How Do I Hire a Good Email Marketing Manager?

Frequently I'm seeing businesses facing issues not with setting up email marketing process, but with finding a person who's going to set it up. Sometimes they have to try few email marketing managers before they find the one who can really do the work.

And that's pretty understandable - it isn't easy for a CMO to find a person who's really experienced with email marketing, as the CMO most likely doesn't have that good email marketing understanding.

Here's the list of branches every good email marketer should be an expert in:
- marketing / product part of work;
- email deliverability;
- infrastructure;
- running AB tests, data-driven email development, understanding of business goals (sales or retention but not CTR).

But how could a person who's not an email guru himself distinguish if a candidate really understands all the listed things or just uses the words he has seen across all those email marketing blogs across the web?

I see no way for doing that. The only way is to hire a person and very likely to find out he isn't a good fit months later.

Or... you can ask some email marketing effort to assess knowledge and experience of a candidate. Feel free to ask me to help you with it if you feel the need.

Email List Acquisition Via Merger

Seems like my internet service provide has been bought by a larger one.

How did I know that? Not in a straightforward way. I've received an email with the info on my internet account balance from an unknown domain. It included my full personal information. At the same time it had a wrong account ID which made me think the email database has been stolen and now some kind of a fraud is happening.

But after checking things for a couple of minutes I discovered the fact it's a message from my new ISP.

How would I deal with email subscribers of a bought business?
1.I'd let the acquired subscribers know about the change by sending an email and a text using a previous name of the provider.
2. At the same time it's a good point to update the expectation of customers on types and frequency of notifications we're going to send them.
3. And of course, I would use a good friendly from but not robot@domain.com which was the case for the email I've got from my ISP.

Gmail Postmaster Interface Finally Arrived

Hurrah! The Gmail postmaster interface is finally available!
https://postmaster.google.com/

Obviously it was launched recently as the data is available only for the last few days.

What I do like in the interface:
- DKIM / SPF / DMARC related data
- domain and IP reputation info available
- a lot of smaller data points

The only weak thing is DNS-only confirmation flow for domain. Small or non-IT companies might end up not getting that access or waiting for a few day which isn't ok in case of an email deliverability crisis.

Here goes a screenshot:

Lazada - Unsubscription Won't Work Even on Desktop

At this point I *have* to mark your emails as Spam as there's no other way for me to easily stop seeing your emails.

I can understand why your unsubscription process is broken on mobile, but I'm seeing the same on my desktop:

How to Write Emails Saying 'Sorry' to Your Customers

Earlier I was writing about an epic fail in an unsubscription process of a Japanese hotel booking service.

But now those guys did something incredibly not intelligent. They decided to write me an email about 3 days long downtime of their whole service despite the fact I've unsubscribed from all their email earlier!

Their fault #2 is not trying to filter their subscribers list for this campaign. It's obvious the email had to be sent only to those customers who were likely to be affected by the issue. Let's take a look at my profile info:
- I'm unsubscribed from their emails
- my last activity dates back to January (and I was only unsubscribing but not booking!)
- I never booked anything on their website

So the chances I was affected by their epic downtime is almost non-existent. You shouldn't been mailing me!

Ok, let's say you've selected a simplest way and are mailing all the customers who were online during last 6 month - try at least not to promote your failure but ask a subscriber to come back, re-engage him. Isn't it the correct goal for such kind of a campaign?

A Really Good Example of an Airline Tickets Aggregator Campaign

Finally I've seen an interesting email coming from one of widely known airline tickets aggregators.

The email had a lot of interesting information for casual flyers:
- airport lifehacks
- tips on how to spend couple free hours around most popular airports

Of course it won't be new to a frequent flyers e.g. business travelers, but for me as a casual traveler that was a bunch of useful and never known before tricks. Fabulous!

But even that great email had a flaw. I've tried to unsubscribe from their digest just to check their unsubscription flow. Everything went fine except the fact I didn't find a way to re-subscribe. It means you're likely to not see some new great emails from them.

Unsubscription, Unsubscription, Unsubscription

At some point almost every email senders becomes useless for a receiver. Even if you're an email marketing professional and you have subscribed to research others' email campaigns. And unsubscription time comes.

Today I want to say 'Hey, that's bad, it doesn't work!' to Lazada, which is an eBay clone aimed to Asian customers: