Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on June 2022
Posted on July 7, 2022
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Good Apple, Bad Apple: MPP Has Had Positive and Negative Results (MediaPost)
Best Fonts for Emails: How to Make Your Emails Look Great and Easy to Read (AWeber)
Does punctuation in a subject line help or hurt email performance? (Alchemy Worx)
Are We Witnessing the Death of Gmail Annotations? (SendView)
12 Unique AMP Emails in eCommerce that will liven up your Marketing Campaigns (Netcore Cloud)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
I’m very happy and proud to announce that I started a blog! Friends of Email
It’s a spanish blog for LATAM #emailgeeks where I’ll talk about email, code and mktAutomation. It’s been my wish since a long time to start it, and it’s finally coming together.https://t.co/IxguUsnwkt
— Rodrigo Santander (@Ro_Santander) June 6, 2022
Treat your #email reputation like your credit score.
It takes alot of time to build but little time to destroy #emailautomation #emailgeeks @SparkPost
— Marc Valdez (@MarcValdezSP) June 9, 2022
From a conversation earlier today:#EmailGeeks pic.twitter.com/dbxXabVnbV
— Mike Hillyer (@MikeHillyer) June 15, 2022
Hold your breath, #EmailGeeks! They can sense your fear! 😱 pic.twitter.com/xhdAIef7J3
— Mailgun by Sinch (@Mail_Gun) June 16, 2022
Just a friendly reminder that 99% of marketers whose success relies on email don’t go to email conferences, don’t call themselves #emailgeeks, don’t use more than a few basic features in their ESP, have never touched email HTML, don’t understand deliverability, etc. etc. etc.
— Gregg Blanchard (@greggblanchard) June 27, 2022
Someone reached out to me about a job, and this was a part of the description:
“Solely own cold email outreach, including sending 1m+ emails per month to cold prospects.”
I can’t imagine something that’s a harder pass than this for any email marketer.
— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) June 30, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Camping World RV, 6/15 – Inflation-Buster RV Deal!
IKEA, 6/3 – Chad , join us this Pride Month as an LGBTQ+ ally
Zales, 6/3 – 🌈 Live Loud. Love Proud. Let Your Pride Shine.
REI, 6/15 – Outside With Pride This Month (& Every Month!)
Williams Sonoma, 6/4 – All the colors of Le Creuset 🌈
Express, 6/4 – 40% off a 🌈 of cute tees
Hobby Lobby, 6/24 – Red, White, Blue – 40% Off July 4th Decor
Macy’s, 6/18 – Extra 25% off the perfect Father’s Day gift to buy online & pick up in store by tomorrow—just in time!
Neiman Marcus, 6/8 – Celebrate Dad!
Bass Pro Shops, 6/8 – What Do Your Give The Man That’s Give You Everything? We’re Here To Help!
Crate & Barrel, 6/13 – Father’s Day is June 19: It’s time to treat Dad
Zales, 6/13 – Save 30% Off Gifts That Say “You’re Awesome, Dad”
Wegmans Catering on Meals 2GO, 6/15 – The Perfect Party for Grads, Dads, and More!
Express, 6/7 – Guest, bridesmaid or bride? 💍
Banana Republic, 6/18 – Modern Dresses Perfect For Wedding Season
Omaha Steaks, 6/29 – FREE 🌭 + FREE 🍔 + ☀️ = Grill Time!
Eddie Bauer, 6/13 – 6 Must-Haves For Fun In the Sun!
Nordstrom, 6/4 – The best summer shoes are here
Target, 6/8 – Save 20% on kids’ shorts 😎
Gap, 6/8 – For your next BBQ/party/RSVP: tops & shorts from $25
Express, 6/2 – 🌜 TONIGHT ONLY! Style Steals $15+ starts @ 6 p.m. 🌛
Express, 6/3 – ✈️💰🏝️ Win a 2-NIGHT STAY at any Canopy by Hilton in the U.S. & MORE!
Williams Sonoma, 6/7 – Host a Whiskey Tasting: stock your bar cart | 20% OFF all Goldtouch Pro Bakeware
West Elm, 6/7 – Complete your sofa look with chic (& comfy) pillows
Olive Garden, 6/7 – Too busy to make dinner? 🍽️
Burlington, 6/3 – Shop for your (4-legged) BFF!
Panera Bread, 6/7 – Your besties + All the 🍕
Applebee’s Grill & Bar, 6/7 – Only a few days left to get FREE* movie tickets
Bass Pro Shops, 6/7 – Win Your Own TOYOTA TUNDRA TRUCK!
West Elm, 6/2 – O HEY! It’s KULE x West Elm
Patagonia, 6/13 – Stories you didn’t know you needed
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
The Definitive Guide to Adapting to Mail Privacy Protection
Webbula: What Are the Top 3 Reasons You Love Working in Email Marketing?
