Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on July 2019
Posted on August 5, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
British Airways faces record £183m fine for data breach (BBC)
Cultivate Lasting Customer Relationships Through Loyalty Programs (CMS Wire)
Tinder Inspired Interactive Email: Interview With Penguin Random House (Email on Acid)
Email Marketers are Currently Crushing it (Rockstar CMO)
Mat Sweezey’s List of 103 Marketing Thought Leaders, by Category (Marketing Profs)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Everyone should be able to read your email, no matter their permanent, temporary, or situational disability. #litmuslive #emaildesign #emailmarketing #ADA pic.twitter.com/KyQhSZzzNJ
— Lauren Sinnott (@LSinnottHCB) July 31, 2019
A3: It’s such a bummer when brands use From Name tricks to confuse subscribers into opening. It can harm credibility. There are instances where it makes sense to use a person’s name in the From, but fooling folks into engagement can harm credibility and brand sentiment. #EOAChat https://t.co/2kDeTnOhls
— Jen Capstraw (@jencapstraw) July 9, 2019
When you open a Google doc and the only other person in the doc is… you from another tab. pic.twitter.com/TYnrXinrky
— Cap Watkins (@cap) July 11, 2019
Nice try, @gmail 🙄 pic.twitter.com/fue7WPE0rX
— Harry Roberts (@csswizardry) July 15, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Express, 7/31 – Hit PAUSE on your show – EVERYTHING is 30% off online
Best Buy Weekly Ad, 7/21 – OMG. It’s an e-mail from Best Buy – Apple offers are here for this week!
Bed Bath & Beyond, 7/13 – Please open for summer’s BLACK FRIDAY! We’re giving you this $180 off deal and a 20% or $20 off coupon.
Fossil, 7/5 – Cue the Celebratory Music!
J.Crew, 7/5 – Hold on to your hot dog buns: Shop 40% off full-price styles!
West Elm, 7/5 – HBD America! THIS awesome deal ends TONIGHT in stores + online!
Harley-Davidson, 7/5 — *** Forever Riding Free ***
Zales, 7/5 – Open for Black Friday In July Savings
Banana Republic, 7/12 – T.G.I. 40% OFF
VS PINK, 7/30 – This PINK FRIDAY will be CRAZY! 🤯 SEE WHAT’S ON SALE!
Saks Fifth Avenue, 7/20 – The subtle way to do scent this summer
Staples, 7/21 – Style + savings: 20% off school supplies when you buy a backpack.
Hobby Lobby, 7/15 – Fall is what you make it™
Wegmans Meals 2GO, 7/20 – Weekends Are Meant for Less Work
Neiman Marcus, 7/20 – 25 free samples & metallic clutch when you shop beauty
Gap, 7/10 – Our latest collabs just dropped
T.J.Maxx, 7/22 – Made in Italy. Unbelievable prices.
Patagonia, 7/12 – Recycled T-shirts that save resources
Petco Foundation, 7/5 – Save Lives with a Click!
Subway, 7/31 – Our app does it all
VS PINK, 7/31 – Our Crush Of The Week is 🍑 approved!
Lane Bryant, 7/31 – A little ooh-la-la for your lingerie drawer
Epicurious, 7/3 – 11 things you should know before you throw that 4th of July BBQ
Banana Republic, 7/3 – Introducing: BR STYLE ITINERARY ISSUE #1
Walmart, 7/6 – Achieve backyard bliss this summer
Express, 7/12—A cheat sheet to finding your perfect rise
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Deliverability Problems Ahead: 11 Red Flashing Warning Signs
When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: Optimizing Automated Emails
Email Deliverability Quarterly: Return Path Acquired, CCPA Update, Yahoo-AOL Merged, and More
Email Deliverability Problems Ahead: 11 Red Flashing Warning Signs
Posted on July 30, 2019
Nothing can destroy your email marketing performance quite like email deliverability problems. Whether it’s the slow slip of inbox placement due to diminishing engagement or the sudden collapse due to a block or blacklisting, it’s always devastating and usually a shock. But, honestly, email deliverability problems are rarely a surprise if you know what to look out for.
In this post, Clea Moore, Director of Deliverability Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting, shares a list of events that often precede email deliverability problems:
- Changing Email Service Providers
- Warming Up a New IP Address
- Warming Up a New Sending Subdomain
- When Doing High-Volume Ad-Hoc Sends
- During Peak Season Sending
- When Bounce Rates Start to Exceed 3%-5%
- When Opening Up a New Subscriber Acquisition Source
- During Periods of Faster-than-Usual List Growth
- When Email Complaint Rates Start to Exceed 0.2%
- When Your Open Rates Drop Dramatically at a Particular Mailbox Provider
- When Your Open Rates Average 5% or Less at a Particular Mailbox Provider
For a detailed discussion of each of these, plus more advice on when to seek the help of a deliverability expert…
>> Read the full post on the Modern Marketing Blog
When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: Optimizing Automated Emails
Posted on July 23, 2019
Email marketing is so effective and has such a high return on investment that brands often settle for good enough when they could be achieving much higher returns. In this blog post series, we’ll be examining several overlooked opportunities to increase your email marketing performance.
