Email Marketing RulesThe Future of Email Podcast: A Conversation with Chad S. White of Oracle
Posted on March 8, 2022
I join Matthew Dunn, the host of The Future of Email Podcast, to talk about major email marketing trends and where the industry is headed over the next 12-24 months. Recorded in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our conversation is pretty heavy, getting into cyber- and geopolitics. We talk about:
- The need for a strategic roadmap, but also the disruptions that have led to email marketers throwing their roadmaps out repeatedly
- The many potential disruptions on the horizon this year
- How two years of upheaval have changed email marketers’ priorities
- How marketers handled the early months of the pandemic
- The mailbox provider landscape and its power dynamics
- How politics, power vacuums, and social value expression are changing marketing
- CAN-SPAM and the future of email legislation in America
- Mail Privacy Protection and Apple’s brand stance on privacy
- The historical importance of email opens in deliverability management
- Whether Google is likely to follow in Apple’s email privacy footsteps
- All the ways that Apple is flexing really hard right now
- Mega Tech monopoly risks
- The martech landscape and the best-of-suite proposition
- And much more…
The Biggest Shifts in Email Marketing Trends for 2022
Posted on March 4, 2022
The turbulence of the past two years has heavily influenced recent email marketing priorities and is shaping the trends that will dominate 2022. We can see those shifts in the results of our third-annual Email Marketing Trends Survey, where we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts about the adoption and impact of 26 email marketing tactics and technologies.
For a detailed look at all 26 trends and how they rated, check out our posts on:
- Unproven Opportunities, which are low-impact trends with low adoption
- Competitive Differentiators, which are high-impact trends with low adoption
- Proven Essentials, which are high-impact trends with high adoption
However, in this post, let’s go beyond the quadrant placements and look at the highest impact trends overall, the biggest increases and decreases in adoption and impact, the largest gap between the impact of a trend and its adoption, and much more.
The Last Word on February 2022
Posted on March 3, 2022
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
9 Favorite Lessons From 20 Years in the Email Marketing Industry (Webbula)
Expert Advice for Senders on Shared IPs (Kickbox)
Update on the Gmail App Prefetching Images (SparkPost)
Uniting the Email Community for Ukraine (Email Audience)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Email marketing = a give, give, take (2:1)
— Dennard (@Dennardcrawford) February 4, 2022
A friend of mine works in lab testing. Talked about someone who came in for a urine test, handed over a cup that was ice cold, they tested it anyway, it came back positive for THC, meth, and cocaine.
That’s what it’s like when you buy a list people! #emailgeeks #dontbuylists
— Mike Hillyer (@MikeHillyer) February 8, 2022
📣 Public Service Announcement 📣:
Being a marketer is not easy
Being a developer is not easy
Being a designer is not easy
Platforms are not easy
Strategizing is not easy
Coding is not easy#emailgeeks #Email #MarketingTwitter— 🟣Guilda (@justguilda) February 10, 2022
A tribute to @hugeheadca who we just found out passed away in January from brain cancer. One of the OG #emailgeeks and a good man. #RIP :: Every Time You Buy an Email List – A puppy dies! https://t.co/z4detf7AqC via @YouTube
— Ryan Phelan (@ryanpphelan) February 18, 2022
Hello. It is I, with more email-based screaming into the void.
IF YOU MAKE ME LOG IN TO UNSUBSCRIBE, YOU’RE TACKY AND I HATE YOU.
Also you’re violating CAN-SPAM, so maybe cut that out.#emailgeeks #emailmarketing #YesIWillComplainToYourLegalTeamButItsForYourOwnGood pic.twitter.com/Td41wBZLb0
— Skyler H (@Holobachgirl) February 23, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Burlington, 2/1 – Be inspired by our Black History Month #BurlingtonPartners
Starbucks, 2/1 – Celebrating Black History Month
Omaha Steaks, 2/22 – Celebrate Twos-day 2/22 with $22.22 Deals!
Sears, 2/5 – Don’t blow it, buddy 💔 Up to 75% off Valentine’s jewelry inside
Uncommon Goods, 2/6 – 💓Truly uncommon gifts for your extraordinary love 💓
Zales, 2/8 – 💝Think Outside the Chocolate Box this Valentine’s Day
Williams Sonoma, 2/9 – In full bloom 🏵️ Spring-inspired settings for your Easter table
Venmo, 2/8 – Receive your tax refund in your Venmo account with Direct Deposit
Crate & Barrel, 2/5 – IN STOCK & SELLING FAST | Back by popular demand
Saks Fifth Avenue, 2/5 – See what’s back in stock this week
ModCloth, 2/26 – Hit replay on these restocked styles. 🔁
Big Lots, 2/1 – BIG bedroom deals, little initial payment!
