Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on August 2018
Posted on September 12, 2018
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer (Recode)
Email Workers Bogged Down With Operational Tasks: Study (MediaPost)
Give Your Email Team the Keys to the Marketing Database (Neverbounce)
The Importance of Email File Size (SparkPost)
2018 Cart Abandonment Inspiration: We have abandonment issues (Curated Email)
The 6 Pillars of Effective Email Acquisition (Trendline Interactive)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
To all you email designer / developers out there. I salute you. Your world is soooooo different.
— Dan (@danjdavies) August 28, 2018
I’ve had a nightmare over the past few months with non-payers, late payers and excuse makers. My experience prompted me to make: https://t.co/d1ql0rRlif – A curated list of articles, tools and templates to try to help UK freelancers. #freelance #freelancers
— Paul Maloney (@p_maloney) August 7, 2018
To all sales reps ever: Emails do not “get lost in my inbox.” I just don’t read yours.
— Matt Byrd (@mparkerbyrd) August 16, 2018
“We value you as a customer and would love to hear your feedback.” -noreply@mostcompanies.com
— Greg Galant (@gregory) August 22, 2018
The job of a #marketinganalytics dashboard isn’t to answer all your questions. It’s to help you ask better, deeper questions – @MattHertig #emflconf
— Krissy Head (@krissmatiss) August 24, 2018
Sure, sex is great but have you ever taken new email template designs and spent 5 hours with graph paper breaking them down to their individual elements? #emailgeeks #EmailMarketing @litmusapp #ThursdayMorning
— Libby Pauly (@lpdesignsvt) August 30, 2018
Noteworthy subject lines
ASPCA, 8/3 – Wildfire Update: 300+ Animals Assisted
Tiny Prints, 8/19 – Here’s a sneak peek at our 2018 Holiday Collection
The North Face, 8/19 – Labor Day Starts Now
Nike, 8/3 – Back-to-school essentials
FansEdge, 8/4 – Four Weeks Till College Kickoff…Got The Feels?
Hayneedle, 8/8 – Game on: Up to 35% off homegating gear starts now …
Morton’s, 8/3 – Dine with us during Boston Restaurant Week!
Olive Garden, 8/9 – You get together. We’ll handle the rest.
REI, 8/9 – Spend a Relaxing Night in the Woods with Us
Jetsetter, 8/12 — #UpAllNight: Cities That Never Sleep
Victoria’s Secret, 8/8 – Because AC.
Pier 1 Imports, 8/18 – Hey summer, don’t let our pumpkins hit you on the way out.
REI, 8/19 – REI & Brooks are Giving Back to Scenic Trails
The North Face, 8/2 – Recycled tees that give back…
Ann Taylor, 8/12 – LAST CHANCE: $10 Off A Rotating Wardrobe
ModCloth, 8/19 – Exponential outfit options right this way.
Staples, 8/19 — $10 off is like lunch money in your pocket.
Sony, 8/4 – Meet Your New Assistant | Sony Smart TV with Google Assistant
White House Black Market, 8/26 – Start The Week Off With Confidence
Banana Republic, 8/28 – Working overtime (the clothes, not you).
Horchow, 8/26 – What’s new: Hooker Furniture
Barneys New York, 8/18 – The Top Jewelry Trend for Fall
J.Jill, 8/30 – The Fall Five—essential styles you need now.
Williams Sonoma, 8/12 – 10 Things You Didn’t Know Your KitchenAid Could Do
Jetsetter, 8/19 – Live the “Crazy Rich Asians” Lifestyle at These 7 Real-Life Film Locations
Clinique, 8/30 – Play now for a Superheroes Makeup Kit.
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
ESP RFPs: Improving Your Vendor Selection Process
Email Brand Guidelines: Why You Need Them and What to Put in Them
The Most Inspiring Email Marketing Programs: 30+ Must-Subscribe Brands
The Good News and the Bad News about Email Marketing’s ROI
Really Good Emails Podcast: Email Benchmarks
EEC: The Email Marketing Industry Needs to Think of Itself in Broader Terms
Hard Learned Lessons from Giving 100+ Talks and Webinars
KoMarketing: Email Content Planning is Critical Step for Campaigns
Leadership Brief: Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag
Posted on September 5, 2018
As a culture, we’ve been trained to instinctively see every mistake and every failure as bad. But smart marketers know the truth: Only frequent mistakes and only big failures are bad.
Infrequent and small errors are opportunities to learn and improve, and are pretty much inevitable—particularly, if you’re doing anything innovative. This is especially true in the world of email marketing, where frequency is high, turnaround times are short, resourcing is lean, and complexity is growing with no end in sight.
However, despite the outsized opportunity for email marketing mistakes, more than 50% of brands haven’t sent an apology email for an email error in the past 12 months, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey.
