Email Marketing RulesWhy Building Homegrown Email Platforms Is So Out of Favor
Posted on July 2, 2019
Build or buy? When it comes to email marketing platforms, it’s a question that brands rarely bother to ask themselves anymore because nearly everyone buys. And when brands do seriously ask themselves this question, it’s exceedingly rare for them to actually choose to go down the build road.
According to Litmus’s State of Email Survey of thousands of marketers worldwide, the percentage of brands using custom, homegrown email platforms to send marketing emails fell to just 6.1% in 2018, down from 10.9% in 2016.
Most of these homegrown email platforms are only used to send transactional emails, with traditional email service providers used to send the promotional emails that make up the vast, vast majority of their email volume. Only 34% of brands rely exclusively on a homegrown email platform to send all of their marketing emails, according to Litmus. That means that just 2% of brands use in-house email platforms to support all their email needs.
As you might expect, many of the companies that do choose to go this route are tech giants like Amazon and Uber. In fact, it’s become a not-so-funny joke that if you hire an email marketer from Amazon that they’ll want to build their own email platform. Since most companies don’t have Amazon’s scale, resources, and culture, this is a recipe for plenty of pain and suffering, if not disaster.
Let’s better understand why homegrown email platforms are dwindling and becoming the exclusive pet projects of unicorn companies by looking at the major dangers associated with homegrown email platforms…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Business Book of the Month Podcast: Chad S. White’s ‘Email Marketing Rules’
Posted on July 1, 2019
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with David Bain, the host of the Business Book of the Month Podcast, about my book, Email Marketing Rules.
During the 51-minute interview, we talked about a wide range of email marketing topics, including:
- The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs
- How the paid-owned-earned (POE) media model has become outdated and doesn’t account for email marketing, as well as several other popular channels
- How to best include promotional content in transactional emails
- The need to have promotional emails, transactional emails, and corporate emails on different IP addresses and sender domains
- The recommended minimal email frequency
- Where to find your most valuable subscribers
- Sender name best practices
- Different approaches to mobile-friendly email design
- The advantages of maintaining a content calendar
- And much, much more.
>> Listen to the Business Book of the Month podcast online
Or listen wherever you get your podcasts
Trends in Using Email Marketing to Amplify Content Marketing
Posted on June 25, 2019
As a 13-year veteran of content marketing, I’m biased, but I think it’s fair to say that content marketing is a powerful way to:
- Demonstrate that your company is composed of experts in their field
- Start, shape, and contribute to valuable and important industry conversations
- Help your customers maximize their positive outcomes and avoid negative ones
- Attract and engage prospects and familiarize them with your brand
As great as content marketing is, a “build it and they will come” philosophy only gets you so far nowadays…and that’s where email marketing comes in.
Email marketing helps get your content in front of more people—specifically, your most loyal customers and most interested prospects. But email is about so much more than just content amplification. Here are some ways that email marketing makes your content marketing work harder for you…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
On-Demand Webinar: Poor Email Performance Visibility – You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See
Posted on June 18, 2019
Email marketing programs are complex three-dimensional objects. If you don’t look at them from all angles and shine a light into the nooks, you simply can’t see it all. And if you can’t fully see it, you have little hope of fully understanding it, much less optimizing and mastering it.
Unfortunately, there’s significant evidence that many brands have poor visibility into their email performance. That’s jeopardizing both customer experiences and email profitability for those brands.
In this on-demand webinar, we discuss how poor performance visibility is affecting email marketing quality assurance, return on investment, and deliverability. Along the way, we share research as well as advice from a few of the more than 500 consultants at Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting—including our Senior Director of QA and Campaign Services, Simone Edmonds; Senior Strategic Consultant for Deliverability Services, Kent McGovern; and Director of Strategic Services, Kaiti Livermore. Break the cycle of your email marketing status quo.