One of the biggest opportunities is around optimizing your triggered or automated emails. These high-performing, workhorse emails reliably perform hour after hour, day after day. They include cart abandonment, browse abandonment, and post-purchase cross-sell emails, amongst others.
Automated emails have been unfortunately lauded as “set it and forget it” emails. If you’ve consciously or unconsciously embraced that approach, then you’re settling for slowly diminishing returns and possibly deteriorating customer experiences.
These are living emails, and as such require ongoing attention to ensure that they’re healthy and thriving. With that in mind…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Email Deliverability Quarterly: Return Path Acquired, CCPA Update, Yahoo-AOL Merged, and More
Posted on July 16, 2019
Email deliverability is constantly changing, as inbox providers adjust their filtering algorithms, blacklists tweak their listing criteria, and consumers evolve their definition of spam. That’s why even the best email marketing programs suffer deliverability problems sometimes.
To help you avoid trouble, the deliverability practice at Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting (OMCC) shares the latest news and tips for what to watch out for in our inaugural Email Deliverability Quarterly.
In this post, Dan Deneweth, Heather Goff, Clea Moore, and Kent McGovern explain how the following news and events will impact marketers’ email deliverability:
- Validity Acquires Return Path
- CCPA Likely Won’t Be Replaced by Stronger PAA
- More State Consumer Privacy Bills Brewing
- Verizon Completes Merger of Yahoo Mail and AOL Infrastructure
- Apple Mail Adds Tabs
- ‘Sign In with Apple’ Announced
For the full discussion of each of these issues…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
The Last Word on June 2019
Posted on July 8, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
It’s Probably Time to Stop Announcing the Death of Email (Forbes)
Is This Common Mistake Affecting Your GDPR Opt-In Rate? (Smart Insights)
Email on Tap Episode 11, with Dan Deneweth, Senior Director, Strategic Services, Oracle (250ok)
Email Deliverability: The Ultimate Guide to Avoid the Spam Folder (Moosend)
Dynamic Email in Gmail Becoming Generally Available on July 2, 2019 (G Suite Updates)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
I unsubscribe from any email that fakes “Re:” or “FWD:” in the subject line. No ifs ands or buts.
— 𝔸𝕃𝔼𝕏 (@alexcwilliams) June 3, 2019
Accessibility is not a nice to have pic.twitter.com/xuVSP0ET7F
— Cher (@codehitchhiker) June 3, 2019
I’ve walked into a position that used 3rd party data… The first thing they said “we don’t know if we can trust our data”. I proved that they couldn’t trust it and it never got used. Take the time to collect first party data in a transparent way and those efforts will pay off.
— Tony Zupancic (@TonyZupancic) June 12, 2019
Remove all the links from your email newsletter–is it still valuable and informative?
No? You’ve got some work to do.
Yes? Great. You’ve earned the right to add the links back.
— John Bonini (@Bonini84) June 24, 2019
Today’s words of wisdom: Opt-outs do not expire! Do not send mail to people who opted out. You can’t decide it’s time to try mailing them again just because you want to. That’s not how this works.
— Laura Atkins (@wise_laura) June 26, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Everlane, 6/13 – New Styles Added: Choose What You Pay
Eddie Bauer, 6/13 – Dad Jokes + Great Gifts = Win-Win
Williams Sonoma, 6/2 – Great Gifts for Every Dad – The Griller, The Gardener, The Cook & Much More!
Walgreens Photo, 6/4 – Last chance to ship your Dad’s Day gifts!
Quiksilver, 6/2 – Your 4th Of July Get-Up Just Got Better
Williams Sonoma, 6/25 – Celebrate the 4th with Hot Dogs, Patriotic Cakes & More
Bed Bath & Beyond, 6/4 – Deck out your dorm room with all things UGG.
West Elm, 6/21 – Happy 1st day of summer! Up to 40% off outdoor furniture + decor
Ann Taylor, 6/8 – Tis The Season For White Pants
Neiman Marcus, 6/27 – Up to 30% off sunglasses! Celebrate National Sunglasses Day
J.Crew, 6/8 – What to wear to work this summer…
Banana Republic, 6/9 – The fool-proof shirt of summer
Barneys New York, 6/2 – Where To Wear: Your Vacation To-Do List
Petco, 6/22 – Bark if you need a vacation!
