The Last Word on August 2025

The Last Word

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

Must-read articles, posts & reports

The Power of Default: Why Doing Nothing Still Gets Results — and When It Crosses the Line (Kath Pay)

Psychology-Powered Email Marketing (Rob Voase)

Intelligence at Scale: Data Monetization in the Age of Gen AI (McKinsey)

How Changing Our Email Newsletter Frequency Boosted Engagement by 500% [Case Study] (Only Influencers)

Insightful & entertaining social posts

Noteworthy subject lines

GameStop, 8/7 – 🚨 🔜 Pokémon Legends: Z-A is coming soon! Pre-order today!
adidas, 8/3 – adidas x Minecraft: Every new world needs an explorer
Uncommon Goods, 8/20 – Yes, it’s early. But not *too* early.
Gap Labor Day Event, 8/31 – GapJeans 101
J.Crew, 8/6 – Order soon to get your Labor Day weekend outfits in time!
Eddie Bauer, 8/6 – Three Days Only! Save On Summer Essentials ☀️😎
Pacsun, 8/14 – Fit Check: HoCo 2025 Edition
Panty Party 🎃 at VS PINK, 8/27 – 8/$38 Panties Is On (F)right Now 🧟‍♀️
IKEA Family, 8/13 – Boo! 👻 Explore our new Halloween collection – costumes optional! 🎃 🦇
BARK X Peanuts, 8/30 – There’s still time to fetch Peanuts© Halloween
Macy’s, 8/30 – Up to 60% off go-tos for National Beach Day 🏖️
Neiman Marcus, 8/20 – Shop fall trends, beauty, fragrance & earn a gift card
Everlane, 8/7 – The Utility Family Just Got Bigger
Staples, 8/13 – 📍 $89 AirTag trackers — don’t lose this deal.
Uncommon Goods, 8/5 – You won’t find these on Amazon
Urban Outfitters, 8/21 – outlook good: new BAGGU exclusives 🎱
MoMA Design Store, 8/25 – Take a Break from Digital
Columbia, 8/16 – PFG: pretty f’ing good.
Banana Republic App, 8/27 – One. Day. Only. App exclusive early access
Everlane, 8/8 – Cleaner, Washable Silk
LEGO® News, 8/29 – Hedwig™ has a letter for you…
Levi’s, 8/7 – BEYONCÉ X LEVI’S® COLLECTION IS HERE
adidas, 8/31 – adiclub, something exciting is coming 👀

New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

Alt Text: Best Practices & Evolving Concerns

Inbox Survival Guide

The Bridge to an Omnichannel Digital Marketing Future

Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make

Welcome Email Best Practices

The Limitations of B2B Email Marketing Benchmarks

The Last Word on July 2025

Alt Text: Best Practices & Evolving Concerns

Alt Text- Best Practices & Evolving Concerns

On websites and in marketing emails, social posts, and other online content, alt text helps a wide range of people fully understand your content by providing a plain-text alternative to images. However, using alt text optimally isn’t as simple as just inserting a text description into an image’s alt tag.

But before we get into how to determine the most appropriate alt text to use, let’s clarify exactly…

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

Inbox Survival Guide

Mavlers' Marketing Insiders Series - Chad S White

Email marketing is evolving, driven by changes at inbox providers and new technologies available to marketers. When I got together with Chintan Doshi, Mavlers’ Head of Email & CRM, for their Marketing Insiders Series, that was the focus of our conversation.

Over the course of an hour, we talked about:

  • The most common reasons emails don’t make it to the inbox today
  • The deliverability rule changes at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
  • The 3 foundational pieces every digital marketing program will need in the years ahead
  • Using consumer behaviors to respond appropriately based on signal strength
  • How SMS and push programs are affecting email programs
  • What teams should focus on now that open rates are less reliable
  • The role of opens and clicks in performance reporting
  • Where AI is actually useful in email marketing right now
  • How AI is evolving
  • And much more

>> Watch on YouTube

The Bridge to an Omnichannel Digital Marketing Future

Consumers have been omnichannel in their behavior for at least a decade, seamlessly shifting from one channel to another on their journey toward getting what they want. And B2B buyers have also gone omnichannel. To their frustration, however, most brands have struggled to move beyond their siloed multichannel operations. That has meant disconnected experiences and outdated messaging, which has been to the detriment of customer satisfaction and profits.

Thankfully, brands now have the tools available to them to finally catch up to the channel-hopping speed of their customers. With the following three components in place, brands are finally able to use real-time customer data from cross-channel behaviors to drive coordinated and cohesive customer experiences across channels with visibility into the impact on customer lifetime value.

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

Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make

Traditional search—and Google, in particular—is under serious threat of being dislodged as the starting point for many buyers’ journeys. In January, ChatGPT and other alternatives drove Google’s search engine market share below 90% for the first time since 2015, according to Statcounter. And the sharks are circling more aggressively now, with both OpenAI and Perplexity set to release browsers to compete with Google’s market-leading Chrome, and with at least a dozen AI startups also vying to gobble up some of Google’s market share.

To be fair, the biggest loser here isn’t Google, which has introduced its own generative AI search results in the form of AI Overviews. The biggest losers are website operators, who are having their content regurgitated by generative AI engines in exchange for a source link (sometimes) and are seeing their web visitor traffic plunge.

For instance, research shows that website traffic from Google has declined between 30% and 70% depending on the search terms used because of AI Overviews, according to AI magazine. That’s in line with Ahrefs research showing that an AI Overview in a search results correlates with a 34.5% lower clickthrough rate on average for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview.

