPs that have stringent rules that businesses have to conform to when adding a single subscriber… and those rules are never actually communicated to the

Email Address List Cleaning: Why You Need Email Hygiene And How To Choose A Service

Email marketing is a blood sport. In the last 20 years, the only thing that’s changed with email is that good email senders continue to get punished more and more by email service providers. While ISPs and ESPs could totally coordinate if they wanted to, they simply don’t. The result is that there’s an adversarial relationship between the two. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block Email Service Providers (ESPs)… and then ESPs are forced to block

The Top Legal Issues with Blogging

A few years ago, one of our clients wrote a great blog post and they were looking for a good image to feature with it. They used Google Image Search, found an image that was filtered as royalty-free, and added it to the post. Within days, they were contacted by a major stock image company and served with a bill for $3,000 to pay for the image use and avoid the legal issues associated with

Somewhere Between SPAM and Creepy Lies Transparency

Recent weeks have been eye-opening for me regarding the data scandals reported in mainstream news. I’ve honestly been taken aback by many of my peers in the industry and their knee-jerk reaction and response to how Facebook data was harvested and utilized for political purposes during the most recent campaign. Some History on Presidential Campaigns and Data: 2008 – I had an amazing conversation with a data engineer from President Obama’s first campaign who shared

We All Hate Spam and Cold-Calling… Until We Don’t

On May 15th, I received an unsolicited email (aka SPAM) from an agency in Atlanta telling me what an explainer video was. I knew what it was, we’ve written about explainer videos extensively and published quite a few of our own. I didn’t respond to the email.  A week later, I get another email with a similar note. A week later, another one. I don’t respond to either. Four emails that I didn’t respond to

The History of Email and Email Design

44 years ago, Raymond Tomlinson was working on ARPANET (the U.S. Government’s precursor to the publicly available Internet), and invented email. It was a pretty big deal because up until that point, messages could only be sent and read on the same computer. This allowed a user and a destination separated by the & symbol. When he showed colleague Jerry Burchfiel, the response was: Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working

11 Poor Email Practices to Avoid Unless You Want Angry Subscribers

Digital Third Coast worked with Reachmail to identify the most egregious behaviors and worst practices exhibited by email marketers. The infographic they designed links each behavior to a memorable pop culture character to help marketers remember and associate the poor behavior. They also included actionable advice on turning the poor behavior into a good one. Unfortunately, not everyone in charge of email marketing tools uses them correctly. It’s entirely possible you’re making one or more