No man is an iland

A dull, grey day here in Vienna, so I thought I’d resurrect and update a less-than-serious and very old post about the future of email marketing.

What will it look like in 20 years time? Inspired by a conversation on Google+ with Remy Bergsma and Kelly Lorenz.

• Email trigger technology is so advanced that the triggered email reaches your inbox before you take the action required to trigger it.

• Email designers complain bitterly about rendering problems with Outlook 2030.

• Online integration now means you get a Tweet about a text message on your smartphone telling you to check email for a note alerting you to a wall post on Facebook informing you of a chat message from a friend who wants to add you to his LinkedIn contacts.

• Experts recommend adding a “view on desktop” link to the preheader to account for the few people who are still using desktop devices.

• Adjustments to US Can-Spam legislation extend the definition of the term “sender” to include birds, reptiles and higher invertebrates. But it still doesn’t require an opt-in.

• Thanks to almost universal image suppression, 3% is now considered a good open rate.

• At least one news headline declares that “email is dead,” while industry commentators complain that email has the highest ROI of all direct response media but still isn’t getting the budget it deserves. Plus ça change.

• Attention spans are so short that Twitter is now preferred for lead nurturing campaigns that require a long copy approach.

• 40% of retailers do not design their emails for blocked holograms. Recipients simply see a spinning red cross accompanied by a security warning.

• Continuing concerns over privacy and permission lead to the introduction of treble opt-in. After clicking a link in a confirmation email, would-be subscribers are asked to solve a Sudoku puzzle in under 60 seconds before their email is added to the list.

• You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.

• Personalization advances mean the offer in an email updates itself based on your browsing behavior after receiving the mail. (Actually, that’s a prediction.)

• The Yahoo Live Gmail New! webmail interface blocks images, blacks out text, hides the sender name, deletes the subject line and issues a strong security warning on all incoming emails that aren’t in a paid certification program…run by Yahoo Live Gmail.

• Web 5.0 focuses on the production of intelligent, thoughtful content by individuals with an objective understanding of the subject matter. It doesn’t catch on.

Your suggestions?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email humor

A lot of thought goes into working out how to increase email response. One option is to send more email.

Ah, but wait.

We live in fear of the frequency increase. Nobody wants to send the straw that breaks the inbox camel’s back and find themselves labelled a spammer.

So we look for segments and situations that let us increase frequency safely. Like when:

• seasonal demand rises, such as around the Q4 holiday shopping season
• you identify your “best” customers, who respond regularly to your messages
• subscribers opt-in to a special series of emails, like a “12 days of Xmas” promotion
• subscribers take some kind of action that lets you send them a highly-relevant “extra” message: the trigger mail approach

One group of subscribers where frequency increases might also lift response is commonly ignored, because we don’t believe it exists: those individuals who are not suffering from too much email.

Yeah, right…like there’s anybody out there not getting enough email.

The “tranquil inbox” is up there with the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster: more people probably believe in the Tooth Fairy.

The search for the empty inbox

We all “know” that inboxes are groaning under the weight of (commercial) email.

It’s not hard to dig up articles about email overload, email bankruptcy or the astonishing volume of spam.

And who hasn’t bragged about their five-figure inbox, where reaching Gmail’s storage limit is top of the “things to do before I’m 30 40 50″ list?

The People have had enough. The People scan through their inbox like five year-olds with a TV remote. Zap, zap, move on, zap, zap…their fingers permanently poised over the “mark as spam” button.

It’s email hell out there.

And this apparent reality pervades a lot of email marketing advice.

You need to stand out in the inbox. You need to ensure your discount is deep enough and your message loud enough to compete. Don’t lift frequency!

There’s a lot of truth in there, especially since “too many emails” is often cited as a reason for unsubscribing or marking emails as spam. But that whole inbox perception is largely driven by people with cluttered inboxes. People like me and (probably) you. IT professionals, email professionals, tech journalists, marketers, office workers etc…mostly in professions and working environments with a big email burden.

It’s not the same for everyone, though.

You rarely hear about people like my sister, whose Hotmail inbox is indeed an ocean of tranquility. Who wishes her favorite retailer would send more email. Or about the huge number of people who do not use email significantly as part of their job.

How much email do people really get?

Nobody can tell you exactly how many emails are sent or delivered to every inbox around the world. But we can make some educated guesses.

