Email Marketing RulesWebbula: Based on Past Economic Downturns, How Should Marketers Approach This One?
Posted on January 24, 2023
I join 11 other email experts in this Webbula roundup as we answer the question: How have your prior encounters enriched and modified your marketing approaches to prepare for an economic downturn?
My answer focuses on my observations from the 2008-09 recession. Based on that, I recommend that brands consider:
- Upping their discounting
- Lean more on their private label products
- Focus on messaging around value, versatility, and durability
- Messaging in the vein of buy one, get two or more items
I also point out that many of your customers won’t be feeling the downturn in a significant way. For those loyal, high-spend customers—particularly those that tend to buy full-price items—use personalization and segmentation to avoid sending them discounts and other recessionary messaging.
To watch my full answer, as well as the advice of the other experts…
How to Fill Your Digital Marketing Content Calendar in 8 Steps
Posted on January 19, 2023
A blank content calendar can be daunting. Here’s the 8-step approach that Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Creative Services team uses to build out content plans with our clients.
Let’s start with major events that typically involve campaigns that last weeks or even months. These are our tentpole campaigns around which we build our content calendar.
First Quarter 2023 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on January 17, 2023
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful four-quarter strategy. Oracle Marketing Consulting’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’ll 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
The Newest Automation Trigger: Internet-Connected Devices
Posted on January 13, 2023
Automated messages can be triggered by a vast range of behaviors and events. In our Oracle Consulting Checklist of Automated Campaign Ideas to Explore (free, no-form download), we identify more than 110 triggered campaigns—and that’s independent from the channel you’d use for your message, any segmentation you’d do, and how you’d treat your automations differently across your lines of business.
We organize this incredible variety of triggers into four groups based on whether they’re triggered by…
- An action taken by the subscriber or customer or by the brand
- Inaction over a period of time by the subscriber or customer
- A date that’s important to the individual subscriber or customer
- A signal from an internet-connected device owned by the customer or user
Chances are you’re familiar with those first three trigger types, but that last bucket is the newest and least developed. However, these machine-triggered messages have a lot of potential, especially as more and more products become connected to the internet.
Visual Branding in Email Marketing: 7 Elements to Optimize
Posted on January 11, 2023
Wherever your customer is, in whatever channel they’re engaging with your brand, you want that experience to feel consistent and unified. Visual branding is the critical first step in creating that feel, as consumers will immediately perceive major disconnects. In your email marketing program, visual branding is important for two strategic reasons.
First, you want your emails to look consistent with your brand and therefore immediately feel legitimate, so your customers and subscribers are confident that your emails are definitely coming from your brand. If you don’t achieve that, then subscribers may become concerned that the email is spoofed or otherwise feel unsafe about engaging with the email. That can lead to disengagement and spam complaints.
And second, you want the transition from the email to landing page to be comfortable and as seamless as possible, as if they’re part of the same experience. This provides assurances that they’ve indeed arrived at your website and that it’s safe to proceed. It also simplifies the user experience if icons, menu buttons, and other elements are consistent in appearance and placement.
However, with all of that said, the visual branding of your emails doesn’t need to be exactly the same as your website’s. It only needs to be harmonious. That’s a good thing because the email channel has some limitations that force brands to make compromises.
Let’s look at seven aspects of visual branding in email marketing and what the best practices are…
The Last Word on December 2022
Posted on January 9, 2023
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Black Friday Email Breakdown: What Happened and What it Means for Senders in 2023 (Validity)
Email Marketers Seek New Standards for Authentication (AdWeek)
Privacy Scofflaws: Few Firms Are Complying With CCPA And GDPR (MediaPost)
The Biggest Obstacles to Succeeding With Data-Driven B2B Marketing (MarketingProfs)
8 Email Marketing Trends For 2023 (iPost)
Announcing: 2022 Litmus Email Excellence Award Winners (Litmus)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
— Kent McGovern (@KentMcGovern) December 13, 2022
I created https://t.co/J9mRpvsqRG that has a big list of the words that trigger your emails to go into the junk folder/have deliverability issues. #EmailMarketing #EmailGeeks – sources listed.
— EmailJay (@emailjay_) December 1, 2022
Look what you made me do!
Are you ready for it?
Don’t blame me.We bring you email subject lines written by Taylor Swift.
Comment your favorite one. #emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/EOLOI5LC3z— Aquibur | Mailmodo (@AR_Bits) December 5, 2022
🤯 I think @pompeii79 might have some real competition here #emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/SeELLN41WJ
— Cosmin Popovici (@cossssmin) December 6, 2022
Who can relate? 😂#emailgeeks #marketingtwitter #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/KkXDGkrNlt
— Jimmy | Redhead Marketing Group (@JimmyTheRedhead) December 7, 2022
🤣☠️📨 pic.twitter.com/Pi72XovV4H
— Julio Medina (@JulioMedina) December 13, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Neiman Marcus, 12/22 – What will you wear this NYE?
