Loren McDonald
MediaPost
Danville, CA, United States
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Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Loren:
What Are Your Email Marketing 3-Point Plays?
Now that we're deep into the NBA playoffs (that's basketball, for non-fans), it's time to roll out an idea I've been bouncing around. Data geeks and analytics have become as important to basketball strategy as instinct and deep understanding of the game and players. It's the same "Moneyball"-style phenomenon that reshaped baseball strategy, and it can guide your email marketing decision-making. → Read More
2 key starter steps for getting more marketing projects done
With most marketers strapped for time, getting more marketing projects done is all tall order. Here are two key steps to get you started → Read More
Email Marketing Messages With A Message
The commercial message is becoming a popular medium for dissent, or at least it seems that way in the early days of Donald Trump's presidency. More brands are using email marketing to deliver or amplify their cause and views. → Read More
Have We Forgotten How To Market?
Excuse me while I rant a little bit. What's up with email subject lines coming from big brands lately? Way too many look like lazy marketing or borderline spam. → Read More
Keep Seeking Ways To Boost Revenue and Efficiency
I met recently with a client that's an email marketing veteran. The company does many things well with its high-volume retail email program. What frustrates the email/CRM team is that it doesn't control its email destiny, and that limits its ability to innovate. → Read More
Use Change Management To Transform Your Email Marketing Program
One thing that keeps email marketers shackled to what I call the "hamster wheel of mediocrity" is not knowing how to manage the leap to greatness. You know you need to move your email program away from relying on broadcast messages and simple segmentation. But achieving a highly automated, dynamic program takes more than buying the right technology. You also have to manage change effectively… → Read More
Engagement Rate Heralds Next Era Of Email Metrics
Mobile devices are complicating our usual understanding of email metrics. Just as marketers newer to email have grasped the nuances of deliverability, inbox placement, the differences between click-through and click-to-open rates and unique versus gross clicks and opens, along comes mobile with its own measurement challenges. → Read More
Random Messiness: Time To Add Some To Your Email Marketing Program?
Could your email marketing program use a little chaos, disruption and messiness? On a recent flight home from London, I watched economist Tom Harford's TEDTalk presentation, "How frustration can make us more creative," in which he shows how inserting messiness and disruption into the creative process will usually produce a better result. Naturally, it got me thinking about how to apply his… → Read More
Is It Real
Finding the right email frequency is one of the many issues that email marketers have to figure out in order to have a successful email program. What happens when they change their email cadence, such as emailing on more days of the week or emailing more than once a day at different times of the year? → Read More
Are Words (In Email Marketing Messages) So Last-Century?
Of course they aren't. If you're reading this column in email, you might have used the MediaPost Email Insider sender name and subject line words you saw in the inbox to decide to open the message instead of deleting it. But I'm wondering how well text-centric email designs serve today's consumers, whose attention spans have been going through a well-documented decline, and whether it's time to… → Read More
'It's IT's Fault'
As marketers, we love to blame IT for all of our problems. Here's how to turn them into partners who solve problems instead. → Read More
Email Marketing In The Subscription Economy
New business models are shifting from purchase and ownership toward sharing or subscriptions. This has and will cause dramatic change in many industries that rely on traditional purchasing scenarios. Here are key areas where email marketing can help convert and retain more subscription customers: → Read More
Email Marketing As Problem-Solver
We've been taught to think about marketing in terms of achieving goals in the customer buying cycle: awareness, interest, trial, purchase, support, loyalty, referral/advocacy or some variation of these. Achieving these goals is like tying your shoes. You just do it, without thinking strategically about the process. We add a popover to our home page to acquire more subscribers. We test copy in… → Read More
Was Sending That Prince-Themed Email After His Surprise Death A Wise Move?
"To celebrate Prince we've marked down a collection of items just as striking as he was." Really? The retailer that used Prince's death to promote a discounted purple handbag clearly didn't think through that approach. Or, it lacked a process to deal with such events, or both. → Read More
Using Email To Drive That All-Important Second Purchase
Getting a customer to buy from you a second time is one of the most common challenges that online retailers and ecommerce companies face. Many first purchases are seasonal buys, gifts or one-time solutions. Your challenge is to motivate these customers to come back in a different season, to buy gifts for a different person, or find something that complements their first purchases. → Read More
Preference Centers: If You Build It, They Might Not Come
I've advocated for the customer preference center for many years, often as one of the few voices in the wilderness bucking opinions that preference centers are a waste of time, and behavior beats preferences anyway. Marketers complain about two things: Their customers don't use their preference centers, and the data is often inaccurate or dated. So, the preference center doesn't deliver the ROI… → Read More
Key Considerations For A Global Email Regulatory Compliance Framework
The Email Experience Council's new report, "The Global Email Marketing Compliance Guide," is a valuable resource to understand email regulations in 77 countries. But, more strategically, it can form the basis of a global framework for ensuring compliance throughout the world and minimizing your legal risks. → Read More
Your Guide To Global Email And Data Regulations
Marketers have to comply with email and data regulations that vary widely from one country to the next. What's legal in the United States, for example, won't pass muster with Canada and many nations in the European Union. The DMA's Email Experience Council recently published "The Global Email Marketing Compliance Guide" to document global email and data regulations in a single source. Among the… → Read More
Email Marketing Lessons From Trump's Presidential Campaign
Donald Trump just picked up another passel of Republican delegates in the Nevada caucuses this week. Although he's still far from the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination, Trump is now considered the candidate to beat. Love him or loathe him, email marketers could learn a few things from the apparent front-runner's campaign strategy and tactics. Put your own feeling aside and go… → Read More
Optimizing For Mobile? You're Doing It Wrong!
Marketers have been inundated with pleas to optimize their emails for mobile. It's good advice, given that B2C mobile readership is well above 50% and creeping north of 35% for B2B. But the issue isn't just "mobile versus desktop" but also "smartphone versus tablet versus desktop." Smartphone users view and act on emails and websites differently from tablet users, and both of them are different… → Read More