Email Marketing RulesContent & Messaging Strategies for Long-Lifespan Products
Posted on February 18, 2025
For brands that sell products with lifespans that stretch into multiple years, devising a digital marketing content strategy can be difficult. They know they need to keep their customers engaged, but they often struggle with how to keep the conversation and relationship going between product replacement cycles.
For permission-based channels like email and SMS, it can be dangerous to not reach out to subscribers on at least a monthly basis. Less frequent messaging can zero out your email sender reputation, for instance. More broadly—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be much, much harder to maintain permission when you mail, say, every other month than twice a month.
In her presentation at Litmus Live last fall, Ann Handley shared two stats that highlight the challenge and the opportunity. First, 95% of buyers are not in the market for you at any given time, according to LinkedIn B2B Institute. And second, 90% of buyers ultimately choose a vendor they had in mind before they began research, according to Bain and Google.
So, brands need to stay top-of-mind with customers between purchases, but need to do so largely by sharing non-promotional content to avoid alienating customers.
Email Marketing Trends for 2025: Unproven Opportunities
Posted on February 14, 2025
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 faced include:
- Economic uncertainty caused by global trade disruptions, high inflation, and high interest rates
- Changes at inbox providers, including broader BIMI support, Apple’s launch of iOS 18, and Gmail’s increasing use of Automatic Extraction
- Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum
To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts for the sixth year in a row, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each will have in 2025. Then we mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we look at the Unproven Opportunities, which are the email trends that were rated low adoption and low impact. The technologies and tactics here are not fully vetted or seen as very effective, and therefore 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.
Of the 26 trends we’re highlighting this year, only two of them were rated as being in the low adoption–low impact quadrant for 2025. Moreover, these two trends have been in our Unproven Opportunities quadrant all six years of our survey. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
Marketing, Demystified podcast: The Future of Email Marketing
Posted on February 11, 2025
Email marketing is undergoing massive changes, from AI to inbox changes to new branding options in the inbox. I join Marketing, Demystified podcast host Jenn Mancusi to discuss these changes and how marketers can adapt.
During the 55-minute episode, we talk about:
3:37 – How generative AI is transforming email marketing and what the major use cases are currently
12:03 – What are some of the main challenges around using AI in email marketing?
28:01 – What are some of the most significant inbox changes that have been happening?
43:25 – What’s the latest on Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)?
50:58 – What’s one action email marketers should take today to prepare for these changes?
Listen to Marketing, Demystified wherever you get your podcasts or…
4 Hallmarks of Today’s Best Email Marketing Programs
Posted on February 5, 2025
To succeed at email marketing requires constant iteration and evolution with an eye on gradual improvements. And this iteration happens in an environment of continual change—with some of those changes requiring adaptation and some merely presenting distractions.
Experienced email marketers know that a good email marketing program…
- Has an active mailable list size that’s growing
- Contributes positively to their particular business’s success metrics, with good open and click rates just being table stakes
- Has a spam complaint rate of under 0.1% (which is what Google and Yahoo expect)
- Has an inbox placement rate of 95% or better
Those characteristics, and others, are hallmarks of a good program. But what about the hallmarks of the best email marketing programs? Right now, I see four characteristics as qualifiers.
The Last Word on January 2025
Posted on February 3, 2025
A roundup of digital and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
What’s In, What’s Out in 2025 (Total Annarchy by Ann Handley)
The FCC Update Signals a New Era for Digital Marketers and Lead Generators (Forbes)
Year in Email 2024: The Fun Edition (Omnisend)
RGE’s Most Saved of 2024 Collection (Really Good Emails)
Stop Using Entrust for Your BIMI Certificates (Word to the Wise)
Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term (New York Times)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
#htmlemail #emailcode #emailgeeks #emailpeeps #emaildevelopment #emaildeveloper #emaildev #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/WgXueAoao7
— Anne Tomlin (@pompeii79) January 3, 2025
Your #Comcast #EmailMarketing lists maybe shrinking… if you haven’t seen engagement in the last 2 years? suppress those #email addresses. pic.twitter.com/VYjJQSKJjL
— Keith Kouzmanoff (@emailmp) January 2, 2025
If you send me an “update your email preferences because we want to only send you the emails your interested in” email, I will smash that button. Even if I don’t have any changes to make, I want my support of that email to be recognized. #emailgeeks #emailpeeps #emailmarketing
— Anne Tomlin (@pompeii79) January 8, 2025
AI has read the internet.
It has not read the room.
— Jay Acunzo (@jayacunzo.com) January 13, 2025 at 7:52 AM
I saw a post calling the TikTok ban “mass unemployment.”
I feel for folks, but I’m horrified by how social apps trick ppl into building a biz entirely on what are just marketing channels.
We need businesses that can survive w/o social media. If they can’t, we don’t own our businesses.
They do.
— Jay Acunzo (@jayacunzo.com) January 19, 2025 at 7:51 AM
Noteworthy subject lines
DSW, 1/6 – 2025: The Year You Crush It 👟
Nintendo, 1/16 – Ring in the new year with a digital wallpaper from My Nintendo!
