Angie McKaig - E-Business Consultant and Entrepreneur

Absolutely fantastic audio/slide presentation with some very surprising but well tested results. Testing rocks. Companies willing to share their test results? Rocks even more.

Most interesting part of this post, to me, are the questions it asks. Particularly this one: "Does a Twitter link imply that you're social-media savvy...that you're happy to engage in online conversations with your readers? Are you? How does that look if your sender address is do-not-reply@?" Exactly. WHY do companies still insist on sending emails with do-not-reply addresses in the From/Reply-To field? I've never understood this. As a company you want to invite dialogue, not avoid it.

Nice hard dose of reality for email marketers. Unfortunately. (God I hate how ostensibly "user-friendly" email programs handle HTML.)

Nice hard dose of reality for email marketers. Unfortunately. (God I hate how ostensibly "user-friendly" email programs handle HTML.)

Handy tips and links to plugins to make the workflow easier, for those using Gmail. (I'm still married to The Bat, which rocks on a whole 'nother level.)

Sure, this guy's a newb. But his upset about this marketing experience is important to point out for one reason: he represents the masses. I think most folks don't realize the level of information collected from email marketing. I think the real risk here is in B2B communications, like the one in the post - it's very easy to follow up once you know someone's been interested. The real trick is how to follow up without "creeping them out". Sigh.

Good email marketing tip. I love the endlessly clever folks at GetElastic blog (I swear I'd link to every single one of their articles if it wasn't, like, totally fangirl of me to do so).

Not that this is entirely a surprise, but it is a little frightening all the same. Hopefully this report will put pressure on the biggest offenders of "Report Spam" buttons - Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and their ilk - to make the buttons more clear. Clarity is important. Didn't you pay attention to those commercials?

A fabulous sound introduction to the steps you need to take other than designing the email. Truly, there's a lot more to it than people think. I love Digital Web Magazine. Brilliant and useful stuff for web workers.

Why, for the love of chocolate and vodka and everything else that's wonderful in this world, would you send a business email to customers using an @donotreply.com email address? I mean, sure: donotreply@yourcompanysdamndomainname.com makes sense if you have no desire to read replies. (Why don't you want to read replies? Why is it OK for customers be contacted by you via email but not OK for them to reply? But I digress.) But seriously: internal emails, customer emails, important business crap, don't you realize someone probably owns that domain name? Well, they do.

Some good tips here, some common stuff like headline crafting (without the exact tips to make a good headline, but I digress) but also some good suggestions for the pre-header that are worth considering.

Good overview of what to look for, and lots of great screenshots. Squirrel Mail is horrifying, isn't it? Perfect example of what happens when you let a programmer design an interface. (No offense to programmers, but honestly...)