Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on January 2021
Posted on February 4, 2021
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Email Design Trends for 2021 (Really Good Emails)
The State of Email Newsletters: 2021 and Beyond (What If)
Microsoft Is Building a New Outlook App for Windows and Mac Powered by the Web (Windows Central)
88% of Marketers Say Collecting First-Party Data Is a 2021 Priority, Study Says (Marketing Dive)
DMA Email Council: Advice to Further a Career in Email Marketing (DMA UK)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Emails are like billboards.
They get seen at 75mph. If you can grab them in about 1 second, they’ll take the next exit and then you can tell them more.
Say less, better.
— Whale (@whale) January 22, 2021
Hi @ClubMonaco, your subject-line gave me a heart attack!
SL: Your Custom Edit has shipped
I don’t recommend you use this type of click-bait tactic in the future, it makes me want to unsubscribe #emailgeeks #EmailMarketing pic.twitter.com/xeEl2Kf2D0
— Nadja Cada (@NadjaCada) January 6, 2021
Goes without saying, but the latest interactive email for the BBC by @ActionRocket is sweeeeeeeet as. Another hole-in-one 🏆✨ #emailgeeks https://t.co/5tOkIksjzV
— Nicole Merlin (@moonstrips) January 12, 2021
I’d love to get in touch with Emilio Esteves. Does anyone have his emailio addressteves?
— Séamas It Ever Was (@shockproofbeats) November 16, 2012
Good morning to everyone except the people who start their emails with “FWD:” or “RE:” just to trick you into opening their sales pitch.
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) January 19, 2021
Noteworthy subject lines
ModCloth, 1/20 – Madam. Vice. President. 🇺🇸
Burlington, 1/18 – “Life’s most persistent and urgent question…What are you doing for others?” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
West Elm, 1/11 – Join us as we honor the MLK Day of Service, now thru 1/18
Michaels, 1/20 – See what’s in store for 2021. 🔮 This year’s top DIY trends are here!
Sephora Insider, 1/19 – It’s finally 2021—celebrate with new beauty 🎉
Schwan’s Home Delivery, 1/28 – 🏀🏈 SAVE $1.00 on these Game Day All-Stars!
Panera Bread, 1/29 – Plan your Game Day order now, Henry! 🏈
Sears, 1/14 – CONTROVERSIAL OPINION 🏈 Football on TV is better
The Nuts.com Family, 1/28 – Touchdown Treats for Super Bowl Sunday!
DICK’S Sporting Goods, 1/12 – Roll, Champions, Roll 🏆 🏈 Shop Alabama Crimson Tide Gear
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 1/31 – Plan now for an EPIC Valentine’s Day at home!
Evite, 1/29 – A Galentine’s Day to remember
Zales, 1/24 – 💞 Love BOLDLY
Michaels, 1/18 – 💌 Heart it? Cart it! All you need is live… and these Valentine DIYs.
Uncommon Goods, 1/4 – We’re with Cupid 💘 💖
Tractor Supply Company, 1/23 – Shopping Made Easy with Curbside Pick Up on Cold Weather Supplies
Starbucks, 1/15 – Brew a cup of mindfulness with Headspace
IKEA, 1/26 – Chad, stressed about working from home?
MoMA Design Store, 1/11 – WFH? Transform Your Space with These
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 1/7 – Turn your bath into a spa.
Bed Bath & Beyond, 1/21 – 🥧 Baking buys UNDER $100! Get the scoop —-> Plus, take these coupons!
Williams Sonoma, 1/7 – More home baked bread, please
Great Gap Sale, 1/18 – Joggers go with everything (trust us!)
JCPenney, 1/12 – Your activewear just got upgraded
Sephora, 1/5 – New self-tanner for glowy, hydrated skin 🌴 ✨
Banana Republic, 1/20 – Better Together: Dresses & Sneakers
Target, 1/15 – Levi’s jeans, now in more sizes.
Target, 1/8 – Weighted blankets: 20% off + bonus 10% off.
Express, 1/12 – Like wearing your fave blanket, only cuter | + $45 ALL DENIM
Victoria’s Secret, 1/31 – Cuddle Up with Lounge Bras
Eddie Bauer, 1/20 – Polar Vortex-Ready Parkas – $99
Saks Fifth Avenue, 1/31 – Results are in: our best-selling shoes & bags
Nordstrom, 1/15 – Trending now and only here
Crate & Barrel, 1/25 – ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ | Top-rated pieces, back in stock.
Petco, 1/2 – Is your dog at a healthy weight?
Uncommon Goods, 1/8 – New: Adventure awaits with our scratch-off scrapbooking challenge 📷
Patagonia, 1/19 – A new story about an old shirt
Bass Pro Shops, 1/26 – 19 days until Daytona!
Bass Pro Shops, 1/31 – Don’t miss the BIGGEST announcement in fishing history!
IKEA, 1/18 – Chad, get the 2021 Catalog at IKEA Stoughton
RV Magazine, 1/21 – The ALL new RV Magazine eNewsletter is Here!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
ZeroBounce: Email Marketing Tips to Help You in 2021
2020 Email Marketing Holiday Season in Review
Holiday Marketing Quarterly: First Quarter 2021 Checklist
Best Uses & Best Practices for Animated Gifs
Coherent Path Podcast: Coherent Thoughts with Chad S. White
The Best Use Cases for Live Content in Emails
Email Deliverability Quarterly: Gmail’s Spam Rate Recalculation, CPRA Passes, and More
On-Demand Webinar: Modular Email Architecture
Posted on February 2, 2021
Classic email templates are becoming obsolete. They are difficult to maintain, don’t offer enough flexibility, make personalization cumbersome, and take too much time to turn into a final email campaign that’s ready to send. Because of all of those weaknesses, more companies are migrating to modular email architecture and reaping significant improvements.
In this 49-minute on-demand webinar, Jason Witt and Nick Cantu from Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Creative Services team join me to discuss:
- How modular email architecture differs from traditional email templates
- The benefits of having a modular email architecture
- The popularity and adoption rate of this way of creating emails
- What’s involved in building a modular email architecture
- How Oracle Marketing Consulting and our clients use modular email architecture
To learn about all of those issues…
>> Watch the free on-demand webinar on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Sendinblue: 15 Experts Predict the Future of Email
Posted on February 1, 2021
From technological advances to the impact of Covid-19, the future of email marketing will bring both opportunities and challenges. To make sure you’re prepared, Sendinblue asked me and 14 other email marketing experts which trends we think will have the biggest impact this year.
My advice centers on the fact that changing consumer behaviors, as well as civil unrest and political sensitivities, drove brands to try to reduce the number of days in their email production cycles. I say:
“2020 highlighted a need for brands to be more nimble and responsive with their email marketing. In 2021, that will translate into a push to automate more content using personalization and AI-driven recommendations. But even more than that, email programs will seek to simplify and speed up their email builds, leading to a surge in adoption of modular email architecture.”
My fellow contributors offer great advice on adjusting to post-pandemic changes, the tactics and tools to focus on now, and the most-urgent trends in email design and copywriting. For all of our advice…
>> Read the entire post on the Sendinblue blog
ZeroBounce: Email Marketing Tips to Help You in 2021
Posted on January 28, 2021
I join 9 other email marketing experts in sharing my advice about how to succeed with email in the year ahead in this post on the ZeroBounce blog. My advice centers on how open time behaviors have changed during the pandemic and how adoption of send time optimization has increased significantly in response to those changes.
I start my advice by saying:
“The ‘best time to send’ has forever been a moving target, but no more so than during 2020 when the pandemic caused a spike in unemployment and a shift to work from home that led to significant changes to subscriber behaviors. Some of our clients saw significant boosts in email engagement by changing their email send days to traditionally less popular days, such as Saturday and Sunday. Also, some experienced boosts from changing their send time or, better yet, adopting send time optimization, which sends your emails based on each subscriber’s previous open times.”
To read all of my advice, as well as the advice of the 9 other contributors…
>> Read the entire post on the ZeroBounce Blog
2020 Email Marketing Holiday Season in Review
Posted on January 26, 2021
The 2020 holiday season was chaotic and irregular because of the pandemic, a contentious election, and consumers’ financial challenges. Email marketers struggled with those issues, which led to mixed performance results, although email marketing still delivered a high return on investment.
Overall, email volume was up 9% year-over-year during the fourth quarter holiday period, according to data from Oracle Marketing Consulting based on a panel of more than 40 major national B2C brands using the Oracle Responsys Campaign Management platform. In fact, email volume was up every week except during election week, when now-proven-false allegations of election fraud and the threat of violence caused retailers to close stores and pull back on their marketing efforts.
Over the holiday period, email open rates trended nearly identical to last year, finishing up 0.8%. On the other hand, email click rates over the holiday season finished 6.3% below last year’s level, and revenue per email was down 5.8% year-over-year as well.
This blog post goes on to discuss…
- How demand was pulled forward earlier in the holiday season
- How marque shopping days underperformed
- How email churn has remained low
- Which sectors under- and over-performed
- How trends during the 2020 holiday season might affect this year’s holiday season
For a full discussion of each of those issues…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Holiday Marketing Quarterly: First Quarter 2021 Checklist
Posted on January 20, 2021
Oracle’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives B2C brands a quarter-by-quarter checklist for how to achieve more during the critical holiday season with their email marketing and other digital marketing channels. Along with guidance on planning, strategy, and prioritization, you’ll get advice and tips from some of Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts.