Our research shows that if you’re in that group, there’s a decent chance that you should be concerned rather than proud. Yes, email marketing mistakes aren’t great, but not making any could be a sign of much bigger structural problems within your email marketing program and within your company.
In this 5-page Leadership Brief, you will learn…
- How the strength of an email program’s quality assurance process affects the likelihood of making an apology-worthy mistake
- How company culture can impact the remediation of email marketing errors and the customer experience
- About the relationship between email program innovation and email mistakes
>> Download the free Leadership Brief
ESP RFPs: Improving Your Vendor Selection Process
Posted on August 29, 2018
Nearly 5% of brands are very dissatisfied with their email service provider, and another 23% are dissatisfied, according to a Litmus poll. Many of those brands might consider switching ESPs in the months ahead.
However, before any brand switches ESPs, they will likely write a request for proposal. A RFP is a list of questions you send to prospective vendors, whose answers you then compare to one another to differentiate their offerings and find the best fit for your brand’s needs.
But which ESP candidates should you include? How should ESP RFPs go in terms of process? What should you include in your RFP?
To answer those questions and more, Litmus reached out to email experts at Marketing Democracy, BrightWave Marketing, DEG, Trendline Interactive, emailvendorselection.com, Laughlin Constable, and Red Pill Email.
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
Email Brand Guidelines: Why You Need Them and What to Put in Them
Posted on August 24, 2018
Brand style guides tend to meticulously detail permissible fonts, header sizes, image style, logo sizes and placements, and on and on. However, despite the clearly unique considerations of the email channel, many companies don’t have any email-specific guidance in their brand guidelines.
Nearly 38% of brands don’t have email brand guidelines, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey, which is based on a survey of 3,000 marketers worldwide.
Thankfully, more brands are seeing the need to add email-specific content to their style guides, with 18% more brands creating email brand guidelines since 2016. That’s with good reason.
Having email brand guidelines makes designing emails easier and faster, particularly in organizations with distributed email programs or that use email agencies or freelancers. Marketers who describe their email programs as successful are 27% more likely that those at less successful programs to have brand guidelines for email (68% vs. 53%).
For all the details on what to include in your email brand guidelines…
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
The Most Inspiring Email Marketing Programs: 30+ Must-Subscribe Brands
Posted on August 23, 2018
The first step in designing a great email of your own is often seeing a great email from another brand. In a word, the first step is inspiration.
While some marketers get their email inspiration from Pinterest boards, Dribbble, and other websites, the most common way is simply by signing up to get email from great brands.
Want to know which brands you should consider subscribing to? In our 2018 State of Email Survey, we asked marketers which brands they thought had the most inspiring email marketing programs. Here are the top 30 brands, based on more than 3,500 brand suggestions from nearly 1,400 marketers.
Consider these must-subscribe brands…
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
The Good News and the Bad News about Email Marketing’s ROI
Posted on August 16, 2018
Email marketing’s return on investment is 38:1 on average, according to a Litmus survey of 372 marketers worldwide. That’s both good news and bad news… [Tweet this]
The good news is…
That’s a ringing endorsement of email’s acceptance among consumers, its targeting and personalization capabilities, and its business utility. By most measures, the ROI for email marketing is roughly twice that of other digital channels—if not better—and blows away the returns seen with traditional media channels like TV, radio, and direct mail.
The bad news is…
This high ROI misleads marketers and gives them false comfort. Here’s why…
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
Really Good Emails Podcast: Email Benchmarks
Posted on August 14, 2018
In Episode 2 of the new Really Good Emails Podcast, Matt Helbig and Mike Nelson dig into the results of their 2018 Email Industry Conditions study, which is based on survey responses from more than a thousand people in the industry. They talk about some of the most interesting stats—including team sizes, jobs, and email inspiration sources—and reminisce about their first jobs in email marketing (no shame, gentlemen, no shame).
Then I join the podcast to talk about Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey Research Series, how some of our results differ from Really Good Emails’ survey, and interesting findings around email production times and email review processes.
>> Listen to the podcast
EEC: The Email Marketing Industry Needs to Think of Itself in Broader Terms
Posted on August 13, 2018
Email marketing has changed profoundly over the last 10 years, but I don’t know that the email marketing industry has fully recognized the impact. We still talk a lot about “email service providers” and “email marketers,” which may be limiting our audience and limiting our ability to educate and rally the industry.
That’s because many companies that enable brands to send email may not think of themselves as email service providers. And many people who send marketing emails may not think of themselves as email marketers. I know for sure that many marketers define an ESP much more broadly than we as an industry tend to.