Back in 2010, Hotmail revealed they were delivering a mammoth 2.5 billion emails to customer inboxes each day. The numbers suggest they had around 350 million active accounts at the time.

That works out at 7.14 emails per account per day.

Based on more recent inbox profiles, half of those are deals and newsletters.

So an average Hotmail inbox would get between 3 and 4 marketing emails a day.

Yahoo! recently put up a tool displaying how many emails they’re currently delivering each second.

I’ve been watching it to get some idea of typical email volume. At least during the European working day, it looks like the figure jumps around 60,000 a second.

If we took that number as an average, it would mean an equally mammoth 2,592 billion per day. (If anybody wants to check the tool over 24 hours and give me a more accurate figure, I’d be happy to update the numbers.)

The tool also claims around 302 million unique users, giving us a figure of 8.6 emails per user per day.

A recent end-user survey by the UK’s DMA found half getting less than 20 emails a week from trusted brands or under three a day.

Merkle’s Digital Inbox report suggests the average number of companies in a recipient’s “inner circle” is 11.3.

The Retail Email Blog tracks the emailing frequency of the top retailers. At the moment, we’re looking at around 3.2/week. Putting the two numbers together would give us just over five marketing emails a day for the average recipient.

Now there are lots of flaws and assumptions in all the above calculations, and you can find numbers that suggest busier inboxes. For example…

• Hotmail conducted a survey of 500 Hotmail users which found an average 200 emails per week or about four times the amount the earlier calculation suggests.
• Forrester even predict a typical consumer will get an average 9000 commercial emails per year by 2014, which is around 25 commercial messages a day.
• And in 2009, the Radicati Group put the number of global email users at over 1.4 billion, getting 247 billion messages per day: 176 emails a day.

Consider, also, that people often have multiple email accounts. Nor is email volume a perfect indicator of how full or cluttered an inbox is: low email volume with infrequent checking can mean a full inbox, high volume with frequent email management can mean an empty inbox.

Plus we can assume that people who subscribe to commercial emails are probably heavier email users than average.

Basically we have a mess of conflicting numbers. But that’s kind of the point: your inbox is not my inbox is not your subscriber’s inbox. Common sense alone tells us that there is no single inbox reality. And we are not the only ones mistaking our experience or our working community’s experience for reality.

As Harrison Kratz puts it when talking about social media experts:

“Are we so entrenched in this bubble that we’re forgetting what the “norm” really is?”

There is no single inbox reality

We are quite happy to accept that our lists are made up of individuals and segments that differ in terms of tastes, preferences, demographics, buying propensity, fashion sense, eye color and favorite football team…yet we often act as if their inboxes are all the same: full.

Those numbers may be messy, but some of the averages provide strong evidence that that missing segment does exist: the tranquil inbox.

Its size depends, of course, on your list. If you’re marketing to people like me, then good luck finding it. But if you’re marketing to people like my sister, a stay-at-home mum, then it’s a different scenario.

So how do we exploit this segment?

That’s a real challenge, because you can’t really segment by how full or active a recipient’s inbox is.

Two ideas I’d like to throw out for your consideration.

1. Can you ask subscribers if they’d like more emails?

Our (often justified) concern about sending too much means we commonly talk about “opting down”: giving people the chance to get less email, rather than unsubscribe.

What about opting-up? Is that an option to put in a preference center or as a secondary call to action in emails?

“Like our deals? Get even more.”

2. Is it worth testing increases in email frequency to see if that tranquil segment is larger than you think?

Remember, there are plenty of senders keeping subscribers happy with daily emails, and they’re not all daily deals either. Not that I’m suggesting you go daily: when people say they get too much email they really mean they get too much useless email: frequency thresholds are as much about the value you deliver as anything else.

If every email you send me makes me $1000, you can send as many as you like. If they’re a waste of my time, then once a month is too many.

What do you think?

Find related articles:

• Channel: More posts on timing and frequency

You can change your religion and nationality.

You can change your mind, hair and underwear.

You can even change your gender.

But you cannot (CANNOT!) change your from name.

At least you’d think so based on how most people react when you make the suggestion.

They’re not wrong, but they’re not completely right either: I changed my newsletter’s from line and improved results, as I’ll show below.

What are we changing?

