Is the smartphone really killing off the period as a punctuation mark for texters? A recent story in the Washington Post says it is.

Where the full stop once marked the end of a sentence, the simple line break now claims that role in texting.

This year, according to Custora, email drove more Black Friday sales than any other channel – a total of 25.1%. And MailChimp customers alone sent a record 1.2 billion emails on Black Friday – followed by another 1.1 billion on Cyber Monday.

Sideways-scrolling emails have been on the email marketer’s radar for a few years. At Alchemy Worx we first produced them for a client campaign back in 2006, but like many marketers we came up against the number one restriction facing these emails – scrolling left to right on a desktop is not easy! But with 53% of emails now opened on mobile, using easy finger swiping actions or turning the phone to landscape mode, these emails seem much more appealing for both marketers and customers.

With huge retail events like Cyber Monday and the Holiday Season, Q4 provides no end of opportunity for email marketers to engage their customers. Here’s our pick of campaigns that put their own stamp on the season.

For many brands, Christmas is the most commercially critical period of the business year and an effective email program can be the difference between ending on a high or with a hangover.

Using a case study from one of our clients, we examine the halo effect of sending an email. We look at the uplift in revenue across other channels when an email is sent and consider the merits of different attribution models and how email marketers can best demonstrate the full impact of their work.

The great unspoken truth of email marketing is that mailing more makes more money. But email marketers fail to fully exploit this fact because they are afraid of being seen as spammers -€“ a misconception for which we have only ourselves to blame.

How often should you be emailing your subscribers? It’s a question we get asked all the time. The quick answer is ‘as much as they will let you’ because we know that sending more email increases revenue. But it’s not that simple. Indiscriminately ramping up your send frequency without any strategic thought is easy. Making your subscribers happy to receive more of your emails is hard. One works, the other doesn’t. So this month we’d like to offer some competitor analysis of the effective use of increased frequency from well-known clothing brand, Boden.