Best Practices | Email Marketing Strategy

The Next Step in Email Deliverability

By Bill Nussey, on December 15th, 2009

In the never-ending fight to block spam, ISPs first created content filters. Then came the “spam” button. And now, the gatekeepers of deliverability are looking at a new way to factor whether your email makes it to the inbox: [...]

The Tech Behind Domain-based Authentication

By Bill Nussey, on August 17th, 2009

A colleague read my recent post and asked me how marketers could prevent spammers from spoofing their domains. In other words, it’s pretty hard to fake an IP address, but isn’t it easy to fake a “from” field and domain? (For example, Outlook Express easily allows me to put “bnussey@whitehouse.gov” in the from field.)

The solution [...]

How Will the Shift to Domain-based Reputation Affect Your Email Deliverability?

By Bill Nussey, on August 14th, 2009

I recently had a chance to pick the brain of my esteemed industry colleague, Deirdre Baird. Deirdre is the CEO of Pivotal Veracity, Silverpop’s email deliverability partner, and one of the most knowledgeable people in the industry when it comes to getting your email successfully delivered to the inbox.

Specifically, I wanted to get her thoughts [...]

Shopping Cart Abandon: How Long Should You Wait?

By Bill Nussey, on June 11th, 2009

I recently read an interesting “Times Wire” column about a start-up company that focuses specifically on shopping cart abandonment. The company, SeeWhy, is releasing a new service that will alert subscribers when a visitor on their Web site abandons a shopping cart, and then immediately follow up with an email designed to encourage the person [...]

Recent Interview on the State of Email Marketing

By Bill Nussey, on March 19th, 2009

I recently spent some time with the folks at eMarketer, who interviewed me about my thoughts on email marketing. They just published a sizable excerpt from the interview, and I think it does a nice job of capturing the state of email marketing at a high level. It also provides advice on how marketers can [...]

Recession Email—Too Much of a Good Thing?

By Bill Nussey, on March 13th, 2009

I read an interesting article in eMarketer about the popularity of email among retailers during this past holiday season. Advertising agency Smith-Harmon found that retail email marketers accelerated their email campaigns beginning in October, and on average sent customers more than 14.6 emails in December alone.

“Retailers ratcheted up their email marketing campaigns to aggressively compete [...]

Why I Love A/B Page Testing and Optimization

By Bill Nussey, on March 3rd, 2009

People who know me know I’m a big fan of testing. You never know for sure how people are going to respond to your emails and landing pages unless you test, and seemingly insignificant differences and simple changes can have a huge impact on response. What’s really exciting is that marketers today can do more [...]

A Brief History of Marketing

By Bill Nussey, on February 25th, 2009

For an entertaining and enlightening review of how the world of marketing got to where it is today, this video by a German ad agency tells it all in three minutes.

Emailers Not Targeted in New FTC Report on Behavioral Advertising

By Bill Nussey, on February 21st, 2009

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission just came out with an important new report outlining its recommendations on how advertisers who use behavioral targeting—the tracking of individual consumers’ online activities in order to deliver targeted advertising tailored to each person’s interests—should regulate their own activities so that the government doesn’t step in and do it for [...]

An Interesting Finding About Forms

By Bill Nussey, on October 6th, 2008

We just completed a fantastic benchmark study (maybe the first) on BtoB lead metrics. One of the findings that really stood out to me reveals an interesting detail about how people fill out Web forms. It turns out that it’s not the number of questions marketers require, but how long it takes the responder to [...]

Email Marketing Strategy