ASPCA, 6/18 – LIVE VOTE: Pick The Best Kitten Name!
Hayneedle, 6/18 – We polled our staff – and here are their absolute favorites for outdoor this season.
Neiman Marcus, 6/18 – Carolina Herrera’s artful new prints
Hayneedle, 6/15 – 4 design rules you can totally break.
Gap, 6/18 – Got growing kids? We’ve got tees
Saks Fifth Avenue, 6/2 – Add to cart ASAP: Up to 50% off top designer picks
Target, 6/27 – Beauty deal: Spend $20, get a $5 gift card.
Saks Fifth Avenue, 6/6 – New beauty + complimentary yoga mat = Bring on summer
Petco, 6/6 – Whale, whale, whale, here’s 30% off
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Trends in Using Email Marketing to Amplify Content Marketing
On-Demand Webinar: Poor Email Performance Visibility – You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See
Why Building Homegrown Email Platforms Is So Out of Favor
Posted on July 2, 2019
Build or buy? When it comes to email marketing platforms, it’s a question that brands rarely bother to ask themselves anymore because nearly everyone buys. And when brands do seriously ask themselves this question, it’s exceedingly rare for them to actually choose to go down the build road.
According to Litmus’s State of Email Survey of thousands of marketers worldwide, the percentage of brands using custom, homegrown email platforms to send marketing emails fell to just 6.1% in 2018, down from 10.9% in 2016.
Most of these homegrown email platforms are only used to send transactional emails, with traditional email service providers used to send the promotional emails that make up the vast, vast majority of their email volume. Only 34% of brands rely exclusively on a homegrown email platform to send all of their marketing emails, according to Litmus. That means that just 2% of brands use in-house email platforms to support all their email needs.
As you might expect, many of the companies that do choose to go this route are tech giants like Amazon and Uber. In fact, it’s become a not-so-funny joke that if you hire an email marketer from Amazon that they’ll want to build their own email platform. Since most companies don’t have Amazon’s scale, resources, and culture, this is a recipe for plenty of pain and suffering, if not disaster.
Let’s better understand why homegrown email platforms are dwindling and becoming the exclusive pet projects of unicorn companies by looking at the major dangers associated with homegrown email platforms…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Business Book of the Month Podcast: Chad S. White’s ‘Email Marketing Rules’
Posted on July 1, 2019
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with David Bain, the host of the Business Book of the Month Podcast, about my book, Email Marketing Rules.
During the 51-minute interview, we talked about a wide range of email marketing topics, including:
- The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs
- How the paid-owned-earned (POE) media model has become outdated and doesn’t account for email marketing, as well as several other popular channels
- How to best include promotional content in transactional emails
- The need to have promotional emails, transactional emails, and corporate emails on different IP addresses and sender domains
- The recommended minimal email frequency
- Where to find your most valuable subscribers
- Sender name best practices
- Different approaches to mobile-friendly email design
- The advantages of maintaining a content calendar
- And much, much more.
>> Listen to the Business Book of the Month podcast online
Or listen wherever you get your podcasts
Trends in Using Email Marketing to Amplify Content Marketing
Posted on June 25, 2019
As a 13-year veteran of content marketing, I’m biased, but I think it’s fair to say that content marketing is a powerful way to:
- Demonstrate that your company is composed of experts in their field
- Start, shape, and contribute to valuable and important industry conversations
- Help your customers maximize their positive outcomes and avoid negative ones
- Attract and engage prospects and familiarize them with your brand
As great as content marketing is, a “build it and they will come” philosophy only gets you so far nowadays…and that’s where email marketing comes in.
Email marketing helps get your content in front of more people—specifically, your most loyal customers and most interested prospects. But email is about so much more than just content amplification. Here are some ways that email marketing makes your content marketing work harder for you…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
On-Demand Webinar: Poor Email Performance Visibility – You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See
Posted on June 18, 2019
Email marketing programs are complex three-dimensional objects. If you don’t look at them from all angles and shine a light into the nooks, you simply can’t see it all. And if you can’t fully see it, you have little hope of fully understanding it, much less optimizing and mastering it.
Unfortunately, there’s significant evidence that many brands have poor visibility into their email performance. That’s jeopardizing both customer experiences and email profitability for those brands.
In this on-demand webinar, we discuss how poor performance visibility is affecting email marketing quality assurance, return on investment, and deliverability. Along the way, we share research as well as advice from a few of the more than 500 consultants at Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting—including our Senior Director of QA and Campaign Services, Simone Edmonds; Senior Strategic Consultant for Deliverability Services, Kent McGovern; and Director of Strategic Services, Kaiti Livermore. Break the cycle of your email marketing status quo.