Unlayer: Create Engaging Email Subscriber Journeys
Multi-Touch Attribution: Moving Beyond Overly Simplistic First- and Last-Click Models
What’s Wrong with Email Marketing?
What’s Your Digital CX Strategy for Out of Stocks?
When and How to Use Plain Text Email
Posted on July 6, 2022
Creating effective, great-looking HTML emails can be tricky, given today’s rendering challenges and many considerations like dark mode and accessibility. So, it’s understandable that many marketers long to return to the days of plain text emails as a simpler alternative. There’s a nostalgia around these emails, as they take us back to an easier time when writing an email was just that—writing, and nothing else.
However, often this nostalgia tips over into romanticizing the effectiveness of this form of email, which has been largely supplanted by HTML emails for lots of good reasons, including performance. By far, B2B marketers are the most susceptible to being seduced by the allure of plain text emails. So, let’s discuss when these emails are appropriate and some design best practices…
The Definitive Guide to Adapting to Mail Privacy Protection
Posted on June 30, 2022
Prior to the launch of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) by Apple in the fall of 2021, marketers could easily see the engagement of their subscribers and reliably manage their email deliverability by following best practices established over the course of more than a decade. However, MPP has blurred marketers’ visibility into engagement and is causing all of those deliverability best practices to be rewritten to account for the obscuring of open signals.
This playbook is your guide to those changes. It covers six areas of opportunity to improve your email marketing program so that it functions more effectively under MPP:
- Strengthening permissioning and onboarding
- Qualifying active mailable audiences
- Evolving your messaging to encourage clicks
- Revamping reengagement programs
- Increasing re-permissioning
- Creating a MPP mitigation dashboard
Webbula: What Are the Top 3 Reasons You Love Working in Email Marketing?
Posted on June 29, 2022
Along with 10 other email experts, I share my top 3 reasons why I love working our industry. For me, it comes down to:
- Loving the constant evolution of the channel and the fact that there’s always something new to talk about
- Enjoying the emphasis on data and insights, in addition to the art aspects of email marketing
- The people, who really are extraordinarily friendly, open, and welcoming
To see my full answers, and to see everyone else’s too…
Unlayer: Create Engaging Email Subscriber Journeys
Posted on June 22, 2022
Understanding how different subscribers move through the subscriber lifecycle and what their needs are at each stage is critical to getting the right messaging in front of them. In this interview with Unlayer, I talk about the subscriber lifecycle and automated subscriber journeys, answering questions such as:
- Out of the 5 stages (Acquisition, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Re-engagement), which one matters the most in the subscriber journey?
- Your book talks about building high-performance lists by identifying valuable subscriber acquisition sources. Can you elaborate on what these sources are?
- You’ve previously talked about automating your email messaging so you address moments that matter. What do you mean by “moments that matter” in the subscriber journey and why is email automation the way to go?
- How can email affect and support the different stages of the customer journey?
- What do you think marketers do wrong with their emails and what do they need to change to create engaging subscriber journeys?
For my answers to those questions and others…
Multi-Touch Attribution: Moving Beyond Overly Simplistic First- and Last-Click Models
Posted on June 13, 2022
Giving 100% of the credit for a sale to the channel that either attracted the customer by generating the first click of an interaction or closed the deal by producing the last click made sense in the early early ’00s when the average consumer used two touchpoints when buying an item. However, consumers today use an average of almost six touchpoints, according to research by Aberdeen, Oracle, and Relationship One.
In our omnichannel world, single-touch attribution is simply too out of sync with consumer behavior. To appropriately attribute marketing activity today requires use of a multi-touch attribution model, of which there are many. Each assigns different weights to different points in a customer journey, with some of the more important ones being…
What’s Wrong with Email Marketing?
Posted on June 7, 2022
As powerful and unique as email marketing is, it’s far from perfect. If you want to grasp some of its imperfections, just look at what the inbox and mailbox providers have been doing. The features they’re pushing will give you a sense of what they feel is wrong with the channel.
Here are the major perceived shortcomings they’ve been investing in trying to fix:
- Email marketing isn’t engaging enough.
- Email content can become outdated.
- Emails are too cluttered.
- Email isn’t trustworthy enough.
- Emails are sent to people who aren’t engaging with them.
- Email violates subscribers’ privacy.
- Email performance data is inaccurate.
For a full discussion of each of those, including which inbox providers believe that and what they’re doing about it…
What’s Your Digital CX Strategy for Out of Stocks?
Posted on June 3, 2022
The pandemic, geopolitics, and war have snarled global supply chains, frustrating customers and causing record levels of brand switching and retailer switching. With problems unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, brands need nimble marketing strategies that maximize customer retention and minimize poor experiences.
To accomplish this, brands need a multi-pronged approach that spans web, messaging, infrastructure, and loyalty.
