Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We reached the point where we were growing an email list bigger and bigger and bigger with no real end game in sight.

What did we plan to do with all these email addresses once we had them?

Good question.

We didn’t have an answer, so we stopped trying to add more.

We had lots of different ideas, and people have been so gracious to share their thoughts on what we could be doing (I’d love to hear from you in the comments, too, if anything comes to mind).

Here’re a few suggestions we thought over...

And boy is it easy to lose control. After all, email is one of the top ways we communicate with a lot of the people in our lives, from our best friends to people we've never spoken with before. Many of us get bombarded by new emails on a regular basis, and it's stressful to know that we might be missing out on the truly important stuff amid the flood of less pertinent stuff.

Luckily, there are a lot of tools out there that can help us get more organized. In this post, we'll go through 11 of our favorite tools for organizing your inbox. Try 'em out, and help pave your own way to a more productive and less stressful email experience....

If you're anything like most people, you can probably rattle off 100 different things you'd rather do than dig through your inbox.

It starts to feel like a chore because what's in there isn't very interesting. In fact, only 21% of consumers reported that they've received a memorable promotional email in the past two months, according to a study by Litmus. 
To overcome this, many brands are using email personalization as a strategy for creating more engaging email experiences -- ones that feel less like a robot, and more like a friend.

The best part? Email personalization doesn't need to be insanely complicated to resonate with recipients. To see what I mean, check out these 11 great email examples that cleverly use personalization....

Once you build an audience (of email subscribers), anything is possible.

The truth is that building an engaged and sizable email list is hands-down the most long-term, profit-generating investment you can make.

In fact, a McKinsey study reveals that email is a whopping 40 times more powerful at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. On top of that, the average email-based order’s dollar value is 17% higher than social media channels.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is … getting your visitors to sign up is a struggle – one that many online marketers never overcome.

That’s why I’m going to share 11 proven strategies you can start today to build your email list like crazy....

The three Miami experiments show that as long as people think information is personalised to them they are interested – even if there is no actual personalisation. The “Dear First Name” error is not a problem if the remainder of the email contains information that is of interest to the recipient. Because of this, they think the material is personalised.

Of course, this assumes you know the real interests of your target customers. This is where web technologies let marketers down. Web page advertising, for instance, uses past browser history to target adverts to people. However, it becomes incredibly annoying when you always see advertisements for items you have already purchased. No longer is the advertising about something in which you are interested. As a result, it is like calling David by the name Kevin.

Similarly, many e-commerce sites use visitor purchase history to present a page of options that is “personalised”. However, this frequently fails. If you have been shopping for gifts for a friend at an online retailer you are not that interested in the items yourself. Hence, the so-called “personalised” page is nothing of the sort. It would be better suited to your friend.

For marketers, there is another problem. People do not like their activities being tracked. In one study conducted by Adobe more than two-thirds of people say it is “creepy” when websites track their activities. Increasingly, too, web browsers offer private browsing and Internet security suites are preventing the data from being collected in the first place. The result, inevitably, is going to be that just as marketers start to be able to gather more information to provide greater levels of web personalisation, users are going to stop that from happening....

So what makes you want to take that extra step to actually open an email? Often, it's the subject line. After all, it's your very first impression of the email -- and from it, you'll do your best to judge the content on the inside.

I always ask myself one question before opening an email: Will opening this email be a waste of time? Typically, the answer to this question is based entirely on the effectiveness of the subject line. Granted, there are other elements of an email that make me want to open it -- a familiar sender name, for example -- but 9 times out of 10, the subject line is the determining factor....

Three million campaigns sent, we've handpicked our favorites

When you design for email, you should make the most of the fleeting opportunity you have to make an impression on your subscribers. One of the Cialdini principles  of persuasion applies here: if you offer your readers great value through your email, they’ll gladly reciprocate by taking the time to read through and click on any links.

Of course, designing for email also entails responsive email design since almost half of all email opens today occur on a mobile device. Here are the can’t-miss components of successful email design....

Email marketing has become one of the strongest marketing tools in present time. Buyers are trying to reach their potential customers and consumers through emails. This is one of the most effective yet cost saving technology which allows any company to directly reach up to its customers.

Almost 70% of internet users buy online products and email marketing plays a very significant role in that. Email can efficiently carry all the information about a product that consumer can read and understand at ease.

Email communication also allows the consumer to revert back to the seller in case of any kind of query regarding their product and services....

You, like me, probably rattle off emails quickly, all day (and sometimes all night) long. And that means the people receiving your emails are doing exactly the same thing.

Whether this is good or bad for us, generally speaking, is an open question. But until we all get better at dealing with email overflow, how do you make sure the ones you send get noticed – and for reasons other than an unfortunate Freudian typo?

First, the basics. They may seem obvious, but they’re easy to forget....

Are your email campaigns suffering from lackluster results? Try these 29 super tips to boost open rates, increase click-through and drive higher response rates faster than you can say "spam trigger."

Correct positioning of your key messages in your email marketing campaigns can help them get noticed and remembered. But what's the correct position?

Have you ever jotted down your grocery list and driven to the store only to realize you’ve forgotten it? Have you then tried to recall the items on your list? Chances are, you remembered the first items on the list, the last items on the list, or a combination of the two.

What you forgot, on the other hand, were the items in the middle. This is due to the serial position effect.

To summarize, the study found that when you are presented with a piece of content, in this case a list of words, you are more likely to remember the first words (the primary effect) and last words (the recency effect)....