Chris Baggott of ExactTarget, along with Ali Sales of Compendium Software, is publishing a new book about email marketing, Email Marketing by the Numbers. What’s especially interesting about this book is that Chris asked other email marketing bloggers to contribute articles for the book, which are added in every chapter as “What other marketers are saying”. This makes for a good book – shows not only transparency but that other marketers are thinking along the same lines.

Plus I’m sure it helps that all of us bloggers who contributed will be linking to it! The book will be released this spring.

As if free labour weren’t enough! Our PR student intern cooked breakfast for our whole office(us, plus our friends at bv02)!

Here he is in action (With special helper Bess)…

And here is the rest of us enjoying our breakfast!

left to right: Jud (bv02), Jacinthe(bv02), me (card), Scott (bv02), Andrew (bv02), Carolyn (card), Derek(intern extraordinaire). Not in picture: Alison (card)

This is the article I wrote for the January issue of our monthly e-bulletin Expresso.

It seems 2006 was the year for revamping all the most popular email clients. That makes 2007 the year for email marketers to seriously rework HTML templates for optimal rendering results.

Before you’re in the thick of your 2007 email marketing design strategy, it’s time to get updated on the top 5 email clients and how they’ve changed. Screen shots add to the power of this article! Keep reading…

Read the rest of the article…

I have to say, our *just* released Q4 Email Trends Report is my favourite of all of our quarterly reports of 2006…

Why? Well, For years we’ve been telling clients to do bulletins instead of newsletters – pick a focus, keep it short, keep it one screen, don’t make more work than you need to! Some listen to us, and some don’t… But finally, we have the data to back up our big mouths!

In Q4, we split our data by email types, into 5 categories: Newsletter, bulletin, sales/promos, info updates, e-vites and greeting cards. Secretly we all wanted to know the difference between bulletins and newsletters (definitions are in the report, but basically a bulletin is like a digested form of newsletter – 1-3 brief stories, one screen etc.)

And let me tell you, bulletins knocked those long and boring newsletters right out of the park! We’re especially happy for this – because we didn’t make liars out of ourselves… phew!

Of course the data in the report doesn’t mean hard and fast rules – only general guidelines. However, why not try spending less time developing lots of content for newsletter and spend more time strategizing and adding quality to a bulletin. You could even test it out with your list, you might be pleasantly surprised!

Read the Q4 Email Trends Report by card

According to an article in ClickZ, ISPs are getting more aggressive about bounce rates. Spam is on the rise (again!!) and because of spammers constantly outsmarting filters, ISPs have decided to instead to focus less on email content, and more on sender reputation. This means if you aren’t consistently cleaning your bounces, you could see a spike in ISP blocks.

From the article:

In response, ISPs are doing what they’ve always done: tightening delivery requirements. The good news for e-mail marketers is the use of image spam and extreme variations in content mean that content filtering is less of a focus. The bad news is list hygiene and other chores related to best practices are becoming much more onerous. In particular, ISPs are increasingly aggressive about bounce rates. There’s a clear correlation between high bounce rates and spam, so it’s understandable ISPs utilize this as part of their defense.

Continue reading at ClickZ