goolara

[goolara]

Once More Around the Sun: The Year in Email

Another year has come and gone and another batch of email gaffes and oddities. This year saw a noticeable decline in many of the types of errors we used to see in the past. I suspect that this is due to two things: The people who are creating the emails have either done it for a while now and aren’t making the mistakes they used to, and the new creators have learned from the mistakes of the past.…

[goolara]

Another Year, Another Look Back

Another Year, Another Look Back

Nearing the end of the second year of the pandemic, it’s time for our annual look back on the year in email. As with the year before, many of us spent the year under at least partial lockdown. The businesses that could, continued to engage in email marketing. The ones that couldn’t…, well, the ones that couldn’t went out of business. A few companies stopped sending emails at the beginning of the…

[goolara]

Coming Back After Quarantine

Coming Back After Quarantine

In March of 2020, when the lockdown started, many businesses scaled back their operations, assuming that it would be over in a few months. We all know what happened next. Now, as businesses are coming out of a year of hibernation and restarting their marketing programs, some are finding that their email deliverability has dropped precipitously. More email is going to the spam folder and more…

[goolara]

Happy New Year?

We assume most of you are glad to see 2020 come to an end, not that it looks like things have improved with the new year just yet. For email marketing software providers (ESPs), 2020 was a mixed bag. On one hand, many businesses relied more than ever on email to get the word out about their products. On the other hand, many businesses couldn’t weather the lockdowns, with restaurants being…

[goolara]

Hey Google, Why’d You Do That?

Hey Google, Why’d You Do That?

Last week, Google suffered several major outages. Naturally, it made the news. So many people rely on Google for search, Gmail, YouTube, and maps, not to mention Drive, which some companies use to prepare documents and presentations. We don’t fault Google for having an outage. We make software, so we know how difficult it can be, even for a company with Google’s resources, to avoid this…

[goolara]

Email Marketers and California’s New Data Privacy Law

Email Marketers and California’s New Data Privacy Law

In June of 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Taking its inspiration from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the CCPA was intended to protect online data privacy. Like the GDPR, it gives California residents the right to opt out of any sharing of their data and the right to have their data deleted. It was created by…

[goolara]

The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services

The Hidden Costs of Cloud Services

Have you considered moving computer workloads to the cloud? You probably have. In the studies we’ve seen, over 90% of companies are now using cloud computing services.1 If you are considering moving your infrastructure to Amazon Web Service (AWS), or Azure, or some other cloud computing service, there are a few things you should know before taking the plunge. We’ll look at these potential…

[goolara]

2014: The Year in Email

Another year has passed, and another year to look back on the best and the worst that business of email had to offer. We’ve been compiling them all year from a variety of sources. I’m sure that everyone reading this has received at least one of these. Some are typical, minor mistakes and some could kill a career. There are two main causes for most of the mistakes we encounter in email. The first…

[goolara]

Keeping Your Email List Clean

Recently, while reading a newsletter from another Email Software Provider (ESP), we came across the following advice in a column titled “Ask the Experts.” A reader asked how can they keep their subscriber list clean. We were shocked by the advice they gave. They recommended the following:

Remove improperly formatted email addresses, duplicates, and syntax errors. Doing so will increase your…

[goolara]

The Email Game

The Holiday Season is upon us, so we thought it might be fun to offer an infographic in the form a simple game of chance. Of course, your email marketing efforts should be anything but a game of chance. Careful planning, design, and testing will go a long ways toward improving your open rates. Keeping aware of your metrics and avoiding quick fixes, such as list purchasing, will keep your…

[goolara]

Geolocation Tricks and Techniques

In our last blog post, we talked about assembling an email that uses location-specific data to personalize an email. We showed how you can use content blocks to offer information for specific store locations based on the subscriber’s address. In this article we will talk about how to use geolocation in email to personalize each mailing. We won’t be discussing how to obtain address information for…

[goolara]

Using Content Blocks and Dynamic Content

Too often, articles and blog posts that talk about Dynamic Content never go any further than telling us we should use it because it’s good for open rates and clickthroughs. While this may be true, there is seldom any actual information on how to use Dynamic Content in a mailing. Partly this is because every ESP is different and giving specific details on a procedure might only confuse someone who…

[goolara]

Privacy, ESPs, Protecting Your Data, and the Law

The NSA revelations of last year, the enactment of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) in June, and recent European Commission meetings have brought issues of privacy and national data control to the forefront of the minds of IT professionals and technology users around the world. Although many countries, such as Egypt, UAE, and Malaysia, still have no data privacy laws, most industrialized nations…

[goolara]

Using Animated Gifs in Email

First off, let’s get the oldest question out of the way—how to pronounce Gif. According to Steve Wilhite, who invented the format, it should be pronounced “jiff.” You’d think that would settle the matter, but it only polarized the factions. Recently, no less than President Obama weighed in on the subject, pronouncing it with a hard “G” and saying he pondered the pronunciation a “long time” and…

[goolara]

Gmail Insights: Using Quick Action Buttons

Last year, Google announced that they were rolling out a new feature for Gmail called “Quick Action Buttons.” It took a few months before the feature was actually made active, and a few months after that before it finally started appearing in Gmail, but if you do any online shopping, you may have seen these buttons appearing to the right after the subject line on emails. Quick Action buttons, as…

[goolara]

Gmail Insights: What’s Behind Google's Gmail Image Caching?

Gmail Insights: What’s Behind Google’s Gmail Image Caching?

Google certainly likes to tinker with Gmail. Last summer, they added tabs to the Gmail inbox, which some people predicted would lead to massive declines in opens and engagement and signal the eventual demise of email marketing, if not the entire western world. On this blog, we predicted that the fear of the Gmail tabs was overblown and that good, engaging subject lines and content would prevail.…

[goolara]

2013: The Year in Email

2013 was an interesting year. 2012 ended with Oracle buying Eloqua, and 2013 ended with Oracle buying Responsys. Who will they buy next? 2013 began with Salesforce CEO Marc Beniot telling a crowd at CES that email was dead, and then turning around and buying ExactTarget a few months later. It was also the year that marketers finally got over their infatuation with social media after several…