Email Marketing RulesHoliday Marketing Predictions: What to Expect This Year
Posted on October 8, 2019
Every holiday season is a little different because of a variety of factors, including technology trends, consumer sentiment, and the timing of the calendar. Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC) Consulting’s experts share their thoughts and predictions on how this holiday marketing season will be different from past ones.
Our predictions this year revolve around…
- How marketers will adjust to the shorter holiday calendar
- The increase in competition in the inbox
- How marketers will close the deal with last-minute shoppers
- The quiet holiday debut that AMP for Email is likely to have
- The rise of send-time optimization
- How marketers will adapt to heightened privacy concerns this holiday season
- How brands will carry their holiday momentum into the New Year
For a full discussion of each holiday marketing prediction…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
The Last Word on September 2019
Posted on October 3, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
My Life as an Email Entrepreneur: My Final Article. (OnlyInfluencers)
How to Code Search Bars in Email (Email on Acid)
Do Not Reply to This Email: Here’s What You’re Missing (Email Optimization Shop)
Truth and Dare: Email Subject Lines (Email Optimization Shop)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Social reality check when it comes to content marketing: #CMWorld pic.twitter.com/IKy2NMyFOI
— Denise Dubie (@DDubie) September 4, 2019
genie: i will grant you three wishes
aladdin: ok
genie: but before each wish you must watch an ad
aladdin: what
genie: to skip the ads you can get Genie Prime
aladdin:
genie: also i watch you while you sleep
aladdin:
genie: and tell the other genies your preferences, habits etc— Computer Facts (@computerfact) September 8, 2019
Super nice email from @ActionRocket for the climate strike. The use of CSS keyframes is :chef’s-kiss: https://t.co/RfM4g25tZ1 #emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/MRMWJim9KE
— Ted Goas (@TedGoas) September 20, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Hobby Lobby, 9/20 — 🎄 Christmas Trees Ship FREE!
Bed Bath & Beyond, 9/1 – 🔴 ⚪ 🔵 SAVE up to 50% with Labor Day Deals + Your $20 Off Coupon Ends Soon!
Bass Pro Shops, 9/29 – Bass Pro Shops National Hunting & Fishing Day sale continues!
Eddie Bauer, 9/5 – Save On Flannel For The Whole Family
Burlington, 9/4 – Sneak peek: coats for the family
T.J.Maxx, 9/8 – Sweaters. Are. Back.
Nordstrom, 9/16 – Five trends to wear this fall
JCPenney Home, 9/8 – Score a deal! Game-day must-haves for the host
Gap, 9/26 – The sherpa jackets you’ve been seeing everywhere
Banana Republic, 9/15 – Washable blouses are here to make your life easier
Banana Republic, 9/11 – Get spotted in leopard print 🐆
Neiman Marcus, 9/20 – Coated denim adds edge
T.J.Maxx, 9/5 – The Runway Event is HERE.
Neiman Marcus, 9/1 – Ready for Fashion Week?
Lane Bryant, 9/5 – Who’s the boss? 🙋♀️
Dollar General, 9/20 – Why pay drug store prices?
Zales, 9/26 – Up For a Fun Game?
Olive Garden, 9/16 – 🍴 Can’t decide on dinner? Get $6 off 2 entrées!
Marshalls, 9/25 – Have you heard?? We’re online!
Kohl’s, 9/23 – 📱 Have you downloaded the Kohl’s App yet?
Petco, 9/28 – The Petco app has been updated and is better than ever!
Saks Fifth Avenue, 9/4 – Be happy, not perfect: a chat with Poppy Jamie on mental wellness & more
REI, 9/8 – New Sustainable Materials. Same Legendary Styles.
Patagonia, 9/16 – Strike for climate action
Patagonia, 9/20 – Fight for a livable future
Williams Somona, 9/26 – How to Bake a Cake That Looks Like Art! (It’s Easy as Pie)
Express, 9/9 – NEW! 💖 Introducing Labels We Love
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Marketing Isn’t Owned Media—It’s Granted Media
Email Blacklists: How to Get Off One, and Stay Off Them
The 2019 Email Design Look Book, Plus the 6 Pillars of Modern Email Design
Posted on October 1, 2019
The Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting team reads lots of emails. Like, tens of thousands every year. That’s because it’s our job to help brands succeed in the inbox and we’re always looking around for inspiring examples and fresh approaches.
