4 Ways to Boost Digital Marketing Margins When Discounting

Discount messaging is a staple of holiday messaging. In fact, 56% of the subject lines used by retail and ecommerce brands for their 2023 holiday email campaigns mentioned discount amounts, according to Oracle Digital Experience Agency research. And, of course, many more campaigns featured discounts without mentioning them in their subject lines.

But just because discounts are highly anticipated by consumers during the holidays doesn’t mean brands have to give away margin needlessly. Here are four tactics that help you clawback unnecessary discount dollars.

>> Read the entire article on CMSWire.com

Common Accessibility Myths that Cost Brands Customers

The No. 1 impediment to creating more accessible and inclusive digital experiences is false preconceptions. When we have baseline misunderstandings and misconceptions about how our customers interact with our brands, we automatically limit ourselves from finding appropriate solutions.

In this blog post, we share a 43-minute on-demand webinar that breaks down a number of accessibility myths, discusses accessibility solutions, and shares advice from our Accessibility & Inclusive Design Ideas checklist (free, no-form download). However, the post also busts the six biggest accessibility myths.

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

Apple iOS 18- The Most Important Changes for Marketers

Centered around Apple Intelligence, the updates and new product features in Apple iOS 18 offer some significant improvements for consumers, including a smarter Siri and a variety of AI tools. While most won’t have a noticeable impact on digital marketers, let’s talk about a few that will:

  • Apple Mail inbox tabs
  • AI Summaries in Apple Mail
  • RCS support in Apple Messages

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

 

The Last Word on September 2024

The Last Word

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

Must-read articles, posts & reports

The Last Days of Last-Click? (eMarketer)

Elusive AI ROI Doesn’t Mean the Bubble Will Burst (CMSWire)

Gmail Allows More Senders to Protect Their Brand Using BIMI Common Mark Certificates (Google Workplace Updates)

Consumers Will Sign Up for Retail Newsletters If… (Chain Store Age)

Google and Apple Face Billions in Penalties After Losing E.U. Appeals (New York Times)

What’s the Average Lifespan of a Website? 10 Factors in Website Longevity (Andy Crestodina)

My Go-to Solution to Increase Revenue During the Holiday Rush (Only Influencers)

Five Fundamental Truths: How B2B Winners Keep Growing (McKinsey & Co.)

The Man Quietly Rewriting American Privacy Law (Politico)

Insightful & entertaining social posts

Noteworthy subject lines

Patagonia, 9/30 – Our vote’s on Earth
Harley-Davidson, 9/6 – A Salute to Service
VS PINK, 9/17 – Halloween Recs 🧟‍♀️ Look Alive—or Not
Forever 21, 9/29 – 30% OFF Spooky Shop 👻🖤
Williams Sonoma, 9/22 – A Thanksgiving table to remember 🦃
Williams Sonoma, 9/15 – Your stress-less Thanksgiving checklist is here
vineyard vines, 9/30 – NEW: Limited-Edition Breast Cancer Awareness Tees
FIGS, 9/29 – They Said F*** Cancer and Beat It
West Elm, 9/22 – ‘Tis the season to get ahead of holiday festivities
Clinique Online, 9/19 – A+++ offer. Take 25% sitewide. 🙌 🙌 🙌
Levi’s®, 9/8 – Football season is on 🏈
Big Lots, 9/7 – Use your coupon now for National Tailgating Day!
Forever 21, 9/17 – Jackets & Outerwear 🧥🍂
Quiksilver, 9/18 – Get Your Long Sleeves Ready 🍂
Neiman Marcus, 9/2 – Fall boots in thigh-high lengths you’ll love
Michaels, 9/23 – We’re your concert prep HQ! Style your look with our must-have supplies and DIYs. ✨ 💕
Crate & Barrel, 9/23 – New furniture. By next week.
The Container Store, 9/23 – No Time To Organize? Let Us Do It!
J.Crew, 9/4 – Introducing Fall 2024 with Demi Moore
Crate & Barrel, 9/15 – How @lonefoxhome found his *perfect* chair
Crate & Kids, 9/15 – ICYMI: Our new Jeremiah Brent collab is here!
Columbia, 9/18 – Mickey’s Outdoor Club collection coming soon!
Exclusive Offer From Victoria’s Secret, 9/17 – Hurry—Your $15 Expires Tomorrow
Gap, 9/29 – You have 50% off waiting + app-only bonus 10%
Columbia, 9/28 – $20 off $100+ when you say yes to texts! 📱

New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

Understanding AI: 5 Frameworks for Marketers

Accessibility & Inclusive Design Ideas to Explore

Litmus’s State of Email in Lifecycle Marketing Report

AI Opportunities Throughout the Email Production Process

Get Inspiration from Our Holiday Subject Line Word Cloud

Why Email Marketers Shouldn’t Bother Fighting the Power

Holiday Email Subject Line Insights to Boost Your Campaign Results

Can You Over-Personalize Your Digital Marketing Messages?

The Last Word on August 2024

Understanding AI: 5 Frameworks for Marketers

Understanding AI: 5 Frameworks for Marketers

We’ve all seen the nested framework above for AI, machine learning, and generative AI. And chances are, unless you’re a developer of AI systems, it didn’t help you understand the significant differences between these wildly different tools either.

To help marketers better understand the differences, we’ve created five frameworks that illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of these tools and how they can be used.

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

Accessibility & Inclusive Design Ideas to Explore

Accessibility and Inclusive Design checklist

Checklists can inspire you, help you identify gaps, allow you to take inventory, and provide an easy-to-follow action plan. At Oracle Digital Experience Agency, we use checklists all the time with our clients. In fact, we love them so much that we wanted to share some of our most useful checklists, including this one about accessibility and inclusive design ideas.

Established by laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), accessibility is the expectation that brands create in-store, online, marketing, and other experiences that are accessible to people with disabilities. Inclusive design is the realization that many more customers benefit from such accommodations beyond those with permanent challenges. That’s because nearly everyone experiences temporary and situational challenges that can be eased by design accommodations. These challenges come in four major forms:

  1. Visual
  2. Hearing
  3. Cognitive
  4. Motor

In our fifth Marketing Checklist, we list accommodations for each of those challenges, along with advice from some of our hundreds of digital marketing experts. Some of these items entail one-time changes, such as adjustments to your website code or to your email templates. However, most involve being thoughtful about every experience your brand creates.

>> Get Your Copy via Free, No-Form Download

2024 State of Email in Lifecycle Marketing Report

Lifecycle messaging is an important aspect of email marketing for nearly every brand. However, many are underutilizing it or struggling to get the most out of their lifecycle marketing efforts.

Based on a survey of nearly 1,000 marketers, Litmus’s State of Email in Lifecycle Marketing Report shares critical insights that can help you improve your lifecycle messaging, including advice from me and five other industry experts.

The report covers:

  • How marketers use email in the customer journey
  • Which KPIs marketers care about
  • Personalization in the customer journey
  • Lifecycle priorities for the next 12 months
  • What to do next

>> Download the report from Litmus

AI Opportunities Throughout the Email Production Process

Brands have been using artificial intelligence tools in their email programs for many, many years. However, the rise of generative AI is causing a reevaluation of the opportunities to use classic AI, machine learning, and generative AI throughout the eight stages of the email production process:

  1. Conception: Identifying the need for a campaign and defining its goal, target audience, and more
  2. Copywriting: Writing the messaging
  3. Design: Crafting the visual design of the campaign
  4. Development: Coding the email experience, including any interactivity
  5. Audience Selection: Choosing the subscribers to receive a campaign or defining the trigger for an automated campaign
  6. Approval: Signing off that the campaign that was created matches its initial intent and goal
  7. Send: Launching and monitoring the campaign
  8. Analysis: Examining the results of the campaign, including any A/B testing

In this post and the 51-minute companion on-demand webinar, we discuss dozens of potential opportunities for marketers to use AI during each of those email production stages.

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

Get Inspiration from Our Holiday Subject Line Word Cloud

As you plan your holiday promotional email campaigns, you’ll certainly want to draft subject lines for your intended campaigns. In fact, you’ll want to write multiple subject lines for each one so you can do some A/B testing. To get you inspired, we created a holiday subject line word cloud based on nearly 1,400 subject lines used by national retailers between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, 2023.

If you’re unfamiliar with word clouds, the more frequently a word is used, the larger it is in the word cloud. So, for instance, some of the most commonly used words in our word cloud include: extra, black, Friday, holiday, ends, gifts, now, sale, styles, and deals.

While that’s interesting, Kelly Moran and I take a deeper dive into what this word cloud reveals about email subject line writing during the holidays and how that can help you write better holiday subject lines.

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

Why Email Marketers Shouldn’t Bother Fighting the Power

As an email marketer, it can feel like bad things are always happening to us.

Not all of these things are bad, and some aren’t as bad as they appeared at first glance (although some are very awful). But all of those changes were implemented with little to no warning, and with zero consultation, forcing marketers to scramble to determine the potential impact on their programs and subscribers and then try to minimize that impact.

>> Read the entire article on OnlyInfluencers.com