Our first quarter guide contains a 27-point checklist and 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 during the next holiday season. It covers six areas:
- Holiday Post-Mortems
- Seasonal Buyer Reactivations
- Email Deliverability Recoveries
- Automated Email Optimization & Growth
- Creative Refreshes
- Upgrades & Expansions of Your Tech Stack
For details on each of those areas…
>> Download the 20-page Q1 2021 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Best Uses & Best Practices for Animated Gifs
Posted on January 19, 2021
Until there’s better support for animated PNGs, CSS animation, and video in email, animated gifs are the safest and easiest way to add motion to your campaigns. And once you’ve created an animated gif for an email, you can reuse it in social media and other digital marketing campaigns. We use them regularly with both our B2C and B2B clients to great success.
Animated gifs are effective for:
- Video previews
- Highlighting product options, such as different colors, patterns, sizes, or configurations
- Displaying an assortment of products
- Product demonstrations or service instructions, whether it’s showing how a dress flows or how a backhoe can remove a boulder
- Reveals, including before-and-afters and price/discount reveals
- Mobile app and software demonstrations or navigation instructions
- Conveying urgency (think: countdown clocks)
- Drawing attention to calls-to-action
- Atmospheric feel (think: fireworks, rain, falling snow)
- Humor
However, there are some concerns you should be aware of when using animated gifs. For a full discussion of those…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Coherent Path Podcast: Coherent Thoughts with Chad S. White
Posted on January 15, 2021
I join Coherent Path CEO James Glover on the Coherent Thoughts podcast to talk about:
- The biggest misconceptions around email
- The value of having universal holdout groups
- Focusing on maximizing the value of a subscriber, not the value of a campaign
- How lobbying by merchants can distract email marketing from serving subscribers
- How AI and machine learning can help marketers focus on their customers
- How email marketers can be more efficient and save time
- Avoiding graphical text
- What marketers need to do differently compared to 12 months ago
- Which brands are sending me emails that I look forward to receiving
- Whether personalization is ruining America and making us more polarized
For a discussion of each of these issues…
>> Listen to the Coherent Thoughts podcast on the Coherent Path blog
The Best Use Cases for Live Content in Emails
Posted on January 12, 2021
The second you send an email, the content in it starts to age. While some content is evergreen and maintains its relevance until whenever your subscribers open your email, other content has a limited lifespan, after which it’s considerably less useful—or completely useless. However, live content can make sure that your content is fresh no matter when your email is opened.
That’s because live content is populated at the time that an individual subscriber opens your email, not at the time that you send it. This not only ensures that your email content is timely, it also allows marketers to include content in their emails that would be difficult to include otherwise.
While image caching by Gmail and Yahoo Mail can sometimes short circuit live content, it’s still powerful. In fact, because of live content’s unique benefits, Oracle Marketing Consultants consider it to be a low adoption–high impact email marketing trend, which means that using live content offers not only significant benefits but also a competitive advantage.
Live content is most effective when used to display content that changes rapidly. Here is our list of the use cases where we think it delivers the biggest impact:
- Live countdown timers
- Account dashboards
- Real-time inventory
- Live poll results
- Device targeting
- Calendar invites
- Live sports scores, medal counts, etc.
- Local weather
- Local maps
- Social media feeds
In this blog post, Oracle Consulting’s Nick Cantu talks about each of those in turn.
>> Read the entire post on on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Webinar on Jan. 21: Modular Email Architecture
Posted on January 6, 2021
Classic email templates are becoming obsolete. They are difficult to maintain, don’t offer enough flexibility, make personalization cumbersome, and take too much time to turn into a final email campaign that’s ready to send. Because of all of those weaknesses, more companies are migrating to modular email architectures and reaping significant improvements.
In this webinar, we’ll explain:
- How modular email architecture differs from traditional email templates
- The benefits of having a modular email architecture
- The popularity and adoption rate of this way of creating emails
- What’s involved in building a modular email architecture
- How Oracle CX Marketing Consulting and our clients use modular email architecture
You’ll leave this webinar with a clear understanding of how modular email architecture can speed up your email production, improve your testing, increase your use of personalization, and more.
Modular Email Architecture: The Next-Generation Email Template
Date: Jan. 21, 2021
Time: 1pm ET/10 am PT
Duration: 1 hour
Your presenters:
Jason Witt, Senior Director of Creative Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting
Nick Cantu, Senior Art Director for Creative Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting
Chad S. White, Head of Research, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting (moderator)
>> Register for this free webinar
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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