>> Watch the free on-demand webinar
The Last Word on May 2019
Posted on June 4, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
When It’s Time to Let Go: 5 Tactics to Improve the Unsubscribe Experience (Litmus)
Do recent changes in the ESP landscape benefit clients? IBM, Epsilon, Yes Marketing (Email Vendor Selection)
What brands can learn from a year of GDPR in preparing for the California Consumer Privacy Act (MarketingDive)
The Cookie Crumbles: Google Announces Privacy Controls (Wayin)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Email is like life. No matter how experienced you are at it, it still has the potential to surprise you! #EmailMarketing #EmailDesign #EmailDevelopment #EmailGeeks
— Beyond the Envelope™ (@Paul_Airy) May 2, 2019
If you’re sending messages from a financial institution, you shouldn’t EVER be failing authentication. ESPECIALLY if you’re asking recipients TO CLICK A LINK.
— Mickey Chandler (@mickc_pro) May 3, 2019
“I want to break up”
“OK, but do you want to get back together” pic.twitter.com/PKbymsELMP— Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) May 7, 2019
Marketers are changing. Students majoring in #marketing are now learning technical skills as well including #coding. The “Marketechers” as @IBMWatson’s @LorenMcDonald calls them, are the #futureofmarketing work. @TiEcon #FutureofWork pic.twitter.com/d3TVDrWm0x
— Localized (@Localizedworld) May 10, 2019
🖐Tips for Writing Alt Text:
1️⃣Use different alt text for each image
2️⃣Be descriptive but watch the length
3️⃣Don’t use title text as alt text
4️⃣Use empty alt text for design elements
5️⃣ Style alt text for users with blocked images#emailaccessibility #emaildesign #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/UkwqXX1YCA— Email on Acid (@EmailonAcid) May 20, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Monterey Bay Aquarium, 5/23 – Summer is coming
Burlington, 5/1 – Give Mom what she really wants
Belk, 5/1 – Spoil Mom, Spoil YOU: Up to 70% Off
Barneys New York, 5/5 – 12 Gift Ideas For Mother’s Day
Clinique, 5/5 – Make sure Mom’s gifts arrive on time.
Ann Taylor, 5/12 – Final Hours For Our Mother’s Day Event!
Neiman Marcus, 5/19 – Dolce & Gabbana for you & your mini
ThinkGeek, 5/4 – May the Fourth Be With You (and this Coupon Code)
FansEdge, 5/4 – May The Fourth Be With You
Chico’s, 5/5 – Cinco DEAL Mayo: Final Deal
J.Crew, 5/30 – We’re bursting with pride
Fossil, 5/30 – Ace Grad Gifting
JCPenney, 5/29 – Dip your toes in…$5 flip flops!
Banana Republic, 5/26 – Summer starts now. Wear linen.
Hayneedle, 5/19 – The seagulls are impressed. Gorgeous coastal-style rooms.
MAC Cosmetics, 5/13 – The Disney Aladdin Collection by M•A•C is Going Fast!
Saks Fifth Avenue, 5/7 – These Met Gala-inspired pieces are pink carpet-approved…
Express, 5/1 – The May Edit: Rent this month’s top trending styles
Ann Taylor, 5/10 – 40% Off This Season’s Must-Have Hue
Sears, 5/5 – Please share! Extra 10-20% off + $60 CASHBACK in points
UncommonGoods, 5/15 – Up to 70% Off (still 100% Uncommon)
Applebee’s, 5/4 – Teachers + Applebee’s = Free Appetizer
Moosejaw, 5/23 – Limited Edition Collection — Moosejaw x Great Lakes Proud
MAC Cosmetics, 5/19 – Four Formulas to Master Your Ultimate Matte Lip!
Epicurious, 5/29 – Stop crying over chopped onions!
Jos. A. Bank, 5/16 – Maintain your Body’s Optimum Microclimate with Travel Tech
ModCloth, 5/3 – Add a little “je ne sais quoi” to your wardrobe.
ThinkGeek, 5/13 – Pika Pika?
Sony Electronics, 5/13 – Our Speaker is Famous | The XB41 is in a New Music Video
Feeding America, 5/22 – Endless summer… for all the wrong reasons
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
SEMrush’s Marketing Scoop Podcast: What Works Best for Email Marketing Now?
2-Year Anniversary of the 3rd Edition of “Email Marketing Rules”
How to Use AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully
Litmus’s Delivering Podcast: Asking the Right Questions
The Rise of Exploitive Email Click Bots
SEMrush’s Marketing Scoop Podcast: What Works Best for Email Marketing Now?
