Archive for: February 2012

Using personas to dramatically improve email marketing results

Feb. 13 Email Marketing, Email Marketing Insight 20 comments

If your email marketing results are still lagging after you’ve put in quite some effort, you might want to take a look at personas. For those who are not familiar with personas: they represent different user types based on psychological data. Lets take these four types of personas (the part in parentheses shows the way they behave).

The four personas

- Competitive (logical and fast)
- Spontaneous (emotional and fast)
- Humanistic (emotional and slow)
- Methodical (logical and slow)

By the way, these four types are not just limited to marketing. They are just anywhere and everywhere. Remember the Sex and the city series? All four main characters were based on one of the four types:

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Email Insight: Knowledge not shared is lost

Feb. 08 Email Marketing, Email Marketing Insight 9 comments

The email insight title about this article is about knowledge of all the bigger and smaller principles and factors involved in email marketing. It is said to be one of the best performing online marketing channels out there, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. The vast amount of work to be done even before you can send out something simple as an email newsletter can be daunting at first. Email marketing vendors and service providers can help, but specific knowledge about your email marketing practices and goals should be in-house.

Imagine having the marketing department solely running the email marketing tasks. In most companies, the marketing department isn’t that big, so email marketing will be a task of one single person, sometimes assisted by another. In other cases it is divided depending on types of communications. However, the knowledge and experience while executing email campaigns is built over time. You cannot go from zero to top speed in a short amount of time like a supercar. Besides, the ride in a supercar most of the time doesn’t take long: either it’s a gas guzzler, the ride isn’t comfortable or you can’t hear yourself think.

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DMARC launched: standardizes email authentication

Feb. 01 Deliverability 8 comments

The DMARC.org (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) website launched two days ago with an official press release stating that fifteen of the biggest email and technology providers have teamed up to combat the threat of deceptive email through standardization of email authentication. This includes the correct use of SPF records and DKIM.

A quote from the press release:

The DMARC specification addresses concerns that have traditionally hindered widespread deployment of an authenticated, trusted email ecosystem. Today, email receivers lack a reliable way to know the extent to which an email sender uses standards like SPF and DKIM for authenticating their messages. As a result, providers must rely on complex and imperfect measurements to separate legitimate unauthenticated messages sent by the domain owner from fraudulent phishing messages sent by a scammer.

Which companies are involved?

All of the big webmail providers are involved: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (they together account for about 1,5 billion email addresses), financial institutions and service providers (Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, PayPal), social media properties (American Greetings, Facebook, LinkedIn) and email security solutions providers (Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, Trusted Domain Project).

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