Great E-Mail Marketing Resources

Thought I'd collect my favorite e-mail marketing sites and blogs into one neat package. Some of the sites below require registration, but most are free to the world. I subscribe to all of them through RSS or e-mail, which is infinitely helpful in keeping up with them and not getting overwhelmed.

In addition to what's below, I tag a lot of Email Marketing stuff on Del.icio.us, which is always available here: http://del.icio.us/napdynmite/emailmarketing

Clickz Email
http://blog.clickz.com/archives/topics/email.html
Frequently updated and widely-referenced, probably th best single source of email marketing information.

MarketingSherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com (sign up for the email marketing newsletter)
They offer a paid subscription and sell some nice studies, but the free content in the newsletter is fantastic. They also specialize in stats and benchmarking information found in few other places.

ReturnPath
http://www.returnpath.com
The deliverability kings offer up topics on a variety of "getting to the inbox" stuff and list management.

Campaign Monitor Blog
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/
An e-mail marketing system vendor with a lot of insight from the reseller's perspective.

ExactTarget Blogs
http://email.exacttarget.com/ETWeb/blogs.aspx
A top notch e-mail service provider's blog on a wide variety of topics from a smart bunch of practitioners.

MarketingProfs
http://www.marketingprofs.com (paid subscription and well worth it)
I unabashedly love MarketingProfs.com, not just for email, but a variety of resources, including a terrific email vendor matrix. Great content on email and much more.

Email Marketing Best Practices
http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/
I just discovered this gem and already feel pretty comfortable recommending it. Tamara Geilen covers everything from design to spam legislation. You could spend a lot of time here.

Email Universe
http://emailuniverse.com/
Targeted at email newsletters primarily, but a lot of great advice about best practices in email.

Email Experience Council
http://www.emailexperience.org/They're new and they're building up their cache quickly. Join and get involved. The site has some good resources as well as a mission.

iDig iStockphoto.com

I use a fair amount of stock photography in my work and while I've always liked and used the heck out of photos.com which is subscription based (about $500 per year) my fiancee has turned me on to a new stock photo site, that I think is even better. It's called iStockphoto.com and it's much more than a stock photography site, it's a community. Community sites are a dime a dozen, but what sets istockphoto.com apart is that this is a community that produces some amazing original stock photography, illustrations, Flash animations, and video that is not only high-quality but inexpensive. iStockphoto.com runs on a credit system. All the artwork is provided by an extremely active community of artists who get paid for their work directly. Anyone can contribute once they fill out an application and get accepted (your first samples are reviewed by a panel). This is a welcome quality control system, and is working well.

To use the service you buy however many credits you want and then you use them pay for whatever you download. Photos are 1 to 6 credits depending on the size you want. Illustrations (vectors thank you!) are mostly 5 credits. Video is 5 to 20 credits. Flash animations seem to vary a bit, but the ones I've seen are usually 1 credit.

The site itself is very Web 2.0 and to delve into all the cool features would take an awfully long post, but the short list would include:

• User ratings
• Tagging
• A great Lightbox utility
• Forums
• A creative network
• A blogging tool

Not only do I get a lot of use out of the site, but I have often started simply surfing around to check out all the cool stuff available. I can't say I've done that with many other commerce sites.