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 2/28 – Our live workshops are back and better than ever!
West Elm, 2/14 – This duplex is WFH done right
Target, 2/26 – Create a clutter-free home office.
Office Depot, 2/26 – It’s your time. Welcome to the new age of work.
West Elm, 2/24 – Meet your binge-watching sidekick
Nordstrom, 2/24 – Dresses for everything on your calendar
West Elm, 2/5 – 🌿Garden goals for balconies & backyards alike
Uncommon Goods, 2/4 – NEW: Self-watering planter ✔️ Propagation station ✔️ And all in one ✔️
Victoria’s Secret, 2/24 – The NEW Accessories You Need This Spring
Eddie Bauer, 2/4 – Introducing The Award-Winning BC Flyline Kit
Eddie Bauer, 2/20 – Introducing The EverTherm Downdraft Jacket
Gap, 2/8 – Our softest denim YET
Banana Republic, 2/9 – Explore Our Watershed Mill Valley Denim
Sears, 2/1 – Appliance busted? 🔧 We’ll fix it, on your schedule…
Express, 2/5 – Just dropped: Insta Style with Rachel Zoe 😍⬇️
Williams Sonoma, 2/4 – WOK THIS WAY: make these recipes tonight!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Proven Essentials
Progressive Profiling: Fuel for Long- & Short-Term Personalization
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Competitive Differentiators
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Unproven Opportunities
8 Alternatives to Open-Triggered Email Sequences in the Age of Mail Privacy Protection
BIMI: The Carrot to Get Email Marketing Managers to Fully Authenticate
How Mail Privacy Protection Is Changing How Email Marketing Performance Is Measured
Posted on March 2, 2022
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is upending how email marketers measure email marketing performance. In addition to hiding IP addresses, blocking forward tracking, and obscuring open times, MPP pre-fetches email content to create a haystack of fake opens in which to hide the needles of real opens by their users. With upwards of 95% of Apple Mail app users likely to enable MPP and Apple Mail accounting for roughly half of all email opens when MPP went into effect last September, email opens have been dramatically depreciated.
That has marketers reevaluating how they measure email marketing success. Let’s discuss how things have changed, and how they haven’t.
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Proven Essentials
Posted on February 23, 2022
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when consumer behaviors and business goals are shifting rapidly. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2022. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Proven Essentials, which are in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but are still improving and delivering tremendous results.
Our Proven Essentials stand in stark contrast to our Unproven Opportunities, which still have significant risks associated with them and benefits that haven’t fully materialized. Our Proven Essentials also have a risk profile that’s the inverse of our Competitive Differentiators—that is, where our Competitive Differentiators offer a competitive advantage to early adopters, our Proven Essentials put late adopters at a competitive disadvantage.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, a whopping 17 of them were rated as being in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2021. That’s a big increase from our prior surveys. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.
Progressive Profiling: Fuel for Long- & Short-Term Personalization
Posted on February 22, 2022
With the phaseout of third-party cookies on the horizon, brands are focusing more on collecting zero-party data. This is information that’s provided directly to brands by consumers. Often, it’s provided in response to progressive profiling efforts—that is, ongoing efforts to build an evolving picture of a customer or prospect over time through forms, surveys, and other methods. Without progressive profiling, you’re reliant forever and solely on the information that was shared at the very beginning of the relationship. That’s inefficient for two reasons.
First, long forms are daunting and a big turnoff to prospects and customers. Every question you add to a form reduces the form’s completion rate, even if some of those questions are optional. Because of that, it’s nearly impossible to get enough information through a single interaction to build an enduring relationship. Brands encounter much less resistance and generate much more success when they ask for a little information at a time, which is central to progressive profiling.
Second, data has a shelf-life. The needs and desires of people and businesses are constantly changing and evolving, so data has to be updated periodically. Indeed, some data has a very short shelf-life before it becomes obsolete. That said, both long- and short-term progressive profiling data are valuable and worth pursuing. Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Peter Briggs looks at the key differences between these two types, and then looks at how to leverage this data.
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Competitive Differentiators
Posted on February 18, 2022
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when consumer behaviors and business goals are shifting rapidly. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2022. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Competitive Differentiators, which are in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but some companies are already seeing great results from using them. They offer a significant competitive advantage with considerably less risk than our Unproven Opportunities.
