Email Marketing RulesThe Biggest Shifts in Email Marketing Trends for 2024 [with on-demand webinar]
Posted on March 5, 2024
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have had to deal with include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by high interest rates
- New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo
- The 2-year anniversary Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making inactivity management much more difficult
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
These have influenced email marketing priorities and are shaping the trends that will dominate 2024. We can see those shifts in the results of our fifth-annual Email Marketing Trends Survey, where we asked some of Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as predict the impact each of them will have in 2024. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
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, we’re going beyond the quadrant placements to look at the highest impact trends overall, the trends with the biggest increases and decreases in adoption and impact, the trends with the largest gap between the impact of a trend and its adoption, and more.
Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Proven Essentials
Posted on March 4, 2024
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have had to deal with include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by high interest rates
- New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo
- The 2-year anniversary Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making inactivity management much more difficult
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed some of Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each of them will have in 2024. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Proven Essentials, which are in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but are still improving and delivering tremendous results.
Our Proven Essentials stand in stark contrast to our Unproven Opportunities, which still have significant risks associated with them and benefits that haven’t fully materialized. Our Proven Essentials also have a risk profile that’s the inverse of our Competitive Differentiators—that is, where our Competitive Differentiators offer a competitive advantage to early adopters, our Proven Essentials put late adopters at a competitive disadvantage.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing experts about, 16 of them were rated as being in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2024. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
3 Benefits of a Customer Data Platform
Posted on February 29, 2024
Many brands are excitedly exploring ways to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve their omnichannel experiences. However, most are quickly discovering serious limitations on their ability to move forward because of how scattered and fractured their customer data is.
It’s not hard to understand how we got to this place. Not only do customers interact with corporations through many different contexts and channels, but the operational platforms that manage those channels typically aren’t designed to communicate with each other or to access or assess customer data very well.
In order to make use of customer data to drive engagement and satisfaction, another kind of solution is required, one specifically architected to receive data from each of these operational platforms, standardize that data, interrelate it, and make it accessible. That solution is the customer data platform (CDP).
Let’s talk about the three major benefits that CDPs deliver.
Everybody Hates Your Brand podcast: Personalization & Its Limits
Posted on February 27, 2024
Personalization is perennially a top email marketing priority. Does that indicate a massive failure or is something else at work?
I join Everyone Hates Your Brand podcast host Rob Voase to talk about all things personalization. We talk about priorities, challenges, avoiding creepiness, and much more. Here’s a rundown of our conversation:
1:25 – My current role at Oracle Digital Experience Agency and my background
7:10 – Why personalization is perennially at the top of marketers’ to-do lists
9:05 – Why personalization and privacy aren’t in conflict
11:20 – How data availability undermines personalization efforts
14:40 – Content, frequency, and urgency expectation differences across channels
16:55 – Convincing marketers that personalization is worthwhile
19:30 – Using AI for personalization
22:40 – Avoiding creepy uses of customer data
27:45 – Recognizing that some topics are extra sensitive
29:00 – How A/B testing is a form of listening
31:05 – How brands go wrong with testing
34:40 – How to prioritize what you’re testing
36:00 – Testing to learn or testing to win
39:10 – People are weird
41:20 – Why keeping a log of testing is important for omnichannel optimization
43:40 – What I would like to banish from email marketing thinking
Listen wherever you get your podcasts or…
2024 State of Email Trends Report
Posted on February 22, 2024
Building on our long-running annual research on email marketing trends, Oracle Digital Experience Agency has partnered with Litmus on a new State of Email Trends report that brings to light valuable details and critical nuances around which email tactics and technologies marketers are using and the success they’re seeing.
The report examines dozens of email trends, helping you understand which might be best for your brand to pursue. It does this not only by sharing both the adoption and performance of each trend reported by nearly 500 marketers, but also by breaking those down across industries and organization size.
- Which email tactics and technologies are seeing the least adoption?
- Which ones are B2B brands using most?
- Are small businesses seeing success with generative AI?
The 2024 State of Email Trends report answers those questions and many more.
