Don’t Write Off AMP for Email Yet

Don’t Write Off AMP for Email Yet, Marketers

When it was officially launched in 2019 by Google, AMP for Email promised to bring standards-based interactivity and real-time content to inboxes, allowing brands to bring landing page and app-like functionality into their emails. Allowing product carousels, live forms, and checkout functionality, the potential payoffs for marketers and consumers were huge. However, reaping those benefits require big changes in the email marketing ecosystem.

Google aggressively promoted AMP for Email, looking to expand support to other mailbox providers like Yahoo and to convince email service providers (ESPs) to make the platform changes necessary for marketers to send AMP-powered emails, since they’re sent as a separate MIME part. At the same time, they worked to convince marketers that it was worth their time to learn how to code AMP emails and create them.

And then the winds shifted…

>> Read the full article on CMSWire.com

The Last Word on June 2022

The Last Word

A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…

Must-read articles, posts & reports

Good Apple, Bad Apple: MPP Has Had Positive and Negative Results (MediaPost)

Best Fonts for Emails: How to Make Your Emails Look Great and Easy to Read (AWeber)

Does punctuation in a subject line help or hurt email performance? (Alchemy Worx)

Are We Witnessing the Death of Gmail Annotations? (SendView)

12 Unique AMP Emails in eCommerce that will liven up your Marketing Campaigns (Netcore Cloud)

Insightful & entertaining tweets

Noteworthy subject lines

Camping World RV, 6/15 – Inflation-Buster RV Deal!
IKEA, 6/3 – Chad , join us this Pride Month as an LGBTQ+ ally
Zales, 6/3 – 🌈 Live Loud. Love Proud. Let Your Pride Shine.
REI, 6/15 – Outside With Pride This Month (& Every Month!)
Williams Sonoma, 6/4 – All the colors of Le Creuset 🌈
Express, 6/4 – 40% off a 🌈 of cute tees
Hobby Lobby, 6/24 – Red, White, Blue – 40% Off July 4th Decor
Macy’s, 6/18 – Extra 25% off the perfect Father’s Day gift to buy online & pick up in store by tomorrow—just in time!
Neiman Marcus, 6/8 – Celebrate Dad!
Bass Pro Shops, 6/8 – What Do Your Give The Man That’s Give You Everything? We’re Here To Help!
Crate & Barrel, 6/13 – Father’s Day is June 19: It’s time to treat Dad
Zales, 6/13 – Save 30% Off Gifts That Say “You’re Awesome, Dad”
Wegmans Catering on Meals 2GO, 6/15 – The Perfect Party for Grads, Dads, and More!
Express, 6/7 – Guest, bridesmaid or bride? 💍
Banana Republic, 6/18 – Modern Dresses Perfect For Wedding Season
Omaha Steaks, 6/29 – FREE 🌭 + FREE 🍔 + ☀️ = Grill Time!
Eddie Bauer, 6/13 – 6 Must-Haves For Fun In the Sun!
Nordstrom, 6/4 – The best summer shoes are here
Target, 6/8 – Save 20% on kids’ shorts 😎
Gap, 6/8 – For your next BBQ/party/RSVP: tops & shorts from $25
Express, 6/2 – 🌜 TONIGHT ONLY! Style Steals $15+ starts @ 6 p.m. 🌛
Express, 6/3 – ✈️💰🏝️ Win a 2-NIGHT STAY at any Canopy by Hilton in the U.S. & MORE!
Williams Sonoma, 6/7 – Host a Whiskey Tasting: stock your bar cart | 20% OFF all Goldtouch Pro Bakeware
West Elm, 6/7 – Complete your sofa look with chic (& comfy) pillows
Olive Garden, 6/7 – Too busy to make dinner? 🍽️
Burlington, 6/3 – Shop for your (4-legged) BFF!
Panera Bread, 6/7 – Your besties + All the 🍕
Applebee’s Grill & Bar, 6/7 – Only a few days left to get FREE* movie tickets
Bass Pro Shops, 6/7 – Win Your Own TOYOTA TUNDRA TRUCK!
West Elm, 6/2 – O HEY! It’s KULE x West Elm
Patagonia, 6/13 – Stories you didn’t know you needed

New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

The Definitive Guide to Adapting to Mail Privacy Protection

Webbula: What Are the Top 3 Reasons You Love Working in Email Marketing?

Unlayer: Create Engaging Email Subscriber Journeys

Multi-Touch Attribution: Moving Beyond Overly Simplistic First- and Last-Click Models

What’s Wrong with Email Marketing?

What’s Your Digital CX Strategy for Out of Stocks?

Mobile Marketing: Leveraging the Latest Trends

The Last Word on May 2022

When and How to Use Plain Text Email

When and How to Use Plain Text Email in Marketing

Creating effective, great-looking HTML emails can be tricky, given today’s rendering challenges and many considerations like dark mode and accessibility. So, it’s understandable that many marketers long to return to the days of plain text emails as a simpler alternative. There’s a nostalgia around these emails, as they take us back to an easier time when writing an email was just that—writing, and nothing else.