Duluth Trading, 1/1 – Happy New CLEARANCE Year!
Redbubble, 1/31 – New year, new goals. Shop now to stay inspired your way
Overstock, 1/6 – The Decluttering Essentials You’ve Been Waiting For – Up to 50% Off! 😍
Macy’s, 1/18 – Don’t quit! Win your resolution with our help
Wayfair, 1/14 – HOLIDAY LIGHTING for less. *MAJOR* markdowns ➡
Goldbelly, 1/29 – NEW Super Bowl Party Kits are Selling Fast! 🏈⚜️
Chubbies, 1/16 – ROSES ARE RED 🌹
Michaels, 1/16 – Shop handmade love for everyone this Valentine’s Day at MakerPlace 💌
Uncommon Goods, 1/28 – This gift guide is Cupid-approved 💘
Crate & Kids, 1/31 – The Easter Gift Guide is here! Hop to shopping →
DSW, 1/21 – Spring break prep starts with sneakers 👟
Eddie Bauer, 1/13 – JUST IN: Highbeam Reflective Jacket & Backpack
Bass Pro Shops, 1/14 – Bundle Up For Winter Adventures!
Neiman Marcus, 1/14 – Style guide for warm-weather destinations
Vuori, 1/25 – New: The Waffle Shirt Jacket
Williams Sonoma, 1/21 – Busy weeknights = cooking simplified
kate spade, 1/13 – A purse-onality test
Crate & Barrel, 1/6 – How to build a home with purpose
Allrecipes Dinner Tonight, 1/18 – This Slow Cooker Marvel Is Nicole McLaughlin’s Most Popular Recipe
Levi’s® Red Tab™ – $501 Gift Card Sweepstakes
Michaels, 1/13 – Need a new go-to party place? 👀 Michaels is here to help you celebrate! 🎉
IKEA Family, 1/21 – Chad, not sleeping well? 😴
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
10 Big CX Ideas for 2025 [with on-demand webinar]
6 Signs You Need an Email Accessibility Audit
First Quarter 2025 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
What XMail’s Launch Could Mean for Email Marketers
A Year of Campaign Subject Lines: Inspiration from 2024
10 Big CX Ideas for 2025 [with on-demand webinar]
Posted on January 24, 2025
The customer experience is undergoing a dizzying evolution that’s disrupting the status quo like never before. Brands must evolve their CX strategies along with these changes—to both avoid massive pitfalls and seize new opportunities.
In this blog post and 54-minute companion on-demand webinar, we discuss 10 major changes affecting the customer experience and how brands can adapt. And in the remainder of this post, we share a quick primer on each of those 10 changes.
6 Signs You Need an Email Accessibility Audit
Posted on January 15, 2025
Ensuring your email campaigns are accessible not only opens doors to a broader audience, but also increases engagement and fosters brand-building inclusivity. With 27% of Americans living with some form of disability, overlooking this demographic can limit your reach, undermine your marketing efforts, and damage your brand image.
Beyond the impact on performance and ethical imperative, the legal landscape surrounding digital accessibility is becoming more stringent. In 2023, the U.S. saw over 4,600 accessibility-related lawsuits, with the majority of those about digital experiences, according to UsableNet. Moreover, the need for brands to be in full compliance with the European Accessibility Act of 2019 this year further heightens the urgency for global marketers to adopt accessibility best practices.
Because of that growing pressure, we’ve seen a significant uptick in requests for our email accessibility audits here at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. But how do you know if your program needs an audit?
First Quarter 2025 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on January 13, 2025
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful year-round strategy. Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives B2C brands a quarter-by-quarter plan for how to achieve more during this critical time of the year with their email marketing and other digital marketing channels.
The first quarter is focused on seizing opportunities, mitigating risks, learning from the just-passed holiday season, and starting to make the larger structural and programmatic changes necessary to succeed in the new year and during the next holiday season. In this Holiday Marketing Quarterly, we cover:
- Holiday Post-Mortems
- Seasonal Buyer Reactivations
- Email Deliverability Recoveries
- Automated Campaign Optimization & Growth
- Creative Refreshes
- Upgrades & Expansions of Your Tech Stack
>> Get the Holiday Marketing Quarterly for free via a no-form download
What XMail’s Launch Could Mean for Email Marketers
Posted on January 9, 2025
Among the new developments to watch in the email space in 2025 may be the launch of XMail, an email inbox platform from X. On Dec. 15, X Owner Elon Musk said on X that XMail is “on the list of things to do.” In a separate post, he indicated that XMail would focus on the “universal” features of email.
Let’s look at some of the issues surrounding this potential launch.
A Year of Campaign Subject Lines: Inspiration from 2024
Posted on January 8, 2025
A catchy, yet descriptive subject line for your email or title for your SMS or push message can give your campaign a sizable boost. One way to stand out and be more relevant is to have a hook that’s connected to a holiday, season, or occasion—like the nearly 1,000 we highlight in our 2025 Content Calendar Assistant.
To inspire you, we’ve pulled together some of our favorite subject lines from 2024 that do just that. Here’s a month-by-month rundown of our faves.
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
