Email Marketing RulesWebbula: How Did the Email Industry Do During the Pandemic?
Posted on March 30, 2022
Email marketing was in heavy use during the early months of the pandemic. Webbula reached out to 9 email marketing experts, including me, to get our take on how the email industry did?
There were definitely a variety of opinions on just how we did as an industry. In my answer to the question, I focused on two things:
- The role that empathy played in brands’ email messaging, and
- How companies that were constrained in their messaging used brand building
To read my response, as well as the eight others…
Loyalty Program Liabilities: Definitions & Recommendations
Posted on March 28, 2022
When you launch a points-based loyalty program, you’re creating a micro-economy with its own currency, market dynamics, and—most importantly from a legal standpoint—liabilities. Because these points can have monetary value that’s realized at the time of redemption, companies must defer revenue to cover these costs.
In this post, Oracle CrowdTwist Senior Strategist Carly Mathews reviews key terms and definitions from the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s lengthy guidance on loyalty program accounting, including:
- Points issued
- Points burned
- Outstanding points
- Redemption rate
- Cost per point
With an understanding of all of those terms, you’re then able to calculate your loyalty program liability.
5 Ways to Generate More Loyalty & Email Signups
Posted on March 24, 2022
The sunsetting of third-party cookies is putting added pressure on marketers to grow their email subscriber and loyalty member audiences. In addition to needing to collect more email addresses as identifiers, they need the zero- and first-party data these programs generate to improve targeting and personalization across all their advertising and marketing efforts.
Here are five ways to boost your loyalty and email signups:
- Sell the benefits of signing up
- Make your signup forms simpler
- Make your signup forms more user-friendly
- Make your signup forms more prominent
- Use many subscriber acquisition sources
For more details on each of those…
Inboxing Podcast: Special Guest Chad White
Posted on March 21, 2022
I join host Hillel Berg for the second season of the Inboxing Podcast. During the hour-long conversation, we talk about:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Inclusive design and email accessibility
- Email marketing’s unique advantages
- The need to continue desiloing the email marketing channel
- List building
- Why I wrote “Email Marketing Rules”
- My top 5 email marketing tips for 2022
- And much more
How to Use Apple’s Auto Opens Safely
Posted on March 14, 2022
The most disruptive element of Mail Privacy Protection is that Apple creates a mountain of fake auto-generated open signals to obscure the real opens generated by your subscribers. With MPP adoption heading toward more than 95% by year’s end, that mountain will get pretty big pretty soon.
Brands’ email marketing programs will be affected differently depending on how many of their subscribers use Apple Mail on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. However, for many brands, their unadjusted open rates (real opens + auto opens) will triple. For a small, unlucky group that has the vast majority of their subscribers using Apple Mail and relatively modest pre-MPP open rates, their open rates will more than quintuple. That’s a lot of noise, which is why Oracle removes auto opens from its reported open rates. Doing so provides a much cleaner signal of engagement.
That said, even though we remove them from this top-level calculation, we do factor auto opens into other calculations and even provide individual-level auto open data. We do this because auto opens can provide some value in certain situations (at least for now). Let’s talk about those situations.
6 Ways to ‘Review and Improve’ Your Automated Emails
Posted on March 10, 2022
As a slogan to promote automated emails, “set it and forget it” has been disastrously successful. That’s because, while it spurred marketers to create lots of triggered campaigns, it set horrible expectations for how to maximize their effectiveness.
The truth is that these are living, breathing campaigns that need ongoing care and nurturing for as long as you’re running them. That’s why I call these emails “review and improve” programs in my book, Email Marketing Rules. Here are 6 ways you can take care of your automated campaigns so they do the best job of taking care of your prospects and customers (and your bottom line):
- Automation Inventory
- Performance Reviews
- Quality Assurance Checks
- Design & Messaging Refreshes
- Testing & Optimization
- Seasonal Optimization
For a discussion of each of those…
The Future of Email Podcast: A Conversation with Chad S. White of Oracle
Posted on March 8, 2022
I join Matthew Dunn, the host of The Future of Email Podcast, to talk about major email marketing trends and where the industry is headed over the next 12-24 months. Recorded in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our conversation is pretty heavy, getting into cyber- and geopolitics. We talk about:
- The need for a strategic roadmap, but also the disruptions that have led to email marketers throwing their roadmaps out repeatedly
- The many potential disruptions on the horizon this year
- How two years of upheaval have changed email marketers’ priorities
- How marketers handled the early months of the pandemic
- The mailbox provider landscape and its power dynamics
- How politics, power vacuums, and social value expression are changing marketing
- CAN-SPAM and the future of email legislation in America
- Mail Privacy Protection and Apple’s brand stance on privacy
- The historical importance of email opens in deliverability management
- Whether Google is likely to follow in Apple’s email privacy footsteps
- All the ways that Apple is flexing really hard right now
- Mega Tech monopoly risks
- The martech landscape and the best-of-suite proposition
- And much more…
The Biggest Shifts in Email Marketing Trends for 2022
Posted on March 4, 2022
The turbulence of the past two years has heavily influenced recent email marketing priorities and is shaping the trends that will dominate 2022. We can see those shifts in the results of our third-annual Email Marketing Trends Survey, where we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts about the adoption and impact of 26 email marketing tactics and technologies.