In that spirit, we’re thrilled to share 20 of our favorite emails from the past year as part of our 2019 Email Design Look Book—just as we’ve been doing since we released our first Email Design Look Book in 2009. On their own, these emails are fantastic examples of email design, development, copywriting, and cross-channel orchestration. However, together, this collection highlights the six Pillars of Modern Email Design:
1. Minimalism
Email subscribers are hurried and distracted (just like we are), so having a concise and focused message is essential to success. Our 2019 Email Design Look Book includes great examples of minimalism from Bose, Mint, and others.
2. Rich Content
Great animation or video is worth a gazillion words, and intuitive interactivity breaks down the barriers to taking action. Our 2019 Look Book includes great examples of rich content from the BBC, LEGO, Nest, Shutterstock, and others.
3. Authenticity
Take this to heart: Consumers want to engage with brands that share their values and participate in meaningful conversations. Our 2019 Look Book includes great examples of authenticity from Filson, Lou & Grey, Patagonia, REI, and others.
4. Context
Brands must deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. How? Personalization and automation, for starters. Our 2019 Email Design Look Book includes great examples of contextuality from Alaska Airlines, Fandango, Grammarly, Unsplash, and others.
5. Service
Email subscribers want help, advice, and insights that bring greater meaning and satisfaction to a brand’s products and services. Our 2019 Look Book includes great examples of service-mindedness from Etsy, Quip, Simple, and others.
6. Delight
Who doesn’t love a pleasant surprise? (Don’t you dare raise your hand.) Humor, beautiful images, a clever spin on a familiar topic—they’re all gold. Our 2019 Look Book includes great examples of delightfulness from Comcast, Harry’s, Seamless, and others.
We hope you find as much inspiration from these emails as we have—and that they spur you to greater creativity and innovation in your future campaigns.
>> View the 2019 Email Design Look Book
Email Marketing Isn’t Owned Media—It’s Granted Media
Posted on September 24, 2019
Email marketing has an unfortunate reputation as being owned media. It’s unfortunate because it doesn’t align marketers with their subscribers and inbox providers, who are the true owners of email. And that results in strategies and tactics that invariably end up hurting their email programs and their businesses.
Some of you might be thinking, Wait, but we own our list. We spent a lot of time and money collecting those email addresses.
It’s true that brands have ownership over the email addresses they’ve collected. They can use them to identify customers and prospects across channels, and even sell them to other companies (which we highly discourage). But, beyond owning them as an identifier, brands don’t own email addresses because they don’t own the relationship that makes up the vast majority of each address’s worth.
In my book Email Marketing Rules (3rd Ed.), I say, “Lists are owned only to the extent that someone can own a collection of nonbinding handshake agreements.” Subscribers can nullify most of the value of a brand knowing their email address by withdrawing their permission—either by unsubscribing, reporting the sender’s emails as spam, or simply by ignoring the sender’s emails for a while, at which point their inbox provider will start junking or blocking their emails to the individual.
Permission is where the vast majority of email’s value comes from, and no one can own or sell someone’s permission. Period.
You might concede that point, but be thinking, But for those people who have given me permission, I own that right to reach them via email so long as I maintain their permission.
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
The Last Word on August 2019
Posted on September 6, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Warning to Marketers: You Can’t Cost-Cut Your Way To Growth (Forbes)
Most Marketers Still Don’t Let Consumers Control Email Frequency or Content (eMarketer)
Litmus Live London 2019: A Recap in Tweets (Litmus)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
1999: “Subscribe to our newsletter”
2009: “Follow me on social”
2019: “Subscribe to my newsletter”— Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) August 7, 2019
I woke up in a cold sweat last night to create this content. I present: the Email Sign-off Alignment pic.twitter.com/SkNpXxrj5V
— Julia Burnham (@juliarburnham) August 9, 2019
How old are you? I’m “had to get invited to gmail” years old.