But, there are still risks, including the acquisition of smaller providers, frequent process and feature changes as the technology stabilizes, frequent changes in best practices as knowledge rapidly evolves, changing cost structures, scarcity of needed skills, and other issues. These hassles and expenses are easier to accept, however, because many adopters are already seeing a sizable return on their investment. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors, most of whom have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, seven of them were rated as being in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2021. Let’s talk about each of them in turn…
Email Marketing Trends for 2022: Unproven Opportunities
Posted on February 16, 2022
Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when consumer behaviors and business goals are shifting rapidly. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2022. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this post, we’re looking at the Unproven Opportunities, which are in the low adoption–low impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics here are not fully vetted and may not generate long-term adoption or impact. There are significant risks that could undermine your investment in part or entirely—including rejection by consumers, inadequate inbox provider support, inadequate digital marketing platform support, the passage of legislative impediments, and other issues.
Because of those risks, most brands will find that the best strategy is to wait and let others work out all the details, uncover the best practices, and stress-test the technologies. However, the pioneering companies who embrace these trends at this early stage may seize a sizable advantage over their competitors.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, just two of them were rated as being in the low adoption–low impact quadrant for 2022. Let’s talk about each of them in turn…
8 Alternatives to Open-Triggered Email Sequences in the Age of Mail Privacy Protection
Posted on February 15, 2022
As more Apple Mail users have enabled Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), opens have become an increasingly unreliable signal of individual-level engagement for email marketers. That is requiring marketers to redefine how they select active audiences for campaigns, how they determine inactivity and make suppression decisions, and how they design journey progressions that were previously driven by opens.
That last impact will be particularly hard felt by B2B brands, who are the biggest users of open-triggered journeys to move customers and prospects down interaction funnels. While B2B brands are likely to be less impacted by MPP than their B2C colleagues, most will ultimately see 15% to 35% of their audiences affected. That’s too much of their audience impacted to ignore. Brands will have to make changes to their open-triggered journeys, and they have several alternatives to consider. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of each.
The Last Word on January 2022
Posted on February 3, 2022
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
8 Stats Show Email Subscribers Worth a Lot More Than Social Media Followers (The Tilt)
The New Normal (Google Trends)
How to Send a One-Time Burst (Postmaster @ Yahoo)
The Biggest Trends in Graphic Design for 2022, as Predicted by Leading Creatives (Creative Boom)
Case Study: 46% Increase in Email List Growth (Email Optimization Shop)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
I’m Mclovin this email from @McDonaldsUK (sorry, I had to)
What kind of email sorcery is this?! #emailgeeks #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/oYsFVTGvWQ
— Samantha Knott (@samanthazoek) January 3, 2022
Best reply address I’ve ever seen.
🎖 yes_you_can_reply@ 🎖— Lauren Meyer (@LaurenEmailGeek) January 26, 2022
B2B tech companies: “Retention has better ROI than acquisition.”
Also B2B tech companies: “We’re hiring 100 new SDRs and 1 new Customer Marketing Manager.”
— Brooklin Nash (@realBrookNash) January 3, 2022
Nothing makes a consumer hate your brand more (And report your email as spam) than hiding an “unsubscribe” link in marketing emails #EmailMarketing #emailgeeks
— Don shaher (@DonatShaher) January 18, 2022
An old boss pitching buying email lists to me. https://t.co/aMKFhxjiiF
— Carin Slater (@carinslater) January 11, 2022
Noteworthy subject lines
Burlington, 1/12 – Don’t let your gift card go to waste!
Quiksilver, 1/4 – New Year | Same Sale!
Tractor Supply Co., 1/6 – Kick Start Your New Year’s Resolutions
Neiman Marcus, 1/14 – Find your spotlight
Crate & Barrel, 1/4 – Start the year off fresh with these easy updates →
Belk, 1/5 – This sparks joy! ✨ 50% off cleaning, storage & organization
IKEA, 1/20 – Children’s play stored the adult way
Home Depot, 1/4 – Motivate Your Next Moves 🏠
IKEA, 1/6 – Your home is never finished
West Elm, 1/12 – Inspo: 10 ways to makeover a blah bathroom
ModCloth, 1/6 – Who? New.
Bed Bath & Beyond, 1/5 – NEW! Subscribe to your favorite products for easier shopping!
Big Lots, 1/7 – Extra 10% OFF with Pickup! Stay safe—grab it curbside!
Applebee’s Grