School is back in session and the seasons are-a-changing. We’ve gathered the latest and greatest in the email marketing world and compiled them all here for your viewing pleasure. We’re learning more and more about what accessibility means for email and when we shouldn’t follow the herd for email best practices. Dive into the engagement report for brands like Birchbox and Blue Apron, then… Read more »
What’s arguably one of the most important things you should bring to a Major League Baseball game? A glove, of course! Mizuno is the first to fill the gap for those who might forget (or may not yet own) this game day essential with their Mizuno Glove Experience; a baseball glove rental station in SunTrust Park in Atlanta. We teamed up with our client, Mizuno,… Read more »
EiQ 2017 in Atlanta brought forth numerous directors, managers, strategists and more from all around the email marketing world to come and speak to hundreds of interested marketers alike. With so many email influencers in one place, we had to act. We asked attendees to fill out a short survey to highlight some key areas of their email marketing efforts. We asked about their top… Read more »
Summer is blazing on and so are we! We’ve gathered up the most interesting things in email marketing this past month and there’s a little something for everyone. Are you sometimes skipping email testing? Have you been thinking (worriedly) about a future as a writer in a video-centered marketing world? Are you curious about what’s been happening to all of those out-of-date travel agencies? We… Read more »
In our first summer edition of What’s Up in Email?, we’re dishing up the latest customer journey info, holiday campaign pointers, minimalist design rules and more. If you’ve ever experienced subpar holiday open rates or had a flashy email design fall flat upon delivery, you don’t want to miss the hard-earned wisdom shared in these articles. 1. Does The Journey Really Matter? Spoiler alert: It… Read more »
As an email marketing agency, we need consumers to open our emails. And then we need them to want to read them. What’s going to set our clients apart from the other senders in your inbox and the other billion things vying for your attention? According to a recent post over on the Email Monks blog, minimalism is the answer. Drawing from our own experience designing… Read more »
Our second-ever issue of What’s Up in Email? has arrived! There won’t be another round-up like this until after our EiQ event has passed us by – meaning, if you get through all these posts now, you should have plenty to talk about during the conference at the end of the month. More details on that (and on how to register) here. In this month’s… Read more »
“Computers were created to do tedious and annoying things” – Me, remembering why I love my job A few weeks ago, I was assigned a data cleansing, standardization and manipulations task for one of our clients, a B2B start-up with a relatively young email program. There were some 16,000 records in the file and they needed all of these normalized and squeaky-clean in order to… Read more »
Late last year, Chick-fil-A came to us seeking new ways to drive downloads for their new Chick-fil-A One app while providing a relevant and engaging experience—but they were faced with a few challenges. Find out how we overcame those challenges to drive more downloads than ever in this case study presented by our pals from Movable Ink. THE CHALLENGE The Chick-fil-A team didn’t have readily… Read more »
Email nerds have been using animation to take their visuals to the next level of greatness for some time now. Typically, integrating any kind of animation involves GIFs. A lot of them. But with a little CSS finagling, a single image can infuse your email with panning, scrolling, looping effects–without the file size limitations and other strife of GIF-making. If you’re looking to quickly add… Read more »
EiQ, the intelligent email gathering, is our newest brainchild and rapidly approaching liftoff. On March 30, in Atlanta, quite possibly the email capital of the world (more on that later), we will bring the digital marketing community together to celebrate the power of email and discuss which major trends are propelling the channel towards further greatness. There will be no talks about whether or not… Read more »
Rheem recently came to BrightWave with a question – How do we easily provide our trade customers with valuable information such as product news, promotions and monthly highlights so that they feel enabled to pass this on to their customers? As the world’s-only producer of heating, cooling, water heating, pool/spa heating and commercial refrigeration products, Rheem has a lot of information to share. The trick… Read more »
There were several lofty predictions for email in 2016! We reviewed five of our favorites and determined where 2016 lived up to the hype and where it fell short. Prediction #1: Gmail won’t start supporting media queries. Made by Chad White at Litmus The email world rejoiced in September when Google announced that Gmail now supports embedded styles and media queries. This change enabled responsive… Read more »
It’s been an action packed, exciting and genuinely fantastic year on all fronts. In fact, 2016 once again will take the cake as the best year ever for BrightWave when it comes to all performance metrics. Not bad for a company approaching its 14th anniversary. Let’s get to the highlight reel. Named the Leading Independent Email Marketing Agency – the Best of the Best – by… Read more »
Gone are the days of carefully planning your Black Friday shopping schedule, fighting crowds and figuring out just how to get that 65” 4K TV into your car. Black Friday 2016 e-commerce revenue reached $3.34 billion, and that doesn’t even include Thanksgiving Day sales! So how was that $3.34 billion generated? It’s no surprise that Search (Black Friday: 38.5%; Cyber Monday: 35.5%) and Direct (Black… Read more »
If 2016 was the big year of “what if,” 2017 looks to be the year of “what works?” The 2016 Forrester Wave report stated that 70% of brands will increase investment in email strategy to operationalize efforts towards customer obsession,” but there are bound to be missteps. Those brands that flew too close to the sun with complex, budget-busting programs will seek a more methodical… Read more »
It’s almost time to start thinking up new campaigns and strategies for 2017. As we (frighteningly quickly) draw near the end of this year, we think there’s no better time than now to ask ourselves some hard questions about email–where’s it’s going, what it should do and how it should do it. We came up with six hard-hitting marketing questions and tossed them over to… Read more »
Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. We’ve known that for years (despite claims to the contrary)–and we’ve got the research to back it up. In our recently released white paper, original BrightWave research found that email is the number one channel that Millennials prefer brands to get in touch. (Don’t have time to dig into the white paper? Check out our infographic.) For this webinar, originally delivered… Read more »
Newsflash: It’s 2016. Designing for desktop only is a sure-fire way to land your email in the trash and irritate your audience. Making emails that function as well on mobile as they do on desktop should be a standard practice for your team because scalability matters—particularly to hard-to-please Millennials, as we found out in our recent original research on Millennials and email. We recognize two… Read more »
Even with brands they like or do business with, the number one reason that Millennials unsubscribe is because they receive emails too often. Nearly half of the nice, young folk we surveyed earlier this year told us that this is the reason they opt out of a program–and there’s a good chance this audience makes up the bulk of your list. If not now, soon…. Read more »
BrightWave has been an outstanding strategic partner for Aflac, helping us optimize our complicated, multi-dimensional email programs. As a result, we’ve taken immediate action that positively impacts our business.
