Email Marketing Rules

2023 will continue a string of challenging years that has seen us transition from pandemic to recovery to high inflation and now to an expected global recession. The pressures that come with that are evident in the predictions assembled by Halon from 19 email marketing experts, including me.

In particular, Matthew Dunn of Campaign Genius captured the stresses that a recession will place on email marketing, as well as on other channels. Beata Linz of Beat Linz Consultancy conveyed the urgency that exists for email marketing and other marketing channels to work together much more closely than ever before because of the sunsetting of third-party cookies.

Matthew Stith of Spamhaus talks about how deteriorating sending practices have led the blocklist operator to issue 9,734 informational listings during the first 11 months of this year. And Guy Hanson of Validity explains how deteriorating list hygiene caused by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, more business pressure on the email channel, and more aggressive policing by Spamhaus and mailbox providers will make deliverability extra tough in the coming year.

For my part, my predictions centered on the growing role of customer data platforms (CDPs) to help brands treat their customers consistently across channels and the new opportunity presented by BIMI now that Apple is supporting it.

>> Check out the free, no-form report from Halon

Gmail is getting old. What’s the next hot email app?

That was the gist of a tweet I saw early this year. At the time, the question made me reflect on the different features and capabilities of all of the major inbox providers, and what those differences said about inbox providers’ attitudes and beliefs about email. It was that reflection that led me to write What’s Wrong with Email Marketing?

But the question still remains: What’s the next hot email app?

While there have been several new email inbox apps since Gmail launched nearly two decades ago in 2004, these apps have generally had very narrow appeal around niche concerns. Convinced that the next hot email app doesn’t currently exist, I wondered:

• What company has the ability to build it?
• What company has the justification to build it?
• What company has the ability to scale adoption?

Only one company came to mind…Amazon.

>> Read the entire article on the Only Influencers Blog

Litmus invited me and 9 other Litmus Live speakers to share their email marketing predictions for 2023. My prediction was about customer data platforms:

“The sunsetting of third-party cookies, launch of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and App Tracking Transparency, and other changes have heightened the need of businesses to utilize their cross-channel customer data to make key decisions in their email marketing programs and other operations. Unfortunately, in most cases, that data is scattered across the organization in multiple databases that don’t talk to each other very well, if at all.

Adoption of customer data platforms will accelerate in 2023 because these systems solve this problem by aggregating all customer data in one central repository—as well as cleaning the data, better controlling access to the data, and mobilizing the data for usage across channels. For email marketing, this will lead to more relevant personalization, better segmentation, and smarter automation that leverages a wider array of triggers across channels.”

Of the other email marketing predictions, I especially agreed with those by Aaron Beatty, Brian Westnedge, Lee Munroe, and Rebekah K. Josefy.

>> Read all the predictions on the Litmus Blog