Email Marketing RulesSurveys, Polls, Forms, & Progressive Profiling: Writing Questions that Deliver Valuable Insights
Posted on February 21, 2024
With the end of third-party cookies, brands are increasingly focusing on collecting more zero-party data directly from their customers and prospects so they can better understand their needs and wants. While larger surveys will play a role, most brands will gain insights a few answers at a time through signup forms, profile pages, polls, and other forms of progressive profiling.
It sounds simple, but writing a good question and collecting reliable answers is harder than it seems. Indeed, things can go wrong:
- Before you write a question
- When writing the question
- When writing answer choices
- Around the timing
- When analyzing the responses
- When repeating data collection
Let’s talk about best practices and things to look out for during each of those steps.
Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Competitive Differentiators
Posted on February 20, 2024
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have had to deal with include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by high interest rates
- New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo
- The 2-year anniversary Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making inactivity management much more difficult
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed some of Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each of them will have in 2024. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Competitive Differentiators, which are in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but some companies are already seeing great results from using them. They offer a significant competitive advantage with considerably less risk than our Unproven Opportunities.
But, there are still risks, including the acquisition of smaller providers, frequent process and feature changes as the technology stabilizes, frequent changes in best practices as knowledge grows, changing cost structures, scarcity of needed skills, and other issues. These hassles and expenses are easier to accept, however, because many adopters are already seeing sizable returns on their investments. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors, most of whom have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing experts about, seven of them were rated as being in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2024. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
First Quarter 2024 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on January 25, 2024
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful four-quarter strategy. Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives you a quarter-by-quarter plan for how to achieve more during the critical holiday season with your digital marketing efforts.
The first quarter is focused on seizing opportunities, mitigating risks, learning from the just-passed holiday season, and starting to make the larger structural and programmatic changes necessary to succeed in the new year and during the next holiday season. In this Holiday Marketing Quarterly, we cover:
- Holiday Post-Mortems
- Seasonal Buyer Reactivations
- Email Deliverability Recoveries
- Automated Email Optimization & Growth
- Creative Refreshes
- Upgrades & Expansions of Your Tech Stack
For the full checklist…
>> Get the Holiday Marketing Quarterly for free via a no-form download
Third Quarter 2023 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on July 13, 2023
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful year-round strategy. Oracle’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives you a quarter-by-quarter plan for how to achieve more during this critical time of the year.
The third quarter is focused on the final prep for the start of the holiday season. In this Holiday Marketing Quarterly, we’ll cover:
- Campaign Planning
- Workload Management
- Contingency Planning
- Audience Optimization
- Performance Monitoring Plans
- Solidifying Your MarTech Stack
For the full checklist…
>> Get the Holiday Marketing Quarterly for free via a no-form download
Is Your Brand Trusted Significantly More than ChatGPT?
Posted on July 5, 2023
The answer to that question will determine which brands truly have credibility and authority in the years ahead and which do not.
Those who are more trustworthy than generative AI engines like ChatGPT will:
- Be destinations for answer-seekers, generating strong direct traffic to their websites and robust app usage
- Be able to build large first-party audiences via email, SMS, push, and other channels
Both of those will be critical for any brand wanting to insulate themselves from the search engine optimization (SEO) traffic loss that will be caused by generative AI.
6 of My All-Time Favorite Quotes about Marketing
Posted on June 7, 2023
In the new 4th edition of Email Marketing Rules, I include quotes from scores of experts who have impacted how I think about the email channel, as well as about marketing in general. Here, I’d like to share six of my favorite quotes along with the wisdom I see in them. In no particular order, here they are…
“The law is the low bar.”
—Laura Atkins, Owner of Word to the Wise
“Customer loyalty is mostly about choosing the right customers.”
—John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing
“Don’t confuse attention for intent.”
—John Bonini, Founder of Some Good Content
“The customers are the assets; not the store and not the ecommerce sites.”
—Michael Brown, Partner at A.T. Kearney
“When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.”