Belk, 12/31 – Staying in for the ball drop? 🎊 Get cozy with 55% off sleepwear
Office Depot, 12/10 – 2023 Calendars & Planners starting at $5
Nordstrom Rack, 12/11 – Party styles up to 60% off
Williams Sonoma, 12/31 – Ring in the new year with festive cocktails & more
Nordstrom, 12/9 – Your mic drop moment is here
Fandango, 12/7 – Your 2022 At The Movies
Petco Love, 12/14 – Discover Your Impact in 2022 🐶🐱
Bass Pro Shops, 12/6 – Food Processing Holiday Wishlist
MoMA Design Store, 12/6 – Our Art Director’s Gift Picks (Plus, 20% Off)
Express, 12/10 – Holiday must-haves c/o style icon Rocky Barnes
Everlane, 12/10 – Consciously Curated by Lorenzo Posocco
Burlington, 12/7 – 🚨Tons under $10🚨
Nordstrom, 12/8 – Gifts for every budget 🙌
Uncommon Goods, 12/11 – Two weeks. 14 days. 42 Xmas cookies.
Target, 12/20 – Last-minute video games deals 🎮
YETI, 12/20 – Check Yourself Off Your List
Crate & Barrel, 12/6 – In-stock guest-ready essentials →
Crate & Barrel, 12/13 – 6 tips for hosting a stress-free holiday.
Wegmans, 12/5 – We have Holiday Entertaining Covered
West Elm, 12/4 – The secret to an uncluttered living room
Williams Sonoma, 12/14 – It’s cookie season! Get inspired with our recipe collection from Joy the Baker
JCPenney, 12/17 – Super Saturday Sale 🎄 Up to 50% Off
The Container Store, 12/16 – STARTS NOW: 15% OFF Pickup Orders
Redbubble, 12/21 – Cutting it close? It’s gift card time.
Moosejaw, 12/23 – Level up your last-minute gifting with an eGift Card.
DICK’S Sporting Goods, 12/24 – Order by 2PM for same-day delivery or 4PM for curbside or in-store pickup! ⏰
Uncommon Goods, 12/24 – No wrapping (or shipping!!) required
Applebee’s Grill & Bar, 12/14 – Open until 7pm on Christmas Eve 🎄
Sears, 12/25 – No PS5 Under the Tree? They’re in-stock and ship for free…
Neiman Marcus, 12/26 – 75% off in sale: Did Santa miss something?
West Elm Design Studio, 12/29 – Got lots of great gifts? Let’s figure out how to put them away!
Crate & Barrel, 12/7 – Everything for a beautiful Hanukkah →
Gap Email Exclusive, 12/4 – R.S.Velvet.P.
Gap, 12/22 – SNUGGLE GAME STRONG
Quiksilver, 12/14 – New: QUIK X STAB. We like to surf.
Eddie Bauer, 12/17 – The Forecast Calls For POWDER! ⛷️🏂
Michaels, 12/5 – Kids Club Winter Workshop is here! ❄️ Sign Up for 12 FREE creative classes.
Columbia Sportswear, 12/20 – They’ll never outgrow snow days.
Princess Cruises, 12/20 – Hey Massachusetts, get exclusive fares to sunny destinations!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Happy Holidays from My Family to Yours!
Picking the Right Sender Name: Brand or Person?
Halon: Email Trend Report 2023
Imagining an Amazon Email Client: Prime Mail
4 Ways to Maximize Double Opt-In Confirmations
4 Major Factors Impacting Email Marketing Performance This Holiday Season
Content Calendar Assistant 2023
Posted on January 5, 2023
Everybody can use a little help coming up with content ideas. And everybody can use a heads up to make sure they don’t look foolish or insensitive by launching campaigns that clash with US or international holidays, occasions, or events. Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Content Calendar Assistant provides that help.
To aid you with your content planning, our Content Calendar Assistant is organized by quarter, month, and week. By quarter because that’s how big themes and seasons are planned. By month because that’s how we tend to think about content creation. And by week because that’s how we plan out our campaign creation. In total, it contains nearly 1,000 ideas to enhance your content planning, plus insights and advice from some of our nearly 500 digital marketing experts.
Email Marketing Font Stacks: Defining Your Font-Family
Posted on January 3, 2023
Picking fonts for the HTML or live text in your marketing emails isn’t like picking fonts for a direct mail piece, which allows for nearly infinite choices. The spectrum of inboxes across which your emails are viewed by your subscribers place limitations on your font options. At the same time, the richness of the email channel provides vastly more choices than social media, push, and SMS channels—which tend not to give you any font choices at all.
How do you make the most of email’s font options? How do you avoid problems? Let’s start to answer those questions by understanding the 5 kinds of email fonts.
Happy Holidays from My Family to Yours!
Posted on December 25, 2022
Wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, my family and I wish you all the best this holiday season. See you in the New Year, EmailGeeks!
Halon: Email Trend Report 2023
Posted on December 14, 2022
2023 will continue a string of challenging years that has seen us transition from pandemic to recovery to high inflation and now to an expected global recession. The pressures that come with that are evident in the predictions assembled by Halon from 19 email marketing experts, including me.
In particular, Matthew Dunn of Campaign Genius captured the stresses that a recession will place on email marketing, as well as on other channels. Beata Linz of Beat Linz Consultancy conveyed the urgency that exists for email marketing and other marketing channels to work together much more closely than ever before because of the sunsetting of third-party cookies.
Matthew Stith of Spamhaus talks about how deteriorating sending practices have led the blocklist operator to issue 9,734 informational listings during the first 11 months of this year. And Guy Hanson of Validity explains how deteriorating list hygiene caused by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, more business pressure on the email channel, and more aggressive policing by Spamhaus and mailbox providers will make deliverability extra tough in the coming year.
For my part, my predictions centered on the growing role of customer data platforms (CDPs) to help brands treat their customers consistently across channels and the new opportunity presented by BIMI now that Apple is supporting it.
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
