We love when our clients test — and learn — something with their email marketing campaigns. From what works in subject lines to the length of the email to how to best use personalization, testing in email marketing is key to consistently increasing your results. But there’s an important caveat: All tests are not created equal. In order to really learn from your tests, they need to be both scientifically accurate and statistically significant results. Did that phrase take you back to college? It turns out that statistics class is […]

When you’re sending email through a third party, like the emfluence Marketing Platform, there are a few important technical items that your Email Service Provider (ESP) should help you take care of.  One of the most important is your email authentication.  When you set up a new account or switch to a new email platform, the platform team should ask you to add two text records to your DNS – SPF and DKIM – that will help optimize your inbox placement. A lot of this process may sound like jibberish […]

Using rich media in marketing campaigns is definitely trending up for 2015. Email is an excellent way to drive your contacts — buyers, prospects — to your content, and so every so often, we get the question, “Can I embed a YouTube video in my email?” The short answer is, “not really.” The standard video embed code won’t work with any inboxes, but HTML5 video can be used to render in iOS, Outlook.com and Apple. HTML5 still won’t work in Gmail, Yahoo!, or Outlook, though — arguably the three biggest […]

First, and importantly: Are you allowed to buy email addresses and add them to your emfluence Marketing Platform account? No. emfluence users/clients can only send to your own permission-based, or “house” list, of opt-in subscribers, those people that reasonably expect to receive email from you. This is also the law in many countries, varying from needing “permission” to “express consent” and they don’t mean those people that forgot to uncheck a box for 3rd party offers a few years ago. That said, email marketers often ask us if they should […]

One of the best parts of being an email marketer is the instant gratification of seeing your results pour in soon after an email deploys. We sit and click refresh, watching our opens and clicks numbers inch upward. But are opens & clicks all you’re watching? Sure, open rate can signify a successful subject line (along with a permission-based list and historically great content on a regular basis). Click through rates are excellent for measuring engagement with a specific item, article or topic. But better yet is the click-to-open ratio. […]