The cost of college textbooks has risen 812 percent since 1978. That’s more than triple the inflation rate over the same period of time, according to The Atlantic. So what gives? Textbook costs are a perfect example of an economic theory known as the principal-agent problem. Professors (the agent) choose the textbooks and the students […]

If you’re sending bulk email, there are only a few ways to increase conversions. You could work on your subject lines, spruce up your copy, segment your list, redesign the emails or improve your call to action. Those are all recommended ways to optimize the email marketing process. But instead of looking for marginal gains […]

2014 was a big year for the Vero blog. We learned a lot. A few of our posts were big hits and a few fell flat. Below, you’ll find links to all 104 posts we published this year along with the total numbers of pageviews (as of December 15). If you have any thoughts about […]

Technology platform changes. Marketers everywhere freak the hell out. Sound familiar? The latest freaking out about Google Inbox is reminiscent of last year’s freaking out about Gmail Tabs. It’s the same deal in social media land with Facebook’s algorithm changes, and SEO with Google’s near-constant tweaking. And it’s a shame because, in my experience, good […]

Recently, one of our loyal blog readers sent us a note that read something like this: "Oh, I didn’t know Vero could do all that!" We try to keep the blog focused on educational email content and we almost never sell. But today, we want to explain what exactly Vero does since, apparently, we haven’t […]

Amazon has 237 million active customers. If it were a country, it would the fourth-largest in the world. In the United States, Amazon owns a 30% marketshare in e-commerce … not exactly a niche market. To what can we attribute Amazon’s growth? After all, they have access to the same tools, people, software and infrastructure […]

I cringe every time I hear the term “email blast”. At best, an email blast has the right message, timing and call to action for just a handful of recipients. At worst, it annoys people enough to unsubscribe from your emails altogether. The truth is that most people get too much email. I work for […]

I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Product Hunt. If you aren’t familiar with Ryan Hoover’s addictive product discovery site, it’s time you check it out. Here’s how it works: Select users submit products like apps, books and startups The community votes and comments on them Each morning, Product Hunt sends an […]

It’s hard to measure the success of an email campaign, so we’re coming up with a better way. This post is an overview of the process we’re using as we measure and update our own campaigns. Some of the results are great and some aren’t. We’ve chosen one with mixed results to share here since […]

At the end of September 2014, we took our first Vero team expedition to Malaysia for ten days. We worked in Kuala Lumpur as a team. We got our scuba open water certificates on Pulau Tioman. We kicked some serious ass as a team. As part of this experience, there were a lot of really […]

One of the reasons we focus on transactional and behavioral emails is because most promotional emails stink. But as Evernote proves in this example, it doesn’t have to be that way. We heard from our readers that this format is fun, so we’re going to break this email down to examine why it’s so effective. […]

Hi from San Francisco! Chris and I have been working here in the Bay Area for a few days, dedicating some serious time to improving the blog. We recorded this Q&A in a conference room at the Segment office. Beautiful office and great people, but we didn’t bring along any audio recording equipment. Our apologies […]

It’s a common misconception that people learn more from failure than success. But in fact, just the opposite is true. Here’s Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried’s thoughts on the Signal v. Noise blog: I don’t understand the cultural fascination with failure being the source of great lessons to be learned. What did you learn? You learned […]

Update: We created a quick tutorial to show you exactly how to send this email using Vero. Read it here. A few months ago, I received this email and this from Airbnb. It is, without a doubt, one of the best emails I’ve ever received. I thought it would be fun to dissect it here […]

As Steve Jobs once said, “Real artists ship.” To make content marketing work, writers need to be shipping great content on a regular basis. Having the right tools is key to maximizing productivity. The best writers find ways to keep the focus on writing while also finding ways to highlight and reference work from other […]

This post originally appeared on Cornerstone Content. I wrote it in my tech blogging days but all the lessons here apply directly to marketers. Given the interest in our recent post about link building and promotion, I thought this would be the perfect time to spend more time on this topic. Enjoy! Content promotion is […]

We’re an email marketing company but we’re trying to grow a business just like you. It seems logical to share our ideas, challenges, successes and failures with you. If this blog were only about email, we’d be withholding a lot of knowledge about marketing, business development and sales. This post is going to examine the […]

This post originally appeared on Sparksheet. Data, data and more data: As content marketers, social media managers and journalists, we’ve been taught to love it. And yes, data like page views, followers and clicks can be valuable. But I’m here to tell you there is so much more to a successful content marketing program than […]

The way we see it, we can either churn out content at a high frequency or we can spend time creating resources that are truly valuable and actionable. We’ve chosen the path less traveled and so while you won’t see new content as often on our blog, what you will see is going to be […]