Newsflash, email marketers: ESP tightening and new Canada anti-SPAM regulations are taking effect soon that a savvy email marketer will not want to ignore. With Google and Microsoft both updating their DMARC, or email authentication, policies on July 1, 2016 deliverability rates could take a hit for those who aren’t in compliance. (Hint: if you don’t know what that is, take a peek at this… Read more »
It’s enough to make an email marketer cringe. An unchecked subject line with a blatant spelling error. An ESP mishap that results in pushing send—to thousands of the wrong audience. This is the dark side of the inbox. The good news: all of these blunders, and countless others, are avoidable. The first step is knowing the mistake and why it’s important to be cautious…. Read more »
As BrightWavers, we love to geek out over the most innovative ideas in the marketing industry. This year our teams came out in numbers for the mammoth industry conferences: IBM Amplify, Salesforce Connections and Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. After rocking out to Stevie Wonder and fraternizing with Fabio, we got to work. We were schooled on the importance of effective consumer communication and the powerful… Read more »
“Right Message, Right Person, Right Time” has long been the mantra guiding strategic email marketing. With the emergence of multi-channel marketing over the last few years, we’ve also added “Right Channel” to the mix. While this is fundamentally sound advice, another piece of the puzzle has recently entered the spotlight – the customer journey. This approach serves to tie every step of the lifecycle together… Read more »
We attend festivals with unfamiliar bands, put our names on month-long restaurant waiting lists and stand in line for hours just to get inside a bar. Even as adults, we are constantly experiencing FOMO – the fear of missing out. FOMO that something is going to happen that you wish you were a part of, so with little hesitation you join the crowd. The same… Read more »
As mobile email opens continue to grow, the challenge of converting glances to skims, skims to reads, and reads to clicks is ever-challenging. Enter: Kinetic Design, a coding technique for creating high-impact interactive emails—right in the inbox. For those looking for that X-Factor to bring their emails up a level, look no further. Hover over animations and carousels of hero images are tell-tail signs that… Read more »
We all know that popups can be annoying. You have found a news article or blog post that has you glued to the screen when suddenly you are pulled away by a box asking you to take some action. You quickly close the popup window and try to find where you left off before you were so rudely interrupted. You give up after 10 seconds… Read more »
Getting your subscribers committed to a long and meaningful relationship is no easy feat. Studies show that subscribers are most engaged in the first 48 hours after opt-in and, as such, Welcome emails average an open rate 4x that of non-transactional mailings. Beyond that, subscribers who receive a Welcome series show more long-term engagement with a brand – 33% more on average. Capitalizing on this… Read more »
Imagine a world in which we can harness behavioral data—everything from what size you click on when online shopping to what types of blog posts you compulsively click—to serve up a different, completely personalized email for each and every customer. Reality: This can happen today, for your email program, though few are putting this slick data science to work. We got a full download on… Read more »
Email will continue to sit in the middle of the marketing cloud and be the hub of the consumer digital experience—it’s just going to look different and evolve. While emerging messaging channels will come and go and occupy dominant niche channels (think SnapChat and YikYak), email will be the old battle axe that won’t go away. As long as permission is the centerpiece of the… Read more »
Sporting goods brand Mizuno tasked BrightWave with creating holiday emails to drive revenue and engagement across its major divisions last year. The creative, highly engaging concept that we came up with was a bit of a game-changer, turning heads both internally and externally. The idea was simple: We identified expert staff members, then allowed them to handpick items for the guide and give a… Read more »
It’s the email marketer’s biggest fear: a campaign with an error that *gasp* gets deployed! While we try to minimize risk through extensive QA, multiple tests and rounds of approval, we’re all human. And there’s no UN-send button. These days, though, many marketers are taking advantage of this painful situation and making lemonade with their lemons. Enter the “Oops” email. While nobody likes having to… Read more »
BrightWave helped us develop the strong, consistent, brand-appropriate look and feel that we were missing—and helped us push the boundaries a little bit, too.
