Email Marketing RulesSinch 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
Email Newsletters: 9 New Best Practices
Posted on May 31, 2023
Nothing in email marketing is static, because ESP technology, inbox providers, and—most importantly—consumers are constantly changing. That change extends to the email newsletter, a mainstay of B2B marketing and a growing player in B2C marketing, too.
To get a read on the latest newsletter trends, I spoke with our Creative Services and B2B teams here at Oracle Marketing Consulting about what they were doing when they overhauled our clients’ newsletters. Consider this your guide to the new best practices for email newsletters. Here are their top 9 recommendations…
Marketing Book Podcast: ‘A Lot of Structural Changes to How Email Marketing Works’
Posted on May 26, 2023
Six years after being on the Marketing Book Podcast to discuss the 3rd edition of Email Marketing Rules, I rejoin host Douglas Burdett to talk about the new 4th edition. During our 1 hour and 17 minute conversation, we cover a wide range of topics, including:
- What’s new in the 4th edition of Email Marketing Rules
- What’s in each of the two volumes of the 4th edition
- What’s unique about the email channel
- What are the downsides of email marketing
- How most new marketing graduates have little to no email marketing knowledge
- How your gut will often led you wrong with email marketing
- Why buying lists is dangerous
- How sender reputations work
- How to communicate email marketing success
- Why the paid-owned-earned (POE) media model is outdated
- Why email marketing is best as a conversation
- The four trends that will drive the next 10 years of email marketing
- The one thing marketers should do today
- The marketing book I’m reading right now
To hear our full conversation, listen to the Marketing Book Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or…
AI-Generated Images: Generative AI Concerns & Opportunities for Marketers
Posted on May 23, 2023
Ready or not, we’re rapidly heading into a world where generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and others do more of marketers’ day-to-day work. That transition is not much in question. The only question is how well your organization makes that transition.
To make that transition as smoothly as possible, we recommend taking a cautious and realistic approach toward the here-and-now of these technologies, while keeping an optimistic long-term view. That starts with having a solid understanding of how these technologies work, including what they’re capable of and what they’re not.
Having that understanding will help you deploy generative AI in ways that will help your business grow, and either avoid or safeguard against situations where AI leads to costly errors or embarrassing customer experiences.
Because the issues and use cases around generative AI vary depending on whether you’re outputting text, code, or images, we’re addressing each of those separately. In this post, we’re focusing on generative AI for images. Let’s start by explaining…
13 Warning Signs of Email Deliverability Problems Ahead
Posted on May 15, 2023
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 blocklisting, 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, says Daniel Deneweth, Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Head of Email Deliverability Services. During his nearly two decades focused on email deliverability, he’s noticed a number of events that often precede problems…
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