—Herschell Gordon Lewis, author of Effective E-mail Marketing
“The strength and power of anything—whether it is a business, an individual fitness plan, or event—has its foundation in an accumulation of small, incremental improvements that all either fit together or build on each other. To sum it up: small improvement x consistency = substance.”
—Nicole Penn, President of The EGC Group
To learn why these quotes are among my favorites…
91 Days Success Podcast: Email Marketing Unleashed
Posted on May 9, 2023
I join Jonathan Mast, the host of the 91 Days Success Podcast, to chat about how to use email marketing wisely, strategically, and productively. During the 50-minute podcast, we talk about:
- How I got my start in email marketing
- Why I wrote the 1st edition of Email Marketing Rules
- Why I’ve now released four editions of it and what’s new about the 4th edition
- Why email marketing is still important to businesses
- How email marketing’s high ROI leads many brands to settle for “good enough” results
- What metrics should marketers be using to measure success
- How email marketing can be used to build stronger, more productive customer relationships
- The evolution of email personalization: small-p personalization vs. big-P personalization
- The role of generative AI, both in the short-term and long-term
- The kinds of mistakes that brands regularly make with email marketing
- How to optimize subject lines
- How to get more out of automated campaigns
- How to avoid having your emails blocked or junked
- The perils of buying email addresses
- What I’d do if I had to start over and rebuild my email marketing consulting career
Listen the 91 Days Success Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or
Email & Coffee Podcast: ‘The Strategy Comes First’
Posted on April 27, 2023
I join Joi Brooks, the host of the Email & Coffee Podcast, to chat about email marketing strategy. During our conversation, we talk about…
- Email marketing education
- The biggest design tip to drive results
- Building interest and nurturing B2B leads
- Desiloing marketing and omnichannel customer behavior
- The critical zero stage of email interactions
- How to create great customers
- Focusing your email content on the HOW, not the WHAT
- How too many marketers settle for “good enough” results
- The need for a broad understanding of email marketing, even among specialists
- The evolution and expansion of email marketing
- Generative AI
- The tension between personalization and privacy
- Data collection, behavioral signal strength, and avoiding creepiness
- Return on touch
- And much more!
Or get Email & Coffee wherever you get your podcasts.
Second Quarter 2023 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on April 5, 2023
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful year-round strategy. Oracle’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives B2C brands a quarter-by-quarter plan for how to achieve more during the critical holiday season with their email marketing and other digital marketing channels.
Our second quarter checklist is focused on finishing your review of the 2022 holiday season and then making a range of improvements to everything from subscriber acquisition to performance reporting to campaign production. In this Holiday Marketing Quarterly, we’ll cover:
- Holiday Messaging Competitive Intelligence
- Audience Acquisition Source Optimization
- Unsubscribe Process Optimization
- Improving Analytics & Reporting
- Experimentation & Testing
- Accelerating Campaign Build Processes
For the full checklist…
>> Get the Holiday Marketing Quarterly for free via a no-form download
Email Marketing Trends for 2023: Proven Essentials
Posted on March 13, 2023
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when the economic environment, consumer behaviors, and business goals are shifting rapidly.
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2023. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Proven Essentials, which are in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but are still improving and delivering tremendous results.
Our Proven Essentials stand in stark contrast to our Unproven Opportunities, which still have significant risks associated with them and benefits that haven’t fully materialized. Our Proven Essentials also have a risk profile that’s the inverse of our Competitive Differentiators—that is, where our Competitive Differentiators offer a competitive advantage to early adopters, our Proven Essentials put late adopters at a competitive disadvantage.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, 14 of them were rated as being in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2023. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
Welcome! Email Marketing Rules is your guide to understanding the best practices of this complex, often misunderstood channel as you craft the best executions for your brand. Every week, we’ll explore strategies and tactics, discuss tips and inspiration, and dig into industry news and trends.
Chad S. White
Head of Research
Oracle Digital Experience Agency
Author of Email Marketing Rules and nearly 4,000 articles about digital and email marketing
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