Email Marketing

Most ecommerce businesses rely on email marketing as a low-cost sales driver. We’ve addressed a wide array of strategies for email, including improving opens, clicks, and conversions, mastering deliverability, optimizing by device, automation, spam, segmentation, and more.

Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Split Testing Improves Results “Up to 191 Percent”

May 26, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Split testing of email marketing campaigns can improve open rates, click through rates and even purchase conversion rates. More email service providers are offering split test functionality, making it possible to upload two or more versions of a single broadcast and send them to random ...
Email Marketing
PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance

April 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new s...
Email Marketing
Quick Query: MailChimp CEO on Email Strategy

March 23, 2009 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants rely on email newsletters and email marketing to drive sales, but the success of those email campaigns varies. There are frequently issues related to open rates, click-through rates and even deliverability of the email itself. To offer insight and suggestions on...
Email Marketing
The PeC Review: MailChimp is a Full-Featured Email Campaign Manager

January 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp offers a complete email marketing solution that is simple and inexpensive enough for small businesses but powerful enough for fairly large Internet merchants with sales of $5 million per year or more. According to its staff, MailChimp has over 60,000 users. It manages lists...
Email Marketing
Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests

July 28, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot of time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. For these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let’s say a newly launched shoe e-retail...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Avoid This "Deadly" Mistake

April 14, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Over the years, I've seen many ecommerce store owners make one simple but deadly mistake when they get started with email marketing: They send emails to old, obsolete email addresses. Does this sound like you? You started your ecommerce store a few years ago. Even back then, you had t...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Report Card: Delight.com

February 11, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Delight.com sells gifts, fashion accessories and home decor items. It claims to make the online shopping experience quick, fun and simple. But what about its email marketing? Delight.com requested a review from Practical eCommerce of its email marketing activities, which we are please t...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Report Card: Accepted.com

December 10, 2007 • Ben Chestnut

Accepted.com provides admissions consulting and application-essay-editing services that help people get into top business schools, medical schools and graduate schools. It produces a free monthly email newsletter called “Odds ‘N Ends” and the staff of Accepted.com has requested that Pra...
Email Marketing
Words and Phrases that Trigger Some Spam Filters

December 3, 2002 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

I built this list of some 250 words and phrases from two spam filter lists. It is not complete. I have left out porn trigger words. Most spam filters work on a point system, so that the occurrence of just one "spam phrase" probably won't trigger rejection -- except some which the filter considers notorious.
Email Marketing
A Simple Way to Format HTML E-Mail Newsletters

January 1, 2000 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

I hesitate to provide a guide to formatting HTML e-mail for one reason: there's little else about this on the Web, and the article is likely to produce a torrent of phone calls and e-mail inquiring about further details.