Last month I co-hosted a webinar with Jeannie Mullen, EVP and CMO for Zinio and Silvia Sierra, VP of Marketing for Access Intelligence, and I was shocked by a statement that Jeannie made - that approximately 70% of email marketing best practices developed in 2006 or prior are WRONG according to the Email Experience Council! What an amazing thought. Almost 3/4 of what we've been taught or told in the last 3 years is out of style!

Once I got over the shock of that statement I started to look back at the evolution of email marketing just over the past year and realized that it really has changed quite a bit.

Consider the following events of the past year:

• The explosion of social media and other Web 2.0 messaging channels;
• The continued increase in mobile device use to read email;
• The fact that spammers are getting more creative, using known best practices like "double opt-in", and spoofing legitimate domains;
• The new budgetary concerns that are pushing email marketers to do more with less.

All of these events have influenced and changed the way email marketing is being done today. I know that I had personally started to relax a bit, but this new statistic has put me back on the hunt for good places to educate myself about the new best practices. So I'd like to share with you some of the most valuable resources I have found:

1. Jeannie Mullen and David Daniels book - Email Marketing: An Hour A Day (available on Amazon.com) - this book has it all, from email marketing to the new Web 2.0 push we've been seeing lately. It's written in easy to understand terms with real world cases and reviews at the end of each chapter to make sure you remember key concepts learned.

2. The EEC Web site (http://www.emailexperience.org/) - the gateway to a number of discussions on changing industry standards, industry-leading subject matter experts, and industry blogs (and so much more!)

3. Clickz.com - Large collection of articles, statistics, and subject matter experts. ClickZ also delivers a variety of different newsletters that cover email marketing to social media to web analytics.

4. MarketingSherpa (http://www.marketingsherpa.com/) - for everything marketing related! MarketingSherpa sponsors a variety of workshops and conferences around the country.

5. And of course our own LyrisHQ.com online marketing resources and corporate blog site - a variety of blog posts and feature articles contributed by internal and external thought leaders. LyrisHQ.com is here to help you stay hip and current to the email marketing trends.

###

Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.