Focus on “outside the envelope”  There’s a reason this is first.  If your email isn’t opened, it’s not going to convert and it can’t get opened if it’s not delivered.   Outside of the envelope things that make a difference:  the “to” address, the “from” address, the subject line (you have 24-35 characters for traditional, 12-16 for mobile) and the format.. [...]

Tim writes “I attended your lunch thing at NEMOA and I was very interested in what the guy from The Golf Warehouse said about pop-ups.  I hate those {redacted} but when I heard what you two said about them, especially what the golf guy said about them, I figured I should test them on our site.  What can you tell [...]

Lisa Blitzer writes: “What is a stick email?  My email guy said our provider is insisting upon us doing one but I looked it up on Google and couldn’t find a thing so they must not be all that popular.  From the way my guy explained it, it sounds craptastic to me.” Hi Lisa: Ah…  Stick emails.   You’re right.  They [...]

A rockstar blogger asks: “Amy, I am considering starting an e-mail newsletter and I have a few questions.  Such as, how long should it be; how frequently should I publish it; and how long will it take to see results (i.e., interest from potential training/consulting clients?)  Thanks!”   I get this question A LOT or as 2.0 (aka the wee terrorist) says [...]

When folks talk about their trigger e-mail programs,  they’re often talking about the usual suspects: abandoned cart e-mails, thank you for your catalog requests, order confirmations and the like.  Most companies don’t send out the EBOSI, which is a shame because it’s often one of the best performing trigger e-mails you can have in your arsenal. An EBOSI – E-Mail [...]

There are many things that influence the success of your thrusts and triggers. Most of those things happen “outside the envelope.” (In other words, before the user opens your e-mail.) One of the most important is the “from” address. Things like format have an impact on deliverability, but users don’t understand things like format. They only know that their images are [...]

These days, everyone and their brother has a thrust e-mail program but surprisingly, very few folks have triggers. Trigger e-mails, also known as good dog e-mails, are sent to individuals based on actions.  The action could be good (thanking them for an order), bad (when they abandoned a cart, for example) or indifferent (confirming a vote in a poll) but [...]

Becky Tesh asks “I’m hoping you can help.  E-mail is a huge part of our success online and this year our results are tanking.  (We’re over thirty percent down on e-mails but up on SEO/SEM sales.)   Our opens are down…  our clickthroughs are down…  and it keeps getting worse.  What can I do?  Our provider says that our deliverability is [...]

You always ask that question to other people so now I ask you, ARE YOU SMOKING CRACK? You told my boss that we shouldincrease the number of e-mails we send out? You were joking, right? You know our company. We can barely do one e-mail every other week and now you want us to dosix times that? SHOOT ME NOW.” [...]

Jessica Kelley says: “I finally figured out thrust e-mails and now you are talking about triggers. H-E-L-L-O Amy Africa. You are not nice.” Jessica.  Jessica.  Jessica.  Haven’t you ever watched Jeopardy?  That was not properly phrased as a question.  (And if the question was about me being “not nice”, well, we have even bigger issues.) Perhaps what you meant to [...]