First we need to clarify what exactly we’re changing.

Every email carries with it various bits of information to say where it came from. This includes such things as the sender’s name and email address.

Most email software and webmail services display the “friendly” version of the sender’s identity in the inbox, i.e. the sender’s name:

So viewing, for example, my newsletter in a typical inbox would show a sender name of:

“Email Marketing Reports”

In this post, I’m only talking about changing this friendly from/sender name, not your sender email address: that’s a topic for another day.

Why you should not change your from line

The main issue with the from line is recognition…existing subscribers have got used to associating a certain from line with your emails.

Most people argue that changing the from line breaks this recognition: emails may then be ignored or even marked as spam (eek!), if the recipient decides some unknown sender has sent them unsolicited commercial email.

This argument is perfectly logical. (But see the P.S. at the end of the post for a surprise!)

However, the problem is not changing your from line per se, but how you change it.

Every criticism of a from line change I have read refers to a case where the from line has changed to something largely unrecognizable to most recipients. Like if email from “Email Marketing Reports” suddenly came from “David Macmillan”.

Nobody knows who David Macmillan is.

But it’s not the same as saying you cannot change your from line at all. Who says the new sender name has to be an unrecognizable one?

Why you should change your from line

The from line plays a major role in getting people to give your message attention. Assuming you send emails worth that attention, then you want people to recognize those emails…which starts with a recognizable sender name.

Equally the value of that recognition increases, the closer the relationship between recipient and sender (again, always assuming the recipient sees value in the messages).

For most businesses, there is no personal relationship between sender and recipient. So most marketing emails therefore come from a company or brand name to exploit the recognition factor (see the earlier image for examples).

So why would you ever want to change this from line?

Of course there are times when a brand, company or newsletter name changes…but these forced changes to something potentially unrecognizable are not what I’m talking about and need their own special approach.

My question is this: when would you voluntarily change your from line?

In an ideal world, we’d have optimized our from line on Day 1. Call me a pessimist, but this isn’t an ideal world.

Like me, you may have come up with a from name at the beginning of an email program and then bowed to the Goddess of No Change and left it untouched, even though in retrospect it was not the best choice of sender name. Like some of these ones from my Gmail inbox:

You might want to move from a generic sender name (like “marketing”) to a recognizable one.

Or you might want to use a person’s or personality’s name to try and get a bigger connection to the reader. This could work well in B2B where the sender might be the recipient’s account manager.

The first case seems logical. The second is a little more complicated: in the best case scenario, everyone recognizes the new “human” sender and you get a results boost. In the worst case, the person’s name is meaningless and results tumble (but see later).

So how about we test? We just need to make sure that:

1. The new from line is as recognizable as possible

2. Other recognition elements are built into the email

Let’s see how that looks in practice.

A real-world example and test results

As I stated, my newsletter comes with a sender name of “Email Marketing Reports”.

Now every issue starts with an editorial signed by “Mark” (me) and every landing page features an article written by “Mark Brownlow”. And I try and keep the tone of the emails and the articles fairly conversational.

Could I get a response boost by using my name as the from line, rather than the rather unexciting website name?

Good question.

“Email Marketing Reports” is hardly a household name in its own right, but it’s surely more recognizable than “Mark Brownlow”: plenty of readers won’t have any kind of relationship with me. Will my name simply bemuse people?

Or will the value of a more human from line outweigh recognition problems? Are there perhaps enough people on the list who do know my name?

The only way to know the overall impact of such a change is to test.

But…instead of testing “Mark Brownlow”, I tested “Mark at Email Marketing Reports”.

A name is in there AND Email Marketing Reports, hopefully addressing recognition issues, but also adding that human touch.

I also ensured the rest of the email was helping recognition: the subject line also has “Email Marketing Reports” in it, and there’s a branded logo and text in the area typically revealed in email preview panes.

So…the results:

Oh!

(Unique CTR was up 19% with the new from line, too, but not enough to be considered statistically significant.)

Now this is a very specific example, so you certainly could not say it was a general lesson on what from lines are best. My circumstances (not a household brand name, some name recognition among recipients) are probably different to yours.

Equally, I’m not convinced those improvements will hold in the long-term: there may be curiosity and novelty factors at play.

Also, if the emails don’t carry enough of a personal touch from me, then the new from line may actually start to hurt results by raising expectations that are then not met.

