Today we are celebrating both the dawn of networked email, and the person who sent the first email, Ray Tomlinson. In October, 1971, Ray sent the very first networked email. To be sure, the computer to which he sent it was barely 3 feet away from the computer from which he sent it, and yes, he had sent it to himself, but nonetheless, it was groundbreaking. Prior to that some computers had a rudimentary 'email' messaging system through which one person could leave a 'mail' message for another person, but only on the same computer (sort of like a local dropbox). Sending one email to another computer was a Very Big Deal. It was also Ray who decided that there should be the "@" between the username and the domain (web address) of the email, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mailchimp has just announced a brand new Shopify integration. Now you may be wondering "Wait a minute, hasn't Mailchimp integrated with Shopify all along?" The answer is that Mailchimp used to have a Shopify integration, but they had discontinued it. In fact, Mailchimp left Shopify 2 1/2 years ago when, in 2019, Mailchimp and Shopify had a rather public and unamicable divorce.
Conventional wisdom says that personalizing email subject lines in email marketing and other commercial email, such as putting someone's first name in the subject line by using tags or other automations, increases the open rate for that email marketing. n fact, if you do a web search, such as in Google, for "email personalization open rates", you will find over 16million results, most of which tell you that personalizing email subject lines in your email marketing will boost your open rate. That may have been true some years ago, but not necessarily so much now.
We get asked "Why is my email going to the junk or spam folder?" all the time. Here is one of the most comment reasons that email gets sent to the junk folder, and what to do about it.
Did you know that your mailing list's MR is way more important than LS (List Size)? In fact, MR is one of the most important, if not the most important, metric of all. Not familiar with 'MR'? Read on!
With the UK adopting their own UK GDPR following Brexit, it's important to understand that you can't just block from your website people coming in from the EU or the UK. As we have mentioned in other articles on GDPR compliance, GDPR specifically prohibits the automated profiling of individuals, including of their online identifiers or locations, which means that it is a violation of GDPR to note, in an automated fashion, from what region in the world they are surfing over to your website.
If you send email, especially email marketing or other bulk email, then there are the two things that your business contracts must contain, even in the U.S., to be not just GDPR compliant, but GDPR-proofed.
Last week we discussed how GDPR affects data you have collected before GDPR went into effect (GDPR goes into effect on May 25, 2018). But what about the case where you have data acquired from a particular individual before GDPR went into affect, and then that individual provides you with additional data after GDPR is in effect? That is the subject of this article.
Despite that GDPR is coming up on its fifth anniversary, people are still asking questions like "What is a 'data controller' or a 'data processor' under GDPR?" And "How is a GDPR data processor different from a GDPR data controller?" And even "Can a company be both a data processor and a data controller at the same time under the EU General Data Protection Regulation?" And the ever important question: "Do we have to comply with GDPR if we are in the U.S.?" Here are the answers.