— Elizabeth Flux (@ElizabethFlux) August 15, 2019
No. Nope. Never. Ever. pic.twitter.com/QplTByX7qe
— Michael J. Barber (@michaeljbarber) August 30, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Express, 8/29 – Labor Day Sale starts TONIGHT! (Out of Office = ON)
Nordstrom, 8/10 – Your back-to-campus checklist
T.J. MAXX, 8/10 – Create your dream dorm!
HomeGoods, 8/1 – Tips to organize your dorm in style!
Target, 8/23 – ✏️ Take note: top back-to-school deals have arrived ✔️
Saks Fifth Avenue, 8/4 – Last chance for up to 25% off new-school-year threads
SavvyMom Today, 8/13 – Our Fave Lunch Boxes and Bags for Back to School
Hobby Lobby, 8/16 – 🍂 Recreate This Charming Fall Mantel
Eddie Bauer, 8/25 – Let Flannel Season Begin!
The North Face, 8/21 – Global Climbing Day is August 24
Saks Fifth Avenue, 8/9 – MAC’s new lipstick is love at first swipe
Banana Republic, 8/29 – Introducing our Packable Performance Suit
Nordstrom, 8/14 – Check out these trending sneakers
Wegmans Meals 2GO, 8/9 – Pizza + Cauliflower = Veggie Perfection
Williams Somona, 8/16 – The Best of Europe up to 30% Off + French & Italian Recipes Inside… + Your Code for 25% Off Inside!
Kohl’s, 8/9 – 15% off + Night Owl Deals? Let the shopping begin! 🦉
Burlington, 8/23 – Introducing the Burlington Credit Card
Walgreens, 8/9 – Get 10X points when you use points in store!
Everlane, 8/15 – Back In Stock: The Performance Chino
See’s Candies, 8/15 – 🍊 Orange you glad? This lollypop favorite is back!
GrubMarket Team, 8/15 – 8 Stone Fruits – Now in Season! 🍑
VS PINK, 8/11 – 🍑 BEST 🍑 BUTT 🍑 EVER. 🍑
Express, 8/14 – Lifts you up. 🍑 Holds you in. 👖
Lane Bryant, 8/16 — $45 JEANS. Get your butt in here!
Anthropologie, 8/29 – “I just got this for 50% OFF”
Zales, 8/12 – “I Believe in Simple, Elegant Designs…” -Vera Wang
Patagonia, 8/26 – New prints and graphics inspired by the public lands and waters we love
Tractor Supply Company, 8/24 – There’s Still Time to Save on Top Pet Brands – and Join Us for Today’s Adoption Event!
Petco Foundation, 8/24 – Does Your Pet Have Superpowers?!
T.J.MAXX, 8/27 – Vacation glam or stay-at-home spa?
Lane Bryant, 8/19 – How does $500 sound?
Goop, 8/13 – who Kerrs?
Underground Cellar, 8/29 – Your $22 wine credit expires tomorrow!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Subject Line Writing: 6 Trends that Are Driving Strategy Changes
The California Consumer Privacy Act Add to Pressure for a New National Standard
Email Annotations in the Gmail Promotions Tab: Opportunities and Concerns
When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: The Best Time to Send Emails
Posted on September 3, 2019
When is the best time to send email? This question has been one of the most-asked in the email marketing industry for well over a decade. And the urgency to answer this question correctly has only grown.
That’s because we live in a time-strapped world where we only want things when we want them. But when we’re ready, we want them immediately. In the meantime, email messages are coming in all day, every day—largely without regard to when customers are most interested in reading and responding to them. It’s a mismatch that leads to frustration, disengagement, and opt-outs.
Thankfully, this doesn’t need to be the case. Brands have more data and tools at their disposal than ever to answer the question of the best time to send emails. Patterns in historical open, click, and conversion behaviors are readily available for your each of your subscribers. Taking advantage of that known behavior offers a competitive advantage that will boost performance of your program. In fact, Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s Head of Strategic Services, Clint Kaiser, says that in all of his years of working with clients, he has yet to see it fail to deliver material lifts in a program. Ever.