Surveys, Polls, Forms, & Progressive Profiling: Writing Questions that Deliver Valuable Insights
Posted on February 21, 2024
With the end of third-party cookies, brands are increasingly focusing on collecting more zero-party data directly from their customers and prospects so they can better understand their needs and wants. While larger surveys will play a role, most brands will gain insights a few answers at a time through signup forms, profile pages, polls, and other forms of progressive profiling.
It sounds simple, but writing a good question and collecting reliable answers is harder than it seems. Indeed, things can go wrong:
- Before you write a question
- When writing the question
- When writing answer choices
- Around the timing
- When analyzing the responses
- When repeating data collection
Let’s talk about best practices and things to look out for during each of those steps.
Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Competitive Differentiators
Posted on February 20, 2024
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have had to deal with include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by high interest rates
- New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo
- The 2-year anniversary Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making inactivity management much more difficult
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed some of Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each of them will have in 2024. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Competitive Differentiators, which are in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but some companies are already seeing great results from using them. They offer a significant competitive advantage with considerably less risk than our Unproven Opportunities.
But, there are still risks, including the acquisition of smaller providers, frequent process and feature changes as the technology stabilizes, frequent changes in best practices as knowledge grows, changing cost structures, scarcity of needed skills, and other issues. These hassles and expenses are easier to accept, however, because many adopters are already seeing sizable returns on their investments. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors, most of whom have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing experts about, seven of them were rated as being in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2024. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Unproven Opportunities
Posted on February 13, 2024
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have had to deal with include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by high interest rates
- New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo
- The 2-year anniversary Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making inactivity management much more difficult
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed some of Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each of them will have in 2024. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Unproven Opportunities, which are in the low adoption–low impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics here are not fully vetted and may not generate long-term adoption or impact. There are significant risks that could undermine your investment in part or entirely—including rejection by consumers, inadequate inbox provider support, inadequate digital marketing platform support, the passage of legislative impediments, and other issues.
Because of those risks, most brands will find that the best strategy is to wait and let others work out all the details, uncover the best practices, and stress-test the technologies. However, the pioneering companies who embrace these trends at this early stage may seize a sizable advantage over their competitors.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing experts about, three of them were rated as being in the low adoption–low impact quadrant for 2024. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
AI Copyright Infringement: People vs. Machines
Posted on February 8, 2024
The New York Times and many other content creators and authors are suing generative AI pioneer OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming they trained their ChatGPT product on copyrighted material without permission nor compensation. These lawsuits have many people asking some variation on the question:
“Should we penalize a chatbot for doing what all human beings do—that is, assimilating information to inform responses—just because it does so more efficiently?”
I’m not a lawyer or legal scholar, but it seems like the answer is almost assuredly yes. That’s because superhuman efficiency and scale routinely leads to abuse. In fact, it’s easy to find compelling examples without even leaving the world of marketing. Let’s discuss a few.
Email’s Not Dead Podcast: The Latest Changes to Email Marketing
Posted on February 6, 2024
Email marketing is constantly changing, which was the driving force behind me writing a 4th Edition of “Email Marketing Rules.” I join Email’s Not Dead podcast hosts Jonathan Torres and Eric Trinidad to talk about the latest edition of my book and the major changes that have happened just since its release last March.
Here’s a rundown of our conversation during the 42-minute podcast:
1:50 – Why we rebranded to Oracle Digital Experience Agency
5:35 – What’s new in the 4th Edition of Email Marketing Rules, and how Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection impacted the writing of it
10:00 – How the two volumes of Email Marketing Rules are different and how they should each be used
18:00 – What’s changed in email marketing since the release of the 4th Edition, with a particular focus on Apple’s Link Tracking Protection
23:10 – The continuing deliverability and list management implications of Mail Privacy Protection as we pass the 2-year anniversary of its launch
29:30 – Why opens are not dead and brands should measure email engagement differently for their MPP-users and non-MPP-users
32:30 – The new Gmail and Yahoo deliverability requirements
Listen to this episode of Email’s Not Dead wherever you get your podcasts or…
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