Posted on May 30, 2019
How can content marketing and email marketing work together? That was the central question that AWeber’s Jill Fanslau and I tried to answer when we appeared on the Season 2, Episode 33 of SEMrush’s Marketing Scoop podcast.
During the episode, we talked about:
- What’s changed in email marketing over the past few years
- How email marketing’s ROI is a double-edged sword, that both helps and hurts marketers
- How brands should adjust to GDPR and why the law is good for brands
- Why list purchases are a no-no and the confusion around list purchases and rentals
- List building across channels
- The role of subject lines and the right victory metrics to use for subject line A/B testing
- How it’s not email versus other channels and rather about email working with all your other channels and vice versa
- And much more
Listen to the episode of Marketing Scoop wherever you get your podcasts or…
>> Listen to the podcast online
2-Year Anniversary of the 3rd Edition of “Email Marketing Rules”
Posted on May 29, 2019
Two years ago today, the 3rd Edition of “Email Marketing Rules” was published. Weighing in at 467 pages, many consider it the most comprehensive books on email marketing ever. I’ve been exceedingly proud that I’ve been able to provide marketers with a source of trusted advice on this critical marketing channel.
96% of reviewers have given “Email Marketing Rules” 5 stars on Amazon.com. If you’re one of the email geeks who has reviewed it, I thank you from the bottom of my heart!
Because it has been so well received, BookAuthority has named it one of the best Digital Marketing books of all time. It’s currently at No. 10, putting it in the company of David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” and Kyle Gray’s “The Story Engine.” That’s amazing!
Thanks again to everyone for your support. I feel exceedingly lucky to have stumbled—like so many of you—into this powerful and dynamic industry.
>> Find “Email Marketing Rules” on Amazon.com
How to Use AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully
Posted on May 28, 2019
Brands are turning to AI and machine learning to answer extremely complex questions, including, “What words should I use to communicate most effectively?” Companies like Persado, Phrasee, Touchstone, and others have turned AI’s data-crunching and pattern-finding power onto email subject lines, as well as other marketing copy.
Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting has seen high interest in these tools among our clients. However, when our clients have tried them, the results have been mixed.
Among those brands that didn’t find enough success, the most common complaints that we’ve heard are that:
- The lift in email performance wasn’t sustainable beyond a few months,
and that - The results in general didn’t justify the expense.
If you’re considering these tools, we have some advice to get you on the path to success.
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Litmus’s Delivering Podcast: Asking the Right Questions
Posted on May 17, 2019
Email analytics are pivotal to achieving marketing success, but many marketers misunderstand what the numbers are telling them or set the wrong goals.
In episode 3 of Delivering podcast, Litmus’s Jason Rodriguez and I talk about:
- Where brands go wrong with email analytics
- The most commonly misunderstood metrics
- The right email metrics to focus your attention on
- How an email brief can keep your campaign success metrics aligned
- Where the gaps are in email performance visibility and how to try to close those gaps
- How the desiloing of email marketing is driving the need for more cross-channel visibility
- Cost-mindsets versus growth-mindsets
- Why maximizing email marketing’s ROI isn’t the end goal
For a discussion of each of these issues…
>> Listen to the Delivering podcast on the Litmus blog
The Rise of Exploitive Email Click Bots
Posted on May 14, 2019
Bots are having a profound effect on how the internet functions and may even outnumber people on some platforms like Twitter. Email marketing is not immune to click bots, with the newest activity being from bots that mimic human subscribers in order to collect information to power data service businesses.
The problem with these kinds of email click bots is that they create activity that inflates performance numbers and causes false positives that trigger automated campaigns and muddy targeting efforts. All in all, they simply make it more difficult to see how subscribers are truly responding. That can cause brands to make tactical or strategic changes that serve bots rather than actual subscribers.
Oracle’s Heather Goff, Bradford Johnson, Dan Deneweth, Wade Hobbs, Kent McGovern and I explore these bots in more detail, but let’s do so in the broader context of all email click bots. We think of these bots as falling into three categories, with each one requiring its own potential remedies:
- Beneficial Email Click Bots
- Malicious Email Click Bots
- Exploitive Email Click Bots
For full discussion of each of these kinds of bots and advice on how to respond to them…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing blog
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