Mobile Marketing: Leveraging the Latest Trends
Posted on June 2, 2022
With mobile devices increasingly woven into the fabric of consumers’ everyday lives, it’s imperative that marketers stay on top of the latest trends in mobile marketing. Leveraging insights from these trends will allow you to evolve your mobile experiences and meet consumers where they are.
Pulling from our on-demand webinar on mobile marketing trends, here are 7 key mobile marketing trends and their implications for marketers:
- Shopping habits continue to rapidly shift.
- SMS marketing is far from saturated.
- It’s a ‘next level’ indicator of brand affinity.
- Mobile messaging isn’t just for transactional communications any more.
- By focusing on relevancy, frequency becomes less relevant.
- It’s not mobile messaging versus email, but rather and email.
- Generational differences aren’t as big as you probably think.
For a discussion of each of those trends by Oracle’s Clint Kaiser…
The Last Word on May 2022
Posted on June 1, 2022
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Should You Build Your Own ESP? (Only Influencers)
Introducing the Email Markup Consortium (EMC) (DEV)
One-Click Unsubscribe: Don’t Do It (Spam Resource)
Martech Checklist: Do You Have the Right Solutions to Future-Proof Your Stack? (Oracle)
The Content Preferences of B2B Buyers (MarketingProfs)
How US Consumers Are Feeling, Shopping, and Spending—and What It Means for Companies (McKinsey & Co.)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Nearly two-thirds of US consumers would give away their email address for a $20 coupon or discount code. https://t.co/CJzCc4UqBO#privacy #etailer pic.twitter.com/3xujoAJoEC
— Chart of the Day (@ChartoftheDay_) May 2, 2022
For the millionth time… “Promotions tab in Gmail is not spam! “
— Tejas Pitkar (@TPitkar) May 3, 2022
Always know your brand voice. Some brands curse in their emails and make prospects laugh. Some brands accidentally use “all-caps” and their prospects unfollow.#emailgeeks
— Naixa R. (@RNaixa) May 3, 2022
One of those days where it’s abundantly clear that marketers are buying and selling lists. So much shit I never signed up for in my inbox.
— Jason Rodriguez (@RodriguezCommaJ) May 4, 2022
Seen in a #coldemail about sending better #coldemails…
“Don’t Spam. Build Relationships.”
Scratching my head over this one… #Emailishard
— Matthew Vernhout (@EmailKarma) May 12, 2022
Email marketing is kind of like drinking in high school…
Yes, “everyone is doing it.”
And
Yes, very few know what they’re doing.
I always hope I’m on the right side of this one. #emailmarketing #marketing #email #emailgeeks
— robbiefitz (@RobbieFitz) May 27, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Zales, 5/1 – 30% OFF Everything: Gift Mom, or Yourself!
Burlington, 5/2 – Mom-approved gifts at mom-approved savings
Williams Sonoma, 5/6 – It’s not too late! Artisan food subscriptions make the perfect gift
Uncommon Goods, 5/3 – This summer, RSVP “yes” to every occasion
Dick’s Sporting Goods, 5/28 – 😎 [Free one-hour curbside or in-store pickup] This will be a summer to remember… BRING ON UP TO 50% OFF deals
Banana Republic, 5/13 – A Season for T-Shirts
Neiman Marcus, 5/2 – Sandal season has arrived!
Belk, 5/19 – Lift’s better in sandals! 👡 $16 flip flops, pool slides & more shoes
Eddie Bauer, 5/20 – 😎🌊Block Rays & Play All Day!
Bass Pro Shops, 5/19 – Apparel For On & Off The Water Protection!
West Elm, 5/1 – Rugs for patios & high-traffic spaces
Banana Republic, 5/24 – The Edit: Wedding Guest
T.J.Maxx, 5/19 – 24hr Early Access = first dibs on deals
ModCloth, 5/1 – Smash-the-like-button styles. 👍
T.J.Maxx, 5/4 – Made in Italy–without the markup 😍
Bed Bath & Beyond, 5/13 – 📈 See what’s trending RIGHT now!
Quiksilver, 5/20 – Now Available: Stranger Things 1986 Collection
Zales, 5/13 – Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Disney’s Brave
Staples, 5/18 – Celebrate WFH Day in style 🎊
Nordstrom, 5/18 – We’re celebrating AAPI Month
Uncommon Goods, 5/18 – Send your dollars toward things you care about
Bass Pro Shops, 5/20 – Cast Your Vote For Conservation
Express, 5/18 – Guess what you just helped us do…❗
Subway, 5/2 – You could be earning rewards!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
4 Ways Your Math May Be Steering Your Email Marketing Program Wrong
Customer First Thinking Podcast: Email Still Rules
7 Advanced Digital Marketing Metrics Most Brands Don’t Use, But Should
Universal Control Groups: The Path to Digital Marketing Measurement Clarity
On-Demand Webinar: How to Transform Your Customer Experience with a CDP
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
