Anyone sending data to the USA or working with a technology partner whose servers are located in the USA needs to review the impact of the latest judgement by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). As of July 16th, data flows between the EU and USA are no longer legal. Why is this? US surveillance laws don’t prevent US security organisations from surveilling companies’ data even if they were members of the Privacy Shield agreement. Neither is there is an effective way for EU citizens to file a complaint about this in the USA. The damning conclusion of the ECJ ruling states; “The requirements of US national security, public interest and law enforcement have primacy, thus condoning interference with the…
Email strategy
Creating a sense of urgency in email
Creating a sense of urgency can be extremely powerful in email marketing, and marketing in general. Urgent situations cause us to suspend deliberate thought and act on rash, snap impulse decisions. Urgency causes people to act quickly. Many times what is stopping a subscriber from converting on a landing page or email is people thinking too hard, not responding to our calls-to-action or simply waiting too long to act. Raising the urgency level in our emails cuts into this to create a significant improvement to conversion rates. In this post I’ll go through some of the methods you can use to create urgency and some examples of how companies are already doing it in their emails. Using a countdown timer…
Email strategy – getting the basics in place
Creating a strategy for email marketing will keep you in the race for customers. Continuity is key – both in terms of implementation and in identifying and reacting to change. Outlook (Hotmail), Gmail, Yahoo et al have been employing user interaction (or lack thereof) to determine whether emails are delivered in the inbox or junk folder for some time now but engaging users should, of course, be a marketing fundamental. Email is the mainstay of online marketing – commercial tools for sending mass marketing emails have been available in the UK since 1999. Every year since has shown double digit growth in email marketing spend despite the decline in the cost of email volume. Why? Because people like emails. Well,…