Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on June 2023
Posted on July 6, 2023
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Beyond Belt-Tightening: How Marketing Can Drive Resiliency during Uncertain Times (McKinsey & Co.)
The Font-Size Issue (Type E)
5 Steps to Mastering the Modern Martech Landscape (RPE Origin)
Why Newsletters Are Set to Be the Hottest Side Hustle of 2023 (Fast Company)
I Spy AI: Half Of Consumers Can Spot An AI-Written Email (MediaPost)
Why and How to Use Loss Aversion in Email Marketing (Plus 4 Examples) (Holistic Email Marketing)
Email Warming Services: Manipulating Spam Filters (EmailKarma)
Big Tech Is Bad. Big A.I. Will Be Worse. (New York Times)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
When you collect customer data, you enter into an obligation to use that data.
So don’t collect information without a plan to execute.
And for the love of god, don’t ignore it.
(“How often should we email you?” is the biggest culprit here)
— Alex (@heyitsalexP) June 1, 2023
There’s no AI in email
— Elliot Ross (@IAmElliot) June 27, 2023
Being smart isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about knowing how to build a network of people who do.
— Mathew Sweezey (@msweezey) June 30, 2023
Noteworthy subject lines
Columbia Sportswear, 6/2 – PRIDE outside, today and every day.
Abercrombie & Fitch, 6/24 – PROUD AND LOUD 🏳️🌈
katespade.com, 6/6 – How we celebrate pride & joy
J.Crew, 6/5 – J.Crew Pride 2023
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 6/8 – Now’s the time to save big on what Dad will love.
Crate & Barrel, 6/9 – Get Father’s Day gift recs from our team
IKEA, 6/27 – College living, A-Z!
REI, 6/12 – A Gift Card for Them, a Bonus for You 🎓👔
Nordstrom, 6/16 – It’s wedding season—let’s do this
Zales, 6/29 – Black Friday In July! Up to 50% Off 🔥🔥🔥
Crate & Kids, 6/2 – NEW backpacks that’ll make a splash at camp ☀️
Michaels, 6/27 – 🚙 Parents: Save on kids’ crafts to take on the go this summer!
West Elm, 6/2 – Patio party starters!
vineyard vines, 6/2 – Comfy Cashmere & Polished Prints
Everlane, 6/2 – We Have New Summer Dresses
Nordstrom, 6/2 – Shorts weather, we’re ready for you
Everlane, 6/20 – Crochet Tops Are Back In Stock
Superdry, 6/22 – Ready for t-shirt weather?
Nordstrom, 6/6 – Now entering your skirt era
J.Crew, 6/2 – Nautical nods, new textures & more of Olympia’s picks…
Victoria’s Secret Semi-Annual Sale, 6/8 – Our Biggest Sale of the Year is Online Now
West Elm, 6/5 – Outside-the-box gallery wall ideas
Art.com, 6/4 – What’s your dining room’s personality?
Clinique Online, 6/30 – 💋 Tips for lips.
MyCollection by Lifetouch, 6/8 – Collect, celebrate and cherish every milestone of Dexter.
The North Face, 6/20 – Our Nuptse jacket is flying off the shelves
Williams Sonoma, 6/22 – How old are your nonstick pans?
YETI, 6/12 – Our First Ever Cast Iron Skillet
Magic: The Gathering, 6/8 – Here’s your preview card from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth™ 👀
Big Lots, 6/29 – Check out our new Broyhill collection! 😍
RH, 6/16 – Now Open. RH England, The Gallery at the Historic Aynho Park.
Michaels, 6/29 – Hey VIP, want a 25% off coupon + the latest scoop on deals? 🕶️ Sign up for texts →
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Hot Digital Marketing Redesign Trends: Changes Brands Are Making Now
The Fifth Age of Email Deliverability
Sinch CX Education Podcast: Bridging the Gap between Omnichannel Marketing & CX
Loyalty Program KPIs: Measuring Health and Performance
The Future of Content Marketing: 5 Predictions
Mailbox Providers Retiring Inactive Accounts: The Risks & How to Respond
6 of My All-Time Favorite Quotes about Marketing
Is Your Brand Trusted Significantly More than ChatGPT?
Posted on July 5, 2023
The answer to that question will determine which brands truly have credibility and authority in the years ahead and which do not.
Those who are more trustworthy than generative AI engines like ChatGPT will:
- Be destinations for answer-seekers, generating strong direct traffic to their websites and robust app usage
- Be able to build large first-party audiences via email, SMS, push, and other channels
Both of those will be critical for any brand wanting to insulate themselves from the search engine optimization (SEO) traffic loss that will be caused by generative AI.