But the results do tell us that voluntary, unannounced from line changes do not automatically mean campaign disasters: they are another potential tactic to use as you look to boost your email results.

Summary

1. Consider a voluntary from line change only when you have good reason to believe it might lift results

2. Avoid changing to something that is unrecognizable

3. Ensure other elements of the email are optimized to keep recognition high – preheader, logos, preview pane, subject line etc.

4. Test

P.S.

Here’s a little spanner to throw into our theory.

If you made the sender the name of a random person, you’d expect results to tank and spam reports to rocket.

A few years ago, a reader noted that their experience suggested the opposite was true: a name (even a fake one) boosted opens and clicks…also over a longer period.

See the original blog post and (particularly) comments for details.

This raises questions like:

Just how quickly do people mark email as spam (people, not email marketers who are more finely tuned to the whole issue)?

Do they really do so without even glancing at the subject line or content, before making their decision? If no, is there less risk than we always imagine with from line changes?

How do from line changes work in the long run?

How often could/should you change a good from line (if at all)? Is there potential to use variations on a *recognizable* theme to keep people on their inbox toes?

What about when people have set up filters based on the sender name: how do they react when these filters break? How many people actually use such filters?

Can from line changes help when people are tired of your emails or have gone inactive (see this post for details)?

I’ll leave those for you to ponder!

What’s your view/experience on voluntary from line changes?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email copywriting

Open rates, are you rising?
Fewer folks, unsubscribing
A beautiful sight,
We’re happy tonight,
Walking in an email wonderland.

It’s that time of year again…the 5th annual collection of articles and reports that help you plan and implement a winning holiday email marketing strategy.

Christmas and Kwanzaa occupy their traditional dates on the calendar (no surprises there), while Hanukkah begins this year on December 20th.

The following resources are all new for 2011. Below them you’ll find collections from previous years, which are obviously still worth exploring. Got suggestions for other resources? Just use the comments.

Happy Holidays. And keep this bookmarked: I’ll be adding new resources as they come online.

• Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season 2011: the big 51 page report from Chad White…full of information on what top retailers did last year, plus advice on how to approach timing, frequency and an array of seasonal email tactics.
• 6 tips and 6 sources of inspiration: big collection of links to sources of design and campaign inspiration, supplemented by a few tips on squeezing more out of the days leading up to December 25th.
• Planning for the holidays: a long list of questions to ask when reviewing what you did last time…thus laying the foundation for this season’s campaigns.
• Holidays ahead of time: advice for (small) business on what might go into holiday emails, with an emphasis on standing out from the typical “X%-off” promotions.
• Holiday retail email ideas: tips, suggestions and warnings on how to ramp up your email marketing in time for Q4 and then make more use of the seasonal opportunity.
• Top 10 steps: ideas for planning and preparing campaigns in advance of the holiday season.
• Top 12 dates: list of key dates and events around which to plan appropriate holiday messaging.
• A holiday marketing story: access a 10-page download outlining specific tactics and approaches to follow to get the most out of seasonal email campaigns.
• Here come the holidays: suggests you get optimization and testing done before the holiday rush.
• Holiday preparedness: 4 tips to help ensure seasonal success isn’t hampered by delivery issues.
• Holiday season will be bigger: brief tips on the overall approach to take to Q4.
• Retail email campaign planner: access a free and cute .pdf holiday campaign calendar off this (sales) page.
• Holiday email trends: offers predictions on the tactics retailers will favor and/or should take a closer look at.
• Holiday opt-ins: reviews all the places you should be promoting your email list to take advantage of increased interest in the holiday season.
• Ten steps: another collection of tips and suggestions.
• Everything holiday: a collection of resources for holiday email campaigns, such as clip art, templates, useful dates, downloadable guides, etc.
• Prepare for the holiday season: an eclectic mix of tips on strategy, design, copy approaches, etc.
• 7 holiday predictions: um…very detailed predictions of how holiday email marketing will pan out. Not just interesting in their own right, but also including optimization advice and tips.
• 12 days of Christmas: 12-part series on how to best exploit Q4 with email, with accompanying tip sheet. The link takes you to Part 1.
• The early emails: examples of the kind of emails that you might send to kick off the long holiday season.
• Interview with Linda Bustos: the e-commerce expert offers advice on a slew of topics, including timing, incentives, mobile, post-holiday messaging and much more.
• Tis the season to email?: Q&A feature covering themes like frequency, timing, “holiday value” and more.
• Holiday inbox planning: example of one company’s standalone “add us to your address list” campaigns, possibly designed to ensure good delivery rates over the critical shopping season.
• Ten email marketing tips: …for the holiday season. The title is a bit of a giveaway.
• B2C success: highlights a few key trends for the season and offers a few tips on what to offer, when and how.
• Festive foul-up or seasonal success: advice on strategy, design, frequency, use of data and much more. Includes a few animated examples of festive campaigns as well.
• Now is the time: …to increase volume. Lots of interesting ideas on extra emails you can send before the holiday season gets into full swing.
• Christmas email marketing: whitepaper with the results of a survey of consumers on their online Xmas shopping habits and email preferences. Also includes lots of tips on optimizing your Christmas email campaigns.
• 5 quick wins: as the title suggests, some quick tips to keep you on course over December.
• Top 5 tips: ditto, covering seasonal behavior, pricing preferences and more.
• Getting the most…: lots of advice and suggestions for how to answer a key question…just how do you differentiate your messages from all the other seasonal emails out there?
• Black Friday /Cyber Monday: how to prepare you and your team to get the most out of the email opportunity.
• Holiday copywriting and content: tips on ideas, structure and style for both email and social media.
• Christmas lookbook: 50 examples of seasonal emails, plus advice…nice!
• Holiday checklist: lists 12 things you need to have covered before you can send out that holiday email campaign and design.
• 7 weeks and counting: gives important dates and deadlines in November and December, while tying them into email campaign ideas.
• Understanding seasonality: suggests the topics and issues you need to cover when reviewing your holiday efforts in 2011, so you can do an even better job next year.
• Advice for the email marketer: a little different this one, since it offers tips on how to prepare for stressful holiday-related situations, such as email mistakes and unrealistic demands from senior management.