However, often this nostalgia tips over into romanticizing the effectiveness of this form of email, which has been largely supplanted by HTML emails for lots of good reasons, including performance. By far, B2B marketers are the most susceptible to being seduced by the allure of plain text emails. So, let’s discuss when these emails are appropriate and some design best practices…

>> Read the entire article on MarketingProfs.com

The Definitive Guide to Adapting to Mail Privacy Protection

Prior to the launch of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) by Apple in the fall of 2021, marketers could easily see the engagement of their subscribers and reliably manage their email deliverability by following best practices established over the course of more than a decade. However, MPP has blurred marketers’ visibility into engagement and is causing all of those deliverability best practices to be rewritten to account for the obscuring of open signals.

This playbook is your guide to those changes. It covers six areas of opportunity to improve your email marketing program so that it functions more effectively under MPP:

  1. Strengthening permissioning and onboarding
  2. Qualifying active mailable audiences
  3. Evolving your messaging to encourage clicks
  4. Revamping reengagement programs
  5. Increasing re-permissioning
  6. Creating a MPP mitigation dashboard

>> Download the guide for free

What Are the Top 3 Reasons You Love Working in Email Marketing?

Along with 10 other email experts, I share my top 3 reasons why I love working our industry. For me, it comes down to:

  1. Loving the constant evolution of the channel and the fact that theres always something new to talk about
  2. Enjoying the emphasis on data and insights, in addition to the art aspects of email marketing
  3. The people, who really are extraordinarily friendly, open, and welcoming

To see my full answers, and to see everyone elses too…

>> Visit the Webbula Blog

Create Engaging Email Subscriber Journeys

Understanding how different subscribers move through the subscriber lifecycle and what their needs are at each stage is critical to getting the right messaging in front of them. In this interview with Unlayer, I talk about the subscriber lifecycle and automated subscriber journeys, answering questions such as:

  • Out of the 5 stages (Acquisition, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Re-engagement), which one matters the most in the subscriber journey?
  • Your book talks about building high-performance lists by identifying valuable subscriber acquisition sources. Can you elaborate on what these sources are?
  • You’ve previously talked about automating your email messaging so you address moments that matter. What do you mean by “moments that matter” in the subscriber journey and why is email automation the way to go?
  • How can email affect and support the different stages of the customer journey?
  • What do you think marketers do wrong with their emails and what do they need to change to create engaging subscriber journeys?

For my answers to those questions and others…

>> Read the entire interview on Unlayer.com

Multi-touch attribution- Moving beyond overly simplistic first- and last-click models

Giving 100% of the credit for a sale to the channel that either attracted the customer by generating the first click of an interaction or closed the deal by producing the last click made sense in the early early ’00s when the average consumer used two touchpoints when buying an item. However, consumers today use an average of almost six touchpoints, according to research by Aberdeen, Oracle, and Relationship One.

In our omnichannel world, single-touch attribution is simply too out of sync with consumer behavior. To appropriately attribute marketing activity today requires use of a multi-touch attribution model, of which there are many. Each assigns different weights to different points in a customer journey, with some of the more important ones being…

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog

What’s Wrong with Email Marketing?

What's Wrong with Email Marketing?

As powerful and unique as email marketing is, it’s far from perfect. If you want to grasp some of its imperfections, just look at what the inbox and mailbox providers have been doing. The features they’re pushing will give you a sense of what they feel is wrong with the channel.

Here are the major perceived shortcomings they’ve been investing in trying to fix:

  • Email marketing isn’t engaging enough.
  • Email content can become outdated.
  • Emails are too cluttered.
  • Email isn’t trustworthy enough.
  • Emails are sent to people who aren’t engaging with them.
  • Email violates subscribers’ privacy.
  • Email performance data is inaccurate.

For a full discussion of each of those, including which inbox providers believe that and what they’re doing about it…

>> Read the entire post on the Only Influencers Blog

What's Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy for Out-of-Stock Products?

The pandemic, geopolitics, and war have snarled global supply chains, frustrating customers and causing record levels of brand switching and retailer switching. With problems unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, brands need nimble marketing strategies that maximize customer retention and minimize poor experiences.

To accomplish this, brands need a multi-pronged approach that spans web, messaging, infrastructure, and loyalty.

>> Read the full article on CMSWire.com

Mobile marketing- Leveraging the latest trends

With mobile devices increasingly woven into the fabric of consumers’ everyday lives, it’s imperative that marketers stay on top of the latest trends in mobile marketing. Leveraging insights from these trends will allow you to evolve your mobile experiences and meet consumers where they are.

Pulling from our on-demand webinar on mobile marketing trends, here are 7 key mobile marketing trends and their implications for marketers:

  1. Shopping habits continue to rapidly shift.
  2. SMS marketing is far from saturated.
  3. It’s a ‘next level’ indicator of brand affinity.
  4. Mobile messaging isn’t just for transactional communications any more.
  5. By focusing on relevancy, frequency becomes less relevant.
  6. It’s not mobile messaging versus email, but rather and email.
  7. Generational differences aren’t as big as you probably think.

For a discussion of each of those trends by Oracle’s Clint Kaiser…

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog

>> Watch the on-demand webinar