Email marketing is both an art and a science. The art comes in with elegant designs, punchy subject lines and well-written copy. Then there’s the science. The data and statistics prove which parts of the art gets people to interact with your email… and which parts don’t work as well. That’s where A/B testing comes into play. Running head-to-head tests allows you to experiment with the creative and understand the effect. Read on to understand the rules of A/B testing, the parts of an email you can test and the metrics you should look at afterwards.

 Personalization is simply a must for marketers. Consumers and business buyers want personalized communications and organizations see a greater return when implementing it. In Salesforce’s Fourth Annual State of Marketing Report,  52 percent of consumers and 65 percent of business buyers stated they would switch brands if a vendor did not personalize communications. Personalization was once as simple as inserting the contact’s first name and maybe even a company, and that was all that was needed, but it has evolved to so much more.

Email marketing automation has become a competitive necessity for many organizations. While still not in use among all categories, marketers that have adapted email marketing automation report great success. This blog post will explain email marketing automation, describe its benefits and explore some ways that email marketing automation can be used to improve marketing response and conversion in different kinds of organizations.

Personalization in communications is not new. Direct marketers have used it in direct mail since the first computers and printers were used for marketing in the mid-twentieth century. Today, variable data printing technologies mean that marketers can personalize every word of a direct mail package, from outer envelope to letter, brochure and response device. Email marketers have had the same option since email’s first day.

Today, personalized email or direct mail communications don’t seem optional. Yet many marketers that use personalization often report poor results. So, what has held personalization back?

It’s not easy to stand out in a crowded email inbox. But a good subject line can be the difference between your email getting opened… and ending up in the trash folder. If you want to boost your open rates, follow these simple do’s and don’ts for writing an email subject line that will get you the results you want.

In 2017, an average of 269 billion emails were sent per day. That means the competition for attention in inboxes for email marketers is very high. Email marketing continues to generate high ROI for marketing departments that build a well-thought-out strategy that delivers personalized messages at the right time to the recipients. Below are three types of emails needed in a marketing strategy today: welcome emails, trigger emails and re-engagement emails. All of these emails play a critical role in the customer journey.  

As marketers we have to be smart when the noise gets louder. In order to reach and resonate with your audience you need to be relevant for each individual, and being personal with your audience is one important part of being relevant – but how much email personalizaiton is acceptable?

Triggered emails are especially potent because they take information you already know about your customers to build meaningful messages and offers to your current, potential and lost clients. If done well, trigger emails as a form of marketing automation is a time saving and highly effective way to build relationships with your target customers. Here are three new ways to incorporate triggered emails into your arsenal in 2016.