Previous “Holiday email marketing” editions:

The first four editions:

• 2010 (30+ resources)
• 2009 (20+ resources)
• 2008
• 2007

In 2008, I also interviewed various retail email experts for their specific advice:

• Getting ready and role models
• Frequency and focus
• Final days and follow-ups
• Not everyone buys/sells Christmas presents

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing and holiday events

No man is an iland (no S), and I owe a constant debt of gratitude to those resources that keep me up-to-date with email marketing advice, wisdom and insight.

Each year, I publish a new list of my personal favorites – the people and places who’ve proved their value as an email marketing resource.

It’s a personal list, not an exhaustive one: there are many other wonderful resources out there, particularly for specialist niches. So please feel free to add to my suggestions through the comments.

Media sites

After a few years howling in the media wilderness, email has slipped past the bouncer and is back dancing with the cool kids in the marketing nightclub. Everyone is writing about it.

MediaPost’s Email Insider still ranks as a big favorite, largely because of the top notch columnists there, especially Loren McDonald. Loren’s also the top email personality to follow on G+

ClickZ and me go back well over a decade. It was there I first read about the killer app (yep, email was once the hot new marketing thing). They have six solid columns now.

A special shout out goes to those by Derek Harding, Jeanne Jennings, Mike Hotz and the great Simms Jenkins.

Other media & membership sites I go back to regularly are:

• MarketingProfs (especially the “Get to the Point: email marketing” newsletter)
• Econsultancy
• iMedia Connection
• MarketingSherpa

The latter is worth joining to get access to the back catalog of case studies with real campaign numbers (some of which I even wrote, back when I used to freelance for them).

Finally, a special mention also for SmartInsights, which features email articles by digital marketing Überguru Dave Chaffey and Tim Watson, who always impresses me with his critical analysis and thinking. (Disclaimer: I write there, too).

Blogs, newsletters, etc.

Phew…the number of email marketing blogs and newsletters is somewhere in the four figures by now. Everyone has their personal favorites. Here are mine:

The Retail Email Blog is the go-to place for keeping up with trends in, well, retail email marketing.

Author Chad White also produces regular reports and throws in his own wise insights with his coverage of the sector.

Pay close attention to anything you see by Dela Quist and colleagues at Alchemy Worx (newsletter).

