Transactional messages are a key customer touch point and one that many retail marketers have no visibility into as the messages are sometimes sent out through the retailer’s ecommerce platform instead of its ESP.

It’s no secret that customers value personalized product recommendations, both online as they shop and in email campaigns.

Segmenting your list is a great way to target a specific group of customers with a specific message to drive better engagement and ultimately revenue.

One key is to train store associates to get customers’ email addresses. A great way to start is by offering shoppers e-receipts.

If you’re looking to significantly increase your online or email revenue, personalized product recommendations are the way to go.

So much of our time and energy spent creating emails is focused on the content and design, or delivering personalized messages through automation.

Although the main reason the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 was to change the date of Easter, it also forever changed the way we measured days, weeks, months and years.

In our latest whitepaper on email benchmarks and trends, we shared some examples of retailers using email messages to drive in-store traffic. I have received a few more recently that I thought were worth sharing:

Email remains the highest performing channel, returning $44.25 for every dollar spent, on average. But retailers can expect even high returns if campaigns are optimized for performance.

International Military Antiques, a military collectables company, saw a 47.8% increase in revenue when it ramped up product recommendations on its website.

Why give your email program the weekend off? A recent study shows consumers open emails slightly more often on Saturday and Sunday than on weekdays.

During this years’ Email Experience Council, I had the unique opportunity to speak with key email program personnel from Comcast, Microsoft, AOL and Google to discuss how they measure activity within the inbox and what senders of commercial email should be doing from their point of view.

This morning, I received this email from Amazon with the simple and effective subject line “Buy it again”

Personalization is no longer a luxury; it’s an expectation. Marketers need to reach subscribers on their terms in order to engage and, more importantly, convert them.

To set the record straight: a navigation bar in an email isn’t really navigating customers through the email like a website.

One of the major challenges retailers have with browse and abandon email campaigns is how to avoid being “creepy”

Earlier this month Brooks Brothers had a Weekend Clearance Event. The sale ran for five days and each day I received an email promoting the sale.

We released our sixth annual research report of the email tactics used by the Top 1000 Internet Retailers and were pleasantly surprised by some of the results.

Now that the busy holiday season has passed and the new year has arrived, it’s a great time to consider refreshing triggered campaigns you may have put into “set and forget” mode in 2014.

What you need to know before crossing international borders with your email strategy.

The privacy and compliance landscape is ever-changing as lawmakers need to stay ahead of spammers who are at most a security threat and at least annoying and responsible for giving email senders a bad rap.

Fewer top online retailers are offering discounts in e-mails, while more actively encourage e-mail sign-ups on their sites.

80% of consumers say they like it when brands’ e-mails recommend products based on their previous purchases.

Retailers are scrambling right down to the wire to help last-minute shoppers complete their gifting.