Hot Digital Marketing Redesign Trends: Changes Brands Are Making Now
Posted on June 27, 2023
At Oracle Marketing Consulting, we’re constantly involved in major redesigns of our clients’ digital marketing campaigns. From year to year, the themes and trends driving redesigns change. Here are the biggest factors propelling brands to undergo redesigns right now:
- More Content Driven by Machine Learning & AI
- More Live Content
- Adapting to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
- Becoming More Inclusive
- Optimizing for Dark Mode
For a full discussion of each of those trends and more…
The Fifth Age of Email Deliverability
Posted on June 23, 2023
The feedback mechanisms, controls, and algorithms that inbox providers use to decide whether to block, junk, or deliver email messages to their users continues to evolve. Since the 1990s, there have been five ages of email deliverability, each of which was ushered in by the arrival of a major change:
In the First Age of Email Deliverability, there were no rules and few if any consequences for bad behavior. Email users were more or less at the mercy of senders, some of whom scraped, bought, and sold email addresses and didn’t always honor unsubscribes.
In the Second Age of Email Deliverability, inbox providers armed their users with the “report spam” button, which allowed them to block future emails from offending senders. Moreover, senders who had complaint rates that were too high saw their emails junked or blocked across entire mailbox providers. As a consequence, senders bloated their lists with inactive subscribers who didn’t complain, but didn’t do anything else either.
Sinch CX Education Podcast: Bridging the Gap between Omnichannel Marketing & CX
Posted on June 21, 2023
“We are constantly chasing consumer expectations, and omnichannel is a big one where we’ve been way behind for a very long time, so the urgency to catch up is real.” That’s a snippet from my conversation with Sinch CX Education Podcast host Gwen Lafage, where we focus on embracing an omnichannel marketing philosophy and strategy.
During our 43-minute conversation, we talk about:
- Email marketing’s popularity, as well as what confuses marketers about the channel
- The biggest changes and challenges facing digital marketers
- The difference between multichannel and omnichannel
- Why brands need to improve their omnichannel marketing capabilities
- The value and role of different channels in an omnichannel strategy
- How to get started becoming more omnichannel
Listen in wherever you get your podcasts or…
Loyalty Program KPIs: Measuring Health and Performance
Posted on June 16, 2023
A loyalty program should work for its members as well as your company, says Oracle CrowdTwist Senior Strategist Carly Mathews. It’s a balancing act. And to measure how good of a balance you’re striking, you need to track a variety of key performance indicators.
With Oracle CrowdTwist clients, we measure many metrics, each of which tells us something unique and important about how a loyalty program is doing. These metrics generally fall into two buckets: health KPIs that measure the appeal of and engagement with a loyalty program, and performance KPIs that measure the direct financial impact of a program.
In this post, we talk about both of those kinds of loyalty KPIs and Leah Carder of Reckitt shares how they measure success at their Enfamil Family Beginnings loyalty program in a companion on-demand webinar.
Mailbox Providers Retiring Inactive Accounts: The Risks & How to Respond
Posted on June 13, 2023
Increasingly, Google, Yahoo, and other mailbox providers are retiring inactive accounts, with the goal of both reducing their storage costs and freeing up desirable account names. While that makes business sense for them, it introduces some risks for email marketers, as well as for consumers.
The issue has gained greater urgency with the announcement by Google that they’ll be retiring accounts that haven’t been active in 2 years. That said, Google’s policy is much less worrisome than that of Yahoo, which has been retiring inactive accounts after just 12 months since 2013.
6 of My All-Time Favorite Quotes about Marketing
Posted on June 7, 2023
In the new 4th edition of Email Marketing Rules, I include quotes from scores of experts who have impacted how I think about the email channel, as well as about marketing in general. Here, I’d like to share six of my favorite quotes along with the wisdom I see in them. In no particular order, here they are…
“The law is the low bar.”
—Laura Atkins, Owner of Word to the Wise
“Customer loyalty is mostly about choosing the right customers.”
—John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing
“Don’t confuse attention for intent.”
—John Bonini, Founder of Some Good Content
“The customers are the assets; not the store and not the ecommerce sites.”
—Michael Brown, Partner at A.T. Kearney
“When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.”
—Herschell Gordon Lewis, author of Effective E-mail Marketing
“The strength and power of anything—whether it is a business, an individual fitness plan, or event—has its foundation in an accumulation of small, incremental improvements that all either fit together or build on each other. To sum it up: small improvement x consistency = substance.”