However, there are several ways to determine “the best time to send emails,” says Kaiser. They vary in terms of the level of impact that they’ll have, but they’re all better than an arbitrary deployment time for your emails based solely upon hunches or how you’ve done it historically. Let’s look at a few data-based approaches to picking deployment times…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
On-Demand Webinar: The Future…Delayed – The Forces that Keep Brands from Being Aligned with Consumer Behaviors
Posted on August 27, 2019
The goal of every brand is to be relevant to consumers and aligned with consumer behaviors. That’s why brands launched ecommerce sites as the internet became an increasingly common place to shop. That’s why brands made their emails mobile-friendly as smartphones became an increasingly common way to read emails. And that’s why brands created Facebook pages and started running ads on Facebook as that social media site became increasingly popular.
Brands chase audiences.
But the speed at which individual brands pursue consumers and align themselves with consumer behaviors varies wildly. Some are on the bleeding edge. Some wait for a solid critical mass. Some wait as long as they can. And some never get on board—sometimes much to their detriment.
In this on-demand webinar, we discuss the forces that keep brands from aligning with consumer behaviors more quickly. Plus, you’ll hear advice on how to overcome those forces from some of our more than 500 experts at Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting, including Clint Kaiser, Cristal Foster, Kim Roman, Autumn Coleman, and Otilia Antipa.
Let’s limit the delay in adapting to consumer behaviors, so we’re serving our customers better and minimizing how much of the future we cede to our competitors.
>> Watch the on-demand webinar on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Subject Line Writing: 6 Trends that Are Driving Strategy Changes
Posted on August 20, 2019
Have your subject line writing strategies and tactics kept up with the times? Check and see if you’re accounting for these six changes in subject line writing, going from the oldest to the newest trend:
- Subject lines need to work with preview text.
- Subject lines can include many more visual elements.
- Subject lines need to demonstrate contextuality, when it exists.
- Machine learning can help write subject lines.
- Voice-assistants are now reading our subject lines.
- Brands may need to write alternative subject lines, if they’re using Email Annotations.
Some of Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s copywriters—including Lizette Resendez, Monica McClure, and Kelly Moran—help break down each of these trends. They share examples and advice on how marketers can adapt their subject line writing to each of these trends.
>> Read the fully post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
The California Consumer Privacy Act Add to Pressure for a New National Standard
Posted on August 13, 2019
First there was the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), which went into effect in 2014. Then there was the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in 2018. Now, after years of major corporate data breaches and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, stronger privacy and data protection laws are taking hold in the US, with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) being the most impactful.
Passed in 2018 and due to go into effect on July 1, 2020, CCPA will add significant privacy protections for Californians and place new burdens on businesses. While the law applies only to residents of California, most businesses have customers in the state and collect private information from customers, so it has broad implications for marketers nationwide.
CCPA is the most sweeping consumer privacy legislation ever passed in the US and gives consumers broad control over personal information collected by businesses. The law is not specific to any one digital channel, but spans all channels where personal information is collected, stored, and used by marketers.
Californians will have the following rights under the law:
- Right to know what personal information is being collected and whether it is sold or disclosed and to whom
- The right to say no to the sale of personal information
- The right to access their personal information
- The right to equal service and price when privacy rights are exercised
In this blog post, Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s Brian Sullivan explains how the California Consumer Privacy Act affects marketers, in addition to discussing the actions being taken by others states besides California.
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Email Annotations in the Gmail Promotions Tab: Opportunities and Concerns
Posted on August 6, 2019
Google’s mission is to sift through the ocean of data out there and bubble up the most critical information so you can find it more easily. They do that in their search results and they increasingly do that in Gmail, whether it’s through Gmail Highlights, featuring the “Top Deals” in the Promotions tab, or through their latest feature, Email Annotations.
What do Email Annotations do? Let’s break this down: (1) Gmail will display Email Annotations in the place of traditional preview text in the inbox (2) under certain circumstances for emails in Gmail’s Promotional Tab (3) when those emails have had Email Annotations coded into them.
In this post, Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s Nick Cantu, James Wurm, and Heather Goof look at all three elements of that statement in turn, including providing the code that you’d need to add to each of your emails to enable Email Annotations. We’ll also pause and ask the most critical question: Even if I can enable them, should I?
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
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
Features