The results of Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey really drove this reality home for me…
>> Read the full post on the Email Experience Council’s blog
Hard Learned Lessons from Giving 100+ Talks and Webinars
Posted on August 9, 2018
At Litmus, we pride ourselves on having lots of first-time speakers at our Litmus Live conferences in Boston, San Francisco, and London. To help put these very talented—but often very nervous—email marketing experts at ease, we do everything we can to provide them with the information they need to make their sessions successful. Along the way, we introduce speakers to each other, give them plenty of opportunities to get feedback from Litmus staff, and even run one-on-one calls where speakers can pick our brains, throw around ideas, and even present a complete dry run of their talk.
The advice we offer our Litmus Live speakers is based on producing more than a dozen Litmus Live conferences, as well as our personal experiences. Between Justine Jordan, Jason Rodriquez, and me, we’ve given well over a hundred presentations and webinars. There have been high points and there have been low points along the way.
A recent personal low point reminded me that I still have improvements to make, and spurred me to reach out to Justine and Jason so the three of us could share some of those lessons learned.
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
The Last Word on July 2018
Posted on August 7, 2018
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Email still public’s preferred marketing channel, even after GDPR (The Drum)
Email Design for Subscribers with ADHD (iContact)
The Great Email Escape (Return Path)
Get the Attention and Investment Your Email Program Deserves (OnlyInfluencers)
What is a customer data platform? How is it different from a DMP or CRM? (Econsultancy)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
I love this email from local boutique Lockwood. The closest subway is closed for construction until February, and they sent an email promoting making a day of shopping near their stores at other local businesses on Broadway in #astoria https://t.co/5UolxLtVUH #SmallBusiness
— Kristin B (@EmailSnarketing) July 17, 2018
Noteworthy subject lines
Victoria’s Secret, 7/3 – Firework it in sequins, rhinestones & so. much. shine.
Fossil, 7/4 – HBD, America!
PersonalizationMall.com, 7/8 – Last Chance – 70% Off Christmas In July Clearance Sale Ends At Midnight
JCPenney, 7/18 – Hurry! Don’t miss Cyber in July
Lenovo, 7/20 – Final Black Friday in July Doorbusters are Live Now!
Epicurious, 7/14 – 10 kitchen tools we can’t wait to buy on Prime Day
PepsiCo, 7/16 – Amazon Prime Day Deals on Pepsi products
JCPenney, 7/17 – School days ahead! 40% off juniors’ Arizona denim
The Container Store, 7/23 – Locker Organization: Back To School Basics With A Twist
Moosejaw.com, 7/27 – Our Fave Backpacks – Just in Time for Back to School
Hasbro, 7/19 – These San Diego Convention items are #TRENDING
ThinkGeek, 7/18 – No con badge required for these exclusives!
ModCloth, 7/6 – AC-approved and outfitted to perfection.
Banana Republic, 7/3 – Here for sheer: wearable, light-as-air shirts.
Victoria’s Secret, 7/8 – Summer essential: an ultra lightweight layer!
Miracle-Gro, 7/20 – Five Mosquito Repelling Plants
Feeding America, 7/23 – It’s summer vacation. So why don’t these kids have anything to eat?
UncommonGoods, 7/6 – This Just In: Birth Month Flower Grow Kits
FansEdge, 7/24 – Football Is Coming…Here’s What’s Trending
The Container Store, 7/3 – “Wow! That Was Easy.”
Sony Electronics, 7/21 – They Can Do That? You Won’t Believe What Goes Into Our TVs
PepsiCo, 7/11 – Cap’n Crunch’s NEW SLURPEE is at 7-Eleven
Aeropostale, 7/27 – Try our new jeans in 18 fits & 81 washes
Petco, 7/11 – Want the simple life? Sign up for Repeat Delivery
ThinkGeek, 7/27 – They know when you last logged in, what you did, and for how long
Kate Spade, 7/10 – what to give the bride
Kate Spade, 7/19 – open this for good luck
Gap, 7/3 – Open ASAP to redeem your codes before they expire
Barneys New York, 7/10 – Read This Before Your Next Trip To The Barber
ASPCA, 7/13 – Is Breaking the Window Breaking the Law?
Nikon, 7/3 – Manhattanhenge: A Rare Photo Opportunity this Month
Ikea USA, 7/30 – No need to wait. The 2019 IKEA catalog is here!
Gucci, 7/24 – Presenting #TimeToParr: A Photographic Journey
Victoria’s Secret, 7/10 – CRUSHING YOUR INSTA
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
What is an email service provider?
Holistic Email Marketing: Personalization Report
Report: 2018 State of Email Service Providers
A Snapshot of the Email Service Provider Landscape
Holistic Email Metrics Matrix Helps You See the Whole Picture
The California Consumer Privacy Act: What Marketers Need to Know
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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