>> Watch the free on-demand webinar
The Last Word on May 2019
Posted on June 4, 2019
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
When It’s Time to Let Go: 5 Tactics to Improve the Unsubscribe Experience (Litmus)
Do recent changes in the ESP landscape benefit clients? IBM, Epsilon, Yes Marketing (Email Vendor Selection)
What brands can learn from a year of GDPR in preparing for the California Consumer Privacy Act (MarketingDive)
The Cookie Crumbles: Google Announces Privacy Controls (Wayin)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Email is like life. No matter how experienced you are at it, it still has the potential to surprise you! #EmailMarketing #EmailDesign #EmailDevelopment #EmailGeeks
— Beyond the Envelope™ (@Paul_Airy) May 2, 2019
If you’re sending messages from a financial institution, you shouldn’t EVER be failing authentication. ESPECIALLY if you’re asking recipients TO CLICK A LINK.
— Mickey Chandler (@mickc_pro) May 3, 2019
“I want to break up”
“OK, but do you want to get back together” pic.twitter.com/PKbymsELMP— Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) May 7, 2019
Marketers are changing. Students majoring in #marketing are now learning technical skills as well including #coding. The “Marketechers” as @IBMWatson’s @LorenMcDonald calls them, are the #futureofmarketing work. @TiEcon #FutureofWork pic.twitter.com/d3TVDrWm0x
— Localized (@Localizedworld) May 10, 2019
🖐Tips for Writing Alt Text:
1️⃣Use different alt text for each image
2️⃣Be descriptive but watch the length
3️⃣Don’t use title text as alt text
4️⃣Use empty alt text for design elements
5️⃣ Style alt text for users with blocked images#emailaccessibility #emaildesign #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/UkwqXX1YCA— Email on Acid (@EmailonAcid) May 20, 2019
Noteworthy subject lines
Monterey Bay Aquarium, 5/23 – Summer is coming
Burlington, 5/1 – Give Mom what she really wants
Belk, 5/1 – Spoil Mom, Spoil YOU: Up to 70% Off
Barneys New York, 5/5 – 12 Gift Ideas For Mother’s Day
Clinique, 5/5 – Make sure Mom’s gifts arrive on time.
Ann Taylor, 5/12 – Final Hours For Our Mother’s Day Event!
Neiman Marcus, 5/19 – Dolce & Gabbana for you & your mini
ThinkGeek, 5/4 – May the Fourth Be With You (and this Coupon Code)
FansEdge, 5/4 – May The Fourth Be With You
Chico’s, 5/5 – Cinco DEAL Mayo: Final Deal
J.Crew, 5/30 – We’re bursting with pride
Fossil, 5/30 – Ace Grad Gifting
JCPenney, 5/29 – Dip your toes in…$5 flip flops!
Banana Republic, 5/26 – Summer starts now. Wear linen.
Hayneedle, 5/19 – The seagulls are impressed. Gorgeous coastal-style rooms.
MAC Cosmetics, 5/13 – The Disney Aladdin Collection by M•A•C is Going Fast!
Saks Fifth Avenue, 5/7 – These Met Gala-inspired pieces are pink carpet-approved…
Express, 5/1 – The May Edit: Rent this month’s top trending styles
Ann Taylor, 5/10 – 40% Off This Season’s Must-Have Hue
Sears, 5/5 – Please share! Extra 10-20% off + $60 CASHBACK in points
UncommonGoods, 5/15 – Up to 70% Off (still 100% Uncommon)
Applebee’s, 5/4 – Teachers + Applebee’s = Free Appetizer
Moosejaw, 5/23 – Limited Edition Collection — Moosejaw x Great Lakes Proud
MAC Cosmetics, 5/19 – Four Formulas to Master Your Ultimate Matte Lip!
Epicurious, 5/29 – Stop crying over chopped onions!
Jos. A. Bank, 5/16 – Maintain your Body’s Optimum Microclimate with Travel Tech
ModCloth, 5/3 – Add a little “je ne sais quoi” to your wardrobe.
ThinkGeek, 5/13 – Pika Pika?
Sony Electronics, 5/13 – Our Speaker is Famous | The XB41 is in a New Music Video
Feeding America, 5/22 – Endless summer… for all the wrong reasons
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
SEMrush’s Marketing Scoop Podcast: What Works Best for Email Marketing Now?
2-Year Anniversary of the 3rd Edition of “Email Marketing Rules”
How to Use AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully
Litmus’s Delivering Podcast: Asking the Right Questions
The Rise of Exploitive Email Click Bots
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