And the worst is yet to come. “Your website doesn’t need to go away,” says Chris Andrew, CEO & Co-founder of Scrunch, “but 90% of its human traffic will.”

>> Read the entire article on CMSWire.com

Welcome Email Best Practices

Welcome Email Best Practices

When someone signs up to receive your promotional emails, it marks the start of what is hopefully a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Start it off right by sending the most effective welcome email possible.

Here are nine best practices to follow:

  1. Send welcomes immediately.
  2. Use a marketing-appropriate sender name.
  3. Use a high-value call-to-action.
  4. Keep your copy and design focused.
  5. Use a welcome email series.
  6. Send different welcomes based on acquisition source.
  7. Craft user-friendly welcomes.
  8. QA and optimize your welcomes often.
  9. Seasonally update your welcomes.

For a full discussion of each of those recommendations…

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

The Limitations of B2B Email Marketing Benchmarks

Email marketers put too much stock in external benchmarks, which can give them a distorted view of their performance and cause them to make ill-informed strategic and tactical mistakes. That was the core message of my closing keynote for MarketingProfs’ Modern Email Marketing Essentials.

Let’s explore that issue and what B2B marketers can do instead.

>> Read the entire article on MarketingProfs.com

The Last Word on July 2025

The Last Word

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

Must-read articles, posts & reports

How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us (The New York Times)(gift article)

Q2 2025 Email Patterns, Trends, and Outliers (Really Good Emails)

Rory Sutherland on the Fat Tail of Marketing (Future Commerce)

The Perfect Storm: How Two Major Industry Changes Impacted Email Engagement (Validity)

Your Favorite Model? Thanks to AI, They Might Not Be Real (CNN)

Yahoo Mail to Absorb Comcast Subscriber Mailboxes (Spam Resource)

Perplexity’s Comet Browser Challenges Chrome With AI-First Internet Experience (CMSWire)

OpenAI to Release Web Browser in Challenge to Google Chrome (Reuters)

Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse (New York Magazine)

Nike Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Misleading Email Marketing (EmailExpert)

Movable Ink Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by STG (Movable Ink)

Ziff David Acquires Email Industries, Organizer of Inbox Expo (Ziff Davis)

Can Bloomingdale’s Bring the Magic Back to Department Stores? (McKinsey & Co.)

Insightful & entertaining social posts

Noteworthy subject lines

YETI, 7/17 – Support Kerr County, Texas.
Abercrombie, 7/24 – Have a Euro summer.
Levi’s, 7/19 – How to maximize your staple pieces
Spirit Halloween, 7/24 – 🚨 Krampus RETURNS
Dell Technologies, 7/9 – Black Friday in July savings inside.
Home Depot, 7/2 – Ready for the 4th of July? ♨️🎆😎
AutoZone, 7/4 – 🇺🇸 Road Trips & Rocket’s Red Glare – Let’s Go
Harley-Davidson, 7/4 – Freedom rides on two wheels
IKEA Family, 7/14 – Cramming. Not good for studying or for storage.
IKEA Family, 7/21 – Declutter your dorm with IKEA designers! 📚 🙌 😎
Wayfair, 7/20 – ⏱️Plus DORM DEALS ⏱️ Less than 24 HOURS ⏱️
Michaels, 7/22 – 🌈 ✏️ 🍎 Make back-to-school a celebration with awesome supplies and DIYs
DSW, 7/18 – It takes a village: 20% off for teachers & parents >>>
Staples, 7/3 – Got your 🧑‍🏫📝? Activate for 30% back today!
J.Crew, 7/21 – Too hot to think? Wear these dresses…
Duluth Trading, 7/20 – 25% OFF Heat-Beatin’ Gear!
Chubbies, 7/7 – Trunks So Good, You’ll Skip the Shirt
Uncommon Goods, 7/21 – The coolest backyard this summer? Yours.
VS PINK, 7/29 – We Live for a Comfy-Cute Moment
DSW, 7/21 – INSIDE: 6 NEW Fall Trends 👠👟🐆🤎🍂
Michaels, 7/8 – Warning: may cause extreme home envy! 😍
Williams Sonoma, 7/28 – Introducing Lotus: professional-grade appliances for your kitchen
Victoria’s Secret, 7/24 – Bras So Good, We Sell 1 Every 5 Seconds
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 7/17 – Closing Soon at The Met
Fanatics.com, 7/29 – Take a Fanatics survey for a chance to win $100 in FanCash!
Fandango, 7/3 – The Rotten Tomatoes App Is Here 🎉
Gap App Exclusive, 7/24 – We’re thanking you with 50% off

New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

How to Use AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully

Key Lead Nurturing Campaigns by Industry

The AI ROI Killer Lurking in Your Architecture: Data Access Charges

How One Button Can Reduce Email Unsubscribes by 80%

The Unsubscribe Experience Is Part of CX. Treat It That Way.

The Last Word on June 2025

Using AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully

Machine learning tools like Persado and Jacquard were writing promotional email subject lines and other copy long before generative AI came along. But unlike genAI, which is primarily about saving time, machine learning-powered copywriting tools are all about increasing performance.

What words and phrases should I use to communicate most effectively? That is the question these tools have sought to answer by analyzing years-worth of campaigns and connecting higher performance with certain words and lower performance with others.

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

Key Lead Nurturing Campaigns by Industry

Key Lead Nurturing Campaigns by Industry

Some lead nurturing campaigns are fairly universal, easily finding an effective role in nearly any business. However, most industries have unique products and customer behaviors that can benefit from their own specific nurture flows.

Let’s discuss some important nurture campaigns that are common in the following industries:

  • Financial services
  • Logistics & distribution
  • Manufacturing
  • Sports & entertainment

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