9 Email Marketing Best Practices for Higher Education
When you hear the term “best practice” in email marketing for higher education, your mind whisks away to some magical place for a moment, allowing you to consider what life would be like if you had all of them in place. Then reality hits, and you begin to question if any of those “best practices” are even doable inside your marketing organization. The truth is that “best practices” are simply guidelines written for the masses in marketing and are sometimes not even relatable to your vertical. There are fundamental email best practices like not buying lists, permissioning, handling of data, and ensuring that you comply with privacy and spam laws. However, there are no generally accepted [...]
8 Email Marketing Trends For 2023
Email marketing, at its core, seems easy, but to do it well or even best in class is hard work. Email marketing trends have come and gone and boomeranged again during my 22-year career, making deciding and writing about trends difficult. In researching this post, I saw posts from 2018-2022 in which organizations rehashed the same trends repeatedly, without substance and very little guidance on how to pull them off. Anyone with a keyboard can write about digital marketing trends. Still, it's another thing to write about email content trends that are actually doable by organizations at all levels on the spectrum of programmatic complexity from small businesses all the way up to fortune 500 companies. [...]
How to write high-performing email subject lines
Are you wondering how to write high-performing email subject lines? Well, the role of email subject lines has evolved over the last 10 years. Often used to give context into what is inside the email, it has sometimes been abused with the likes of using RE: or FW: to sometimes trick the subscriber into an engagement. We have seen the introduction of emojis, the pervasive use of “oops” and the subsequent messaging of “thought leaders” that they don’t carry much weight on opens any longer due to MPP. We will talk about why email subject lines still matter and introduce a method of writing them in the modern era. In 2022, Email Subject Lines Still Matter... [...]
Real Time Dynamic Data for Marketing Emails
Using dynamic data in marketing emails is a standard, at this point in 2022. Blog posts and articles are saturated with practices about it, and virtually everyone in the industry uses some type of personal dynamic information associated with their contacts to provide better communication and to improve the quality of the user experience. It’s a given and we at iPost, like so many others, have been using it for decades. That’s why today we want to take the discussion a step further: using real time dynamic data in your emails to fuel business growth and improve your email messaging. Image Source: makeameme.org What Real-Time Dynamic Data is (and what it isn’t) Dynamic data, sometimes also known [...]
Email Marketing Strategy vs Tactics
EMAIL STRATEGY AND EMAIL TACTICS ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. You will often hear the words strategies and tactics used interchangeably in the email marketing world, but they could not be any further apart. I have been asked many times to create a “strategy” when in reality, what was being asked for was a list of “tactics” to achieve the goal for many types of marketing campaigns. As email marketers, we all need to be aligned on what these email marketing strategies and email marketing tactics actually mean and the effect that they will have. If your long-term vision is to have success with your “strategy” then there needs to be a clear separation between words and [...]
9 Current Email Marketing Trends For 2023
Updated May 2023 Email Marketing is competitive. Brands compete for inbox attention, and marketers are as busy as ever. In my 21 year career in email, I have always read about and watched the current email marketing trends that shape our industry, and for 2023, I thought I would give the email world a bit of the Andrew Kordek vision on email marketing trends that should be top of mind in 2023. Please understand that mileage will vary on these trends, depending on what vertical your brand is in and your major corporate initiatives for 2023. Trend #1 - Stop It With Apple's Mail Privacy Protection It’s time to stop talking, blogging, webcasting, and solutions for [...]
The Importance of Email Marketing for 2023
Updated May 2023 The importance of email marketing has skyrocketed in the past few years, and it’s only going to continue growing in the coming years. With this increased importance, though, comes increased competition. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re putting in your best efforts with your email marketing campaigns now in order to stay ahead of the curve in 2023 and beyond. We’ll go over all this and more to help you understand the value of email marketing in 2023 and which marketing tools you need to use to make it work for you. People Still Use Email Although many people have been led to believe that email is dead, those who understand [...]
Benchmarking for Email Marketing
Welcome to a new digital marketing series at iPost called "Don't do this, do that.", where some of the best minds in email marketing will use dozens of years of both client, agency, and ESP experience to guide you the email marketer with pragmatic advice to help improve your marketing strategy. This week's article is about Benchmarking. What Is Benchmarking? First, let's start with some definitions. According to Wikipedia, "Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies." Benchmark is defined as an object, such as a ruler or standard, used as a measure of size, accuracy, or quality. So if you're comparing yourself to [...]
The Best Day And Time To Send Email
In this article, we will discuss how to choose the best day and time for marketing emails and how to create an ideal schedule for your unique audience. We show you new ways to find unique email transmission times that work best for your business. And we'll give you tips on how to determine the best days and times to send your newsletters, along with recommendations on how to improve your overall email marketing strategy. [Sources: 3, 4, 14] As a marketing e-mailer, it is your responsibility to do your research, test different dates and times, and draw your own conclusions about what works and what doesn't. Use of an email provider that allows you to [...]
5 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
Email Deliverability Matters - Email Deliverability Best Practices Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to build brands, relationships, and revenue. When done correctly, the ROI for email marketing is astronomical, so marketers in all organizations love email marketing. One big area which causes some confusion amongst the marketing purist is that of deliverability. Marketers spend countless hours on creative, offers, messaging, subject lines, testing, marketing automation, and numerous other tasks and strategies to ensure an excellent inbox experience for their subscribers, but one thing is often overlooked; deliverability. Email deliverability is different from delivery of email. Simply put, email deliverability is the percentage of emails that reach your subscriber’s inbox. It is the cornerstone of [...]
4 Dumb Ways to Deal with Mail Privacy Protection
There has undoubtedly been a lot of hullabaloo around Mail Privacy Protection affecting email over the last few weeks. Apple iPhone users on apple devices can now surpass tracking pixels and online activity. The industry itself has all agreed that people should not panic and that email will continue to thrive and innovate due to this change from Apple. That being said, we at iPost all love a good laugh, so we decided to come up with four dumb ways your brand can deal with Mail Privacy Protection going forward. (Please note that we are not condoning or endorsing these practices in any way as this post is meant for entertainment purposes only) So without [...]
Testing an email is a waste of time.
Testing an email is a waste of time. I am sick of the words “test it” in email marketing. For the last 15 years, it seems that you cannot go a week without reading an article about the value of testing in email. Thought leaders, content marketers, vendors, and agencies have all banged the drum of just how testing can work and produce results. Unfortunately, in most cases, marketers haul off and test maybe one or two emails, see little if any change, and move on. Perhaps they get discouraged around how testing is supposed to be set up, or maybe they thought it would be easy and find that it takes patience and [...]
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