No matter how long you’ve been in the industry, successful email marketers know there’s always something new to learn. The evolving nature of email is part of what keeps #emailgeeks coming back, keeping up with new technology and trying to use it to deliver the sorts of messages that excite your subscribers.

Because it’s always changing, sharing knowledge and hearing from others is essential if you want to keep up with where the industry is headed. That’s a big part of what we want to help with, spreading our experience and helping others be better at what they do.

As marketing technology improves and evolves, it can be challenging for today’s marketer to keep up with all the new tools, and understand which ones best fit their needs. Balancing the level of need with concerns about budget, competitiveness, implementation time is never easy work, and it can even lead to paralysis where a team just treads water with the martech it has because sticking with a mediocre or worse status quo is less daunting a challenge than doing the work necessary to identify and implement the right solution for the future.

One common perception of email messaging is that it mostly consists of marketing campaigns — sending personalized emails to a large group of people at once, and sending a consistent message. However, in reality, the majority of all email sent by brands consists of transactional messages, or messages sent in response to a customer interaction with a company. Although there are many types of transactional emails, a few examples include:

• Password Resets
• Payment Reminders
• Purchase Receipts

Among many others. And it’s no surprise that these messages make up the majority — open rates for these messages are over twice as high, and these emails are clicked six times more than typical marketing messages.

The holiday season is creeping around the corner, and it’s one of the busiest times of year for marketers as they prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. When businesses are pressured by revenue goals, there is often a tendency to expand mailing lists and increase sending cadence. Below, I will address a few tips and recommendations to better optimize your marketing programs and strategies for the holiday season.

While growing up, my mom told me that when we first engage in a discussion with someone that we just meet, we listen to the person introducing themselves, we pay attention to what they say, and their body language. Then, we talk using empathy and relate to the person in a meaningful and sincere way.

When it comes to messaging and technology, it’s the same thing, and most of the digital messaging tools have been created with the idea of enabling interaction with a large number of people.