The Rebel's Guide To Email Marketing

I could not be more excited and proud to share the following news with you.

My good friend and colleague, Jason Falls and I have written a book. Yes. It's true, The Rebel's Guide To Email Marketing is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It's set to be on the shelves sometime later this summer or early fall.

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The Waldow Social Weekly: New Friday Email

If there's one thing I've learned in my years in the business world, it's that you need to stop every so often to reflect & reevaluate. During this process, it's important to stop doing what's not working and build upon what is. Sometimes it's about refocusing.

Refocus is exactly what I'm doing with my company, Waldow Social, repositioning it to be more email marketing focused.

It started last month when I began the site redesign process. It continued a few weeks ago with the Waldow Social Elevator Pitch Contest.

This week, I've decided that it's time to mix up my email newsletter.

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The Starbucks Free Drink Postcard

Coffee is one of my three favorite things. See my Twitter bio for the other two.

I own my own company and work from home. In order to avoid going stir-crazy, I often take the 1/4 mile trek down to my local Starbucks. Suffice to say, I drink quite a bit of coffee on a weekly basis. So much so that it only takes me a few weeks to earn my free drink - "earned" after 15 purchases.

Instead of using a credit card or cash (or a plastic gift card), I use the Starbucks iPhone app. I love this app as it allows me to easily manage my account and pay with a few swipes and a quick scan. Easy and simple is good, in this case.

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Waldow Social Elevator Pitch Contest: Win $200

I'm in the process of repositioning my company, Waldow Social, to be more email marketing focused - something I've been helping clients with for nearly 7 years and what I know best.

As part of the process, I'm doing a complete overhaul of the website. Thanks to Google Analytics, I can see that 25% of my pageviews are on WaldowSocial.com. However, if you go to my homepage right now, it's not entirely clear what my services are - how I help clients. Instead, you see the most recent blog post.

The goal of the new website is to make it crystal clear how Waldow Social can help you become a better email marketer.

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Why Gmail Spam May Be Hurting Your Email Marketing Program

A few weeks ago I asked how often you checked your spam folder. I was surprised by the responses. In my very unscientific "study," the far majority indicated they rarely checked their spam folders.

As the average consumer, this is probably not a huge deal. You'll likely miss out on some emails that are falsely marked as spam; however, most email clients do a pretty good job telling you what is spam and what is not.

That being said, if you are an email marketer, it's important to understand which of your emails are landing in the spam folder. Do you know? Are you checking this regularly? Are you doing your own testing by sending a copy of your email to various email accounts? Are you using a third party delivery service like Return Path? Or, are you just crossing your fingers and hoping all is well?

I'm here to tell you today why Gmail spam may be hurting your email marketing program.

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Only Influencers: The Best Network For Digital Marketers

Only Influencers (“OI”) is a private, invite-only network for digital marketers. Founded by entrepreneur, digital marketing maven, and personal friend Bill McCloskey, Only Influencers’ is mostly focused in the email marketing space, yet is starting to include social and mobile as well.

If you are associated in any way with email (or digital) marketing, you need to become a member now.

Why Should You Join?

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Free Email Review: Direct Buy

On occasion, I do FREE (yes free) email reviews (click that link to find out how you can get yours).

Dylan Murphy sent me a recent email from Direct Buy. One thing I just noticed - unless I'm missing something - is that there does not seem to be a way to subscribe to the Direct Buy weekly emails. It would appear you first have to create an account and become a member. Again, I could be missing this. Also, how do I become a member?

However, I'm not here to critique their website. Instead, the goal of this blog post is to showcase a 5-minute screencast review I did of a recent Direct Buy email. So, as promised, check out the review below.

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Email Marketing is Far From Dead

There is no arguing that social media is hot. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, [insert new social media app/platform of the day] are getting all the press these days. If you watch Anderson Cooper 360, he goes to nearly every commercial break reminding views to find him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Some days it feels like Sportscenter doesn't interview athletes anymore. Instead, they quote Tweets.

Nobody seems to be talking about email marketing -- and that's a mistake.

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Scoop Review: A New Tool To Manage Your Inbox

Justine Jordan announced Scoop on the Litmus blog recently. Scoop is a new tool that promises to help manage your inbox.

As described in the post, "Scoop grabs all the emails we signed up for and routes them into a single daily digest that we can read each day. We can choose what time we’d like to catch up on the latest from our favorite restaurants and retailers, and skip over the messages we’re not interested in today. Scoop is smart, too. It gets to know our preferences, and pushes our favorites to the top. If we decide we’d like emails delivered right away (or never again!), Scoop can handle that, too."

Justine was kind enough to let me in on the (very) early Beta version of Scoop. I've been using it for a few days now and have to say, I'm quite impressed.

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