There's a lot of buzz about new media products right now, but let's step back for a moment and focus on your core communication. In this issue of Engage, TMG looks at email marketing, and gives you the "7 Deadly Sins." It's a video you won't want to miss. If you get even one great idea, Engage is worth reading and watching.

INDUSTRY BUZZ

Oh Magazine, How I Adore Thee

How do you get the leaders of five major magazine companies together in one room? For one of the largest print advertising campaigns ever created to promote the vitality of magazines. The "Magazines, The Power of Print" ads will debut in your May issues (weeklies will see them this week) and on websites. Read more here.

Social Media: The Stalker Edition

The buzz at South by Southwest this year wasn’t about Twitter’s new profit model or the iPad. It was on location-based social media. In fact, reports from Austin that the crowds at SXSW were moving en masse from one party or panel to another didn’t come from columnists or bloggers. It came in real time. Read more here.

New Tricks in the Magazine Marketing Bag

When you’re trying to get your magazine in front of an agency, what’s going to make all those young media buyers pay attention? Gifts, spa treatments and cocktail parties all help. But what’s going to get them really excited? Read about it here.

Where Do Americans Get Their News?

Only seven percent of Americans rely on one sole source for news consumption and the overwhelming majority of Americans—92 percent of them—digest news in multiple formats, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Read about it here.

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

The 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing

With the media chatter focused on glitzy new toys, like the iPad that hit mailboxes over the weekend, it’s easy to ignore the gold standards of audience communication—emails and e-newsletters. Email marketing sins are being committed every day, and now’s the time to recognize your digressions and put the halo back on your marketing communication.

Watch the 7 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing

Nearly 1.4 billion people worldwide have an active email account, and roughly 247 billion emails are sent each day. But with this universal adoption, many on the “send” side aren’t paying attention to those who have chosen (or been duped) into receiving.

Need proof? How’s this: Only 72 percent of emails actually make it to the recipient’s inbox. Of that, less than 20 percent gets opened, and an estimated 81 percent of all email sent is spam.

Communication teams are making mistakes because they don’t have the time (or the attention span) to focus on the more traditional tools in the web-marketing arsenal. To top it off, an astounding 37 percent of marketers don’t even bother testing their emails prior to sending, according to an eMarketer survey.

So what can you do to combat casualties in the battle of the inbox? Avoiding these seven deadly sins is a good start.

Check out our Best Practices for Email Marketing.

Best Practices for Email Marketing

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