—Nicole Penn, President of The EGC Group
To learn why these quotes are among my favorites…
How to Use Apple’s Auto Opens Safely
Posted on June 6, 2023
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 at greater than 95%, that mountain is pretty big, especially for B2C brands.
Brands’ email marketing programs have been 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 (known opens + auto opens) have tripled. 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 have more than quintupled.
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, and makes fluctuations much more meaningful and therefore actionable.
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.
The Last Word on May 2023
Posted on June 2, 2023
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Nonprofit Welcome Email Report (Nonprofit Campaign Lab)
2023 Decision Dilemma Global Study (Oracle)
Small Business Leaders Embrace AI: 82% Expect Disruption in the Next 5 Years (Clutch)
Accessibility Report 2023 (Email Markup Consortium)
Expanding upon Gmail Security with BIMI (Gmail Workspace Updates)
Beyond ‘Click Here:’ 4 Rules for Better Email CTAs (MarTech)
Craft Enticing Event Emails to Attract Registrations and Nurture Your Audience (Really Good Emails)
25 of the Best Marketing Newsletters for Email Geeks (Email on Acid)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
A nice way to ask for primary inbox placement, but doubt it is really necessary #emailgeeks. pic.twitter.com/0ITc809WxA
— JeffDeWijs (@JeffreyDeWijs) May 1, 2023
Noteworthy subject lines
Big Lots, 5/7 – Use ANY Bed Bath & Beyond coupon at Big Lots & score BIG savings! 😯
shopDisney, 5/4 – May the 4th be with you
Vuori, 5/5 – Mother’s Day: Gifts Under $100
YETI, 5/5 – That’s One Tough Mother
Clinique Online, 5/17 – Natural-looking makeup 💕 Just 4 quick steps!
Columbia Sportswear, 5/7 – Hint: Our dresses make great gifts for mom.
Uncommon Goods, 5/15 – How to opt out of Father’s Day emails
vineyard vines, 5/18 – Good Life Gifts For Dad
vineyard vines, 5/3 – College Gear For New Grads
IKEA Family, 5/31 – Graduation season is here!
Fanatics.com, 5/14 – Game On: Celebrate Your Grad Today
Crate & Kids Design Desk, 5/8 – Playroom furniture has never looked so grown-up
Lonely Planet, 5/5 – Why are flights so ridiculously expensive right now? ✈️🤔
Lane Bryant, 5/4 – Every vacay-ready thing you need (for less) 👙🏝
RH, 5/15 – The Outdoor 2023 Source Book. Discover 260 Pages of Inspired Design.
Big Lots, 5/14 – Elevate your outdoor space without busting your budget!
Overstock Home, 5/14 – 12% off to Create Your Outdoor oasis! 1000s of Deep Discounts for Patio Season!
Williams Sonoma, 5/3 – Anyone up for a picnic? 🧺🍷🍽️
Lane Bryant, 5/29 – We hate to interrupt your backyard bbq, but…
ECCO, 5/16 – Kick off sandal season with everyday walking comfort
Vuori, 5/26 – The perfect polo doesn’t exi—
Superdry, 5/25 – We do cotton better 🌱
Williams Sonoma, 5/25 – Introducing GreenRow.
Fanatics.com, 5/4 – Introducing Backstage Merch | Where Nostalgia Meets Style
MoMA Design Store, 5/4 – Exclusive Launch! Keith Haring Sunglasses
Art.com, 5/8 – Spotlight on AAPI artist Tsz Kam.
Redbubble, 5/3 – Everything you need for the Dune: Part 2 premiere ⚔️🪱
J.Crew, 5/17 – The May swim collection, with Lucy Williams
West Elm, 5/31 – NEW limited-edition collab: RHODE + West Elm
Quiksilver, 5/15 – Quiksilver X Pacifico® Collection is back!
Forever 21, 5/4 – Hello Kitty x Forever 21 🖤
Forever 21, 5/18 – Barbie x Forever 21 💖
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Newsletters: 9 New Best Practices
Marketing Book Podcast: ‘A Lot of Structural Changes to How Email Marketing Works’
AI-Generated Images: Generative AI Concerns & Opportunities for Marketers
13 Warning Signs of Email Deliverability Problems Ahead
91 Days Success Podcast: Email Marketing Unleashed
10 Years of Email Marketing Rules: What’s Changed & What’s Next
Generative AI for Email Personalization: A Hallucination Wrapped in Confusion
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
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