Email marketers constantly strive to find new ways to get their emails noticed, opened and clicked by end users. With more and more businesses embracing email channel to communicate with customers, it becomes even more important for marketers to innovate and try new things. One of these new techniques, you might have noticed, is to use glyphs or symbols in email subject lines. Marketers do this to try and stand out in the crowded inbox and...

Data released by ComScore in October ’12 suggests that Gmail has overtaken Hotmail as the world’s top email service. Gmail has grown very fast in past few years and would likely end up being the top email provider in North America sooner than later. Delivering email to Gmail users’ inbox brings with itself some unique challenges as Gmail spam filtering focuses heavily on subscriber engagement, content filtering and user driven spam...

Email Marketing is a constantly evolving channel and marketers need to keep abreast of the best common practices. What was relevant five years back might not be the best practise today. I’ve compiled a list of five common email marketing myths, mostly from a deliverability standpoint: Myth 1:“Using words like ‘FREE’ and ‘SAVE’ in the subject line will route mail to bulk folders” Days when spam filters were largely based on content...

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the growing prevalence of social media background checks and some guidelines issued by Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) of Alberta. Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian has recently released a paper titled “Reference Check: Is Your Boss Watching? The New World of Social Media: Privacy and Your Facebook Profile”. The paper provides guidance and...

Late in 2011, Gmail started displaying the reasons why they had marked a message as important. They have now gone an additional step and started displaying reasons for placing a message in the junk folder. While this information is obviously targeted towards end user education, it will also be useful for email marketers to understand how their marketing communications are being perceived by Gmail and their users. Here are some of the...