From Email to Online: Ensuring a Seamless Customer Experience

As an email marketing professional, you obsess about maintaining and growing a database of responsive subscribers, ensuring that your emails make it through the myriad filters to their inboxes, and creating messages that compel recipients to open them and respond. But you probably don’t worry too much about what happens once those recipients do click through. Here's why you should.

READ ARTICLE

Email Hysteria, or Where's the Comfort and Joy in Last Week's 768 Christmas Emails?

Now that we've committed to tallying every retail email we receive in the run-up to Christmas, the holiday season no longer seems the most wonderful time of the year. Last week's batch of 768 emails brought discounts and free shipping, but little in the way of comfort and joy.

READ ARTICLE

Look Beyond the Standard Metrics to Measure Effectiveness

One strength of email as a marketing tool is its measurability. But if you measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns in a vacuum, relying exclusively on standard medium-specific metrics such as open and clickthrough rates, you could be underestimating their effectiveness.

READ ARTICLE

Greatest Hits: Email and Social Media Are the New Chocolate and Peanut Butter

As we wrap up 2010, we're also wrapping up our look back at some of the most popular Email Essentials articles of the past year. This blog post from April looked at the varying efforts of 50 marketers to integrate their social media efforts into their email campaigns.

READ ARTICLE

Happy Holidays--and Thank You!

A year ago, I had little reason to give thanks for email. I’d just been laid off from my job in England, and my boss had opted to give me the news neither in person nor even on the phone but, yes, via email.

Yet here I am, covering email marketing. What’s more, I'm enthused about and impressed with the effectiveness of the medium as well as excited about its potential to maximize the power of complementary media such as social networks.

And for that, I owe all of you a huge thank-you. You’ve been so generous in sharing your success stories, your opinions, and your answers to my questions. As this is the final edition of Email Essentials for 2010, it's as good a time as any to let you know how welcome you’ve made me feel, both in this industry and back in this country after three years abroad.

While I’m at it, l’d like to wish all of you who celebrate Christmas a joyous one. And to everyone, best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a happy and safe New Year’s. I hope that in 2011 you’ll continue to share what’s new and noteworthy in email marketing, as well as let me know what you’d like to learn more about.

Until January 4, when I return with the next edition of Email Essentials, happy holidays!

Sherry Chiger
editor, Email Essentials
sherry.chiger@penton.com

PS: Also keep an eye out for several new sister enewsletters to Email Essentials in the beginning of 2011, including Chief Direct Marketer, Chief Data Marketer, Chief Social Marketer, Chief Web Marketer, and Chief Mobile Marketer.