My clients don’t really have my best interests at heart. They all have names like ‘Joe’ or ‘Jane’ or whatever. So it’s really, really easy to have one of those butt-clenching moments when you realize you just sent a line-by-line chronicling of every onsite SEO issue your pharmaceuticals client has to your unitarian church client. …

I’ve been on an SEO tear of late. I admit, it’s one of my favorite topics. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore stuff like e-mail marketing. E-mail continues to get a bad name. It also continues to produce amazing results for companies that use it right. So, here’s 7 steps to spruce up your …

I’ve decided to start a new segment: 10 best e-mail marketing subject lines of the week. It’s completely sarcastic, by the way. I’m sure you’re shocked. This may be a one-time segment, depending on response, so enjoy: Bring business directly to you, online! I’ve never heard that one before. What time is okay for you. …

[I get paid if you buy a copy - full disclosure. It's a dang good book though.] When someone tells me that, to improve my e-mail marketing, I need to “write more compelling content”, my first impulse is to hit them with something heavy and unforgiving. These kinds of vague pronouncements are like telling me …

When I say ‘become a spammer’ I mean it in the FBI/Mulder profiling way, not the Buy-lots-of-servers-and-send-out-millions-of-messages-an-hour way. You can become a far better e-mail marketer if you study really crappy e-mail marketing. All those e-mails that look like they were written by a troupe of crazed chimpanzees hold invaluable lessons in how to: Get …

Rented and purchased e-mail lists seem like a great idea. Lots of addresses, targeted to you, dirt-cheap. But they rarely work. Why? Their lists are messy. Chances are they got a lot of the names on their list through something called ‘e-mail append’, where they take existing direct mail lists and scour the web for …

Test your subject lines, and you can easily double your open rate (the number of people who read your message). If you use an e-mail marketing service, such as Whatcounts or Emma, they deliver 3 critical statistics: E-mails sent. E-mails opened. Links clicked. If you’re not using one of these services, you need to. Prices …

In this episode, Clarisonic illustrates how to produce a truly awful e-mail marketing piece: The subject line was Time sensitive: Help us tonight at 8 PM and get a free brush head. Yikes. Here’s what I’d change to make this better: Change the tone. The writing style in this reads like it was sent by …

Things go wrong. Sites break. Sometimes, though, a web marketer finds a way to make lemonade. I like Performance anyway, but now I really, really like them: Technorati Tags: e-mail, e-mail marketing, internet marketing…

Even marketers suck at e-mail marketing. One of my staff just received this from the American Marketing Association: Brian opted in to this list. But this was still flagged as spam, at least mentally. What could the AMA do to make this e-mail better? Don’t!!! Use!!!! So!!!! Many!!!! Exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Nothing screams “I am cheesy” …