“What is the difference between you and your competitors?”

- Luc Robijns live from MD expo in Paris -
What is the difference between you and your competitors? That must be (by far) the most asked question today.
My answer started with … another question: what are your needs at the moment?
Otherwise a show like MD expo becomes a non-stop demo session where you discover over [...]

The quest for successful email marketing - Meet Benoit in Paris.

- Live from MD expo in Paris -
I just finished my presentation “Creative ways to construct winning emails” (in French as this works better over here in Paris).  All went very well. Some people paid us a visit immediately at the stand afterwards. The room was slightly overbooked. Sorry for these people sitting on the [...]

Day 3 - part 2: segmentation is king

“Live blog from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit ‘08 in Miami”
I’ve attended several presentations this afternoon. Some weren’t all that interesting, others turned out to be very inspiring!
My most remarkable impression of today is that deliverability and rendering are no longer hot topics in the US. They have been the last 2 years, but they seem [...]

Line length in plain text emails

Email software has the nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this:
Email software has the nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient
places.
As a result, your carefully written newsletter can
appear like this.
The solution is to keep lines short and [...]

Embedded images versus delivery

Some marketers embed images in their proper e-mail message, to prevent that their readers have to ‘download pictures’ first.
Without the deliverability issue, this is a well thought action. Unfortunately, adjusting attachments (like images) will highly increase the chance that your email is reported as spam. Another topic on this blog tells you more about inserting [...]

Don’t send file attachments

File attachments of any kind should be avoided in email marketing. We’ve all heard of the damage done by computer viruses transmitted through attachments.  As a result, file attachments will be blocked by some firewalls and virus scans. The chance of your message being perceived as spam mail will increase considerably.
Moreover, internet users are naturally [...]

Email Marketing Forum 2007: the slides

Yesterday was a great day for email marketers. The Email Marketing Forum in Brussels brought all email marketing specialists together, speaking about different aspects of this amazing, interactive channel. Subjects as testing, reporting, segmenting and dynamic content were widely presented and discussed.
The Email Marketing Forum was an initiative from Best Of Publishing, a leading Belgian [...]

Put critical information in text, not images

Images are disabled by default in many of the major e-mail clients — AOL 9, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Gmail and others. When recipients open a message with images in one of these clients, they’ll see red x’s, warning messages, grey boxes… or simply nothing at all.
If critical branding information is in those images, readers [...]

Transfer your message from junk to inbox with white listing

An essential issue in email deliverability is white listing. A high percentage of sent emails worldwide is spam. ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) try to protect their customer’s inboxes using filter mechanisms and very strict rules. This helps distinguishing wanted mails from the unwanted, but the system is not waterproof. Different permission-based emails are labelled as [...]

Save your emails from hungry spam filters

The Belgian law obliges companies to ask the written permission of their contacts, before they start sending them commercial emails.
Sending unsolicited commercial emails -  also known as SPAM -  causes damage to your corporate image. In some cases it can even cost you a law suit. And that’s one thing you don’t need. So it’s [...]