For a detailed look at all 26 trends and how they rated, check out our posts on:
- Unproven Opportunities, which are low-impact trends with low adoption
- Competitive Differentiators, which are high-impact trends with low adoption
- Proven Essentials, which are high-impact trends with high adoption
However, in this post, let’s go beyond the quadrant placements and look at the highest impact trends overall, the biggest increases and decreases in adoption and impact, the largest gap between the impact of a trend and its adoption, and much more.
The Last Word on February 2022
Posted on March 3, 2022
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
9 Favorite Lessons From 20 Years in the Email Marketing Industry (Webbula)
Expert Advice for Senders on Shared IPs (Kickbox)
Update on the Gmail App Prefetching Images (SparkPost)
Uniting the Email Community for Ukraine (Email Audience)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Email marketing = a give, give, take (2:1)
— Dennard (@Dennardcrawford) February 4, 2022
A friend of mine works in lab testing. Talked about someone who came in for a urine test, handed over a cup that was ice cold, they tested it anyway, it came back positive for THC, meth, and cocaine.
That’s what it’s like when you buy a list people! #emailgeeks #dontbuylists
— Mike Hillyer (@MikeHillyer) February 8, 2022
📣 Public Service Announcement 📣:
Being a marketer is not easy
Being a developer is not easy
Being a designer is not easy
Platforms are not easy
Strategizing is not easy
Coding is not easy#emailgeeks #Email #MarketingTwitter— 🟣Guilda (@justguilda) February 10, 2022
A tribute to @hugeheadca who we just found out passed away in January from brain cancer. One of the OG #emailgeeks and a good man. #RIP :: Every Time You Buy an Email List – A puppy dies! https://t.co/z4detf7AqC via @YouTube
— Ryan Phelan (@ryanpphelan) February 18, 2022
Hello. It is I, with more email-based screaming into the void.
IF YOU MAKE ME LOG IN TO UNSUBSCRIBE, YOU’RE TACKY AND I HATE YOU.
Also you’re violating CAN-SPAM, so maybe cut that out.#emailgeeks #emailmarketing #YesIWillComplainToYourLegalTeamButItsForYourOwnGood pic.twitter.com/Td41wBZLb0
— Skyler H (@Holobachgirl) February 23, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Burlington, 2/1 – Be inspired by our Black History Month #BurlingtonPartners
Starbucks, 2/1 – Celebrating Black History Month
Omaha Steaks, 2/22 – Celebrate Twos-day 2/22 with $22.22 Deals!
Sears, 2/5 – Don’t blow it, buddy 💔 Up to 75% off Valentine’s jewelry inside
Uncommon Goods, 2/6 – 💓Truly uncommon gifts for your extraordinary love 💓
Zales, 2/8 – 💝Think Outside the Chocolate Box this Valentine’s Day
Williams Sonoma, 2/9 – In full bloom 🏵️ Spring-inspired settings for your Easter table
Venmo, 2/8 – Receive your tax refund in your Venmo account with Direct Deposit
Crate & Barrel, 2/5 – IN STOCK & SELLING FAST | Back by popular demand
Saks Fifth Avenue, 2/5 – See what’s back in stock this week
ModCloth, 2/26 – Hit replay on these restocked styles. 🔁
Big Lots, 2/1 – BIG bedroom deals, little initial payment!
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 2/28 – Our live workshops are back and better than ever!
West Elm, 2/14 – This duplex is WFH done right
Target, 2/26 – Create a clutter-free home office.
Office Depot, 2/26 – It’s your time. Welcome to the new age of work.
West Elm, 2/24 – Meet your binge-watching sidekick
Nordstrom, 2/24 – Dresses for everything on your calendar
West Elm, 2/5 – 🌿Garden goals for balconies & backyards alike
Uncommon Goods, 2/4 – NEW: Self-watering planter ✔️ Propagation station ✔️ And all in one ✔️
Victoria’s Secret, 2/24 – The NEW Accessories You Need This Spring
Eddie Bauer, 2/4 – Introducing The Award-Winning BC Flyline Kit
Eddie Bauer, 2/20 – Introducing The EverTherm Downdraft Jacket
Gap, 2/8 – Our softest denim YET
Banana Republic, 2/9 – Explore Our Watershed Mill Valley Denim
Sears, 2/1 – Appliance busted? 🔧 We’ll fix it, on your schedule…
Express, 2/5 – Just dropped: Insta Style with Rachel Zoe 😍⬇️
Williams Sonoma, 2/4 – WOK THIS WAY: make these recipes tonight!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Proven Essentials
Progressive Profiling: Fuel for Long- & Short-Term Personalization
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Competitive Differentiators
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Unproven Opportunities
8 Alternatives to Open-Triggered Email Sequences in the Age of Mail Privacy Protection
BIMI: The Carrot to Get Email Marketing Managers to Fully Authenticate
How Mail Privacy Protection Is Changing How Email Marketing Performance Is Measured
Posted on March 2, 2022
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is upending how email marketers measure email marketing performance. In addition to hiding IP addresses, blocking forward tracking, and obscuring open times, MPP pre-fetches email content to create a haystack of fake opens in which to hide the needles of real opens by their users. With upwards of 95% of Apple Mail app users likely to enable MPP and Apple Mail accounting for roughly half of all email opens when MPP went into effect last September, email opens have been dramatically depreciated.
That has marketers reevaluating how they measure email marketing success. Let’s discuss how things have changed, and how they haven’t.
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 I’ll explore strategies and tactics, share tips and inspiration, and discuss industry news and trends.
Chad S. White
Head of Research
Oracle Marketing Consulting
and
Author of the book
Email Marketing Rules