It’s hard to find the correct word to describe their insights, so I’ll put it like this: nobody has made me think harder about email and my own assumptions and ideas than Dela.

The folk at Bronto have kept up a high standard of practical posts for a long time now. Also especially good for retailers to read.

The email design world is blessed with some excellent resources and I’ve already highlighted 22 sources for design inspiration elsewhere. But a quick extra mention for:

• Style Campaign (written by mobile email design Goddess Anna Yeaman)
• CampaignMonitor (Ros Hodgekiss and colleagues offer strong support for the email design community)
• Litmus (sterling work by Justine Jordan)
• Email on Acid

The deliverability world also has some fine blogs. My favorite is Word to the Wise by Laura and Steve Atkins. You’ll also get a lot of useful information and studies out of Return Path.

Good aggregators for those short of time are the Email Guide and the Email Institute. Special shoutouts also to:

• WhatCounts (particularly articles by Christopher Penn, who comes at email from many different and innovative angles)
• The DMA EMC blog (featuring a lot of top UK talent)
• MailChimp (recently the blog has been more service oriented, but check out the article backlog and resource guides)

Statistics, studies and background data

I have separate posts covering sources of numbers and studies you might need for background or presentations. For example:

• Benchmark statistics
• Value of email marketing – why do it?
• How big is email? – webmail and email numbers
• Mobile email use
• Smartphone numbers and market shares

Community sites

I recently joined the Only Influencers member site and email marketing discussion list.

I’m largely a lurker, due to time issues, but have learnt an enormous amount through the willingness of some very clever people (vendors and marketers alike) to share their expertise, results and practical know-how with others.

It’s invitation-only, so contact Bill McCloskey (it’s his brainchild) to see if you would qualify for an invite.

Another public discussion community is the Email Marketers Club run by the delightful Tamara Gielen.

Twitter accounts

Recommending top Twitter accounts to follow is a hopeless task: there are so many good ones. I am annoyingly selective about who I follow, so most of those that I do are going to give you value for your time. Most of the resources mentioned in this post also have associated Twitter accounts.

Special shout outs to:

Andy Thorpe, Jordie van Rijn and Remy Bergsma: all master sharers of email links and insight. Also check the blogs associated with their accounts.

Some other names to watch for: top sharers and/or fountains of insight on Twitter and elsewhere:

• The Trendline Interactive team, e.g. Andrew Kordek
• The Inbox Group team, e.g. Scott Cohen
• The Red Pill Email team, e.g. John Caldwell and Shannon Holato
• Kath Pay, Scott Hardigree, Steve Henderson, Mia Papanicolaou, Spiro Malamoglou and don’t forget pretty much all the people who I follow.

Those getting started, particularly in small businesses

These are email marketing services whose blogs and other content is well suited to small business, often going well beyond email in the topics they address.

Michael Katz’s newsletter is the only one on this planet I find myself reading every issue, even if I don’t have the time to do so. How does he do that?

These ESPs are also well-tuned in to the needs of the smaller email sender:

• VerticalResponse
• AWeber
• GraphicMail
• GetResponse
• Benchmark Email
• Constant Contact

Bonus people

These are not all email focused, but a few other folk I’ve found struck a chord with me in one fashion or another.

• DJ Waldow, whose monumental enthusiasm and embracement of all things email and social is like having your own personal trainer.
• J-P De Clerck, whose prodigious content output is equally inspiring. More importantly, he has very independent, ethical and forward-thinking views on marketing online.
• Ken Magill, whose coverage of the industry reveals the incalculable value of style, personality and writing skills in creating reader loyalty.
• Jim Ducharme, a top sharer and a writer on email/social media issues with a heart and mind in the right place.
• Robin C Kennedy, the top commenter on this blog…many of his comments deserve their own post. Thanks Robin!
• Kevin Hillstrom, whose blog has taught me more about analysis and measuring the true value of email than I even knew I needed to know.

Author’s note: A couple of the people or organizations mentioned above are also sponsors or clients. A couple are former sponsors or clients. Many I’ve had personal contact with. Many don’t even know I exist. None have bought me a beer.

One or two have sent me t-shirts (I’m a sucker for t-shirts) or chocolate (ditto). All are listed solely on merit and my (inevitably subjective, UK and US-biased) evaluation. Please do add your resource suggestions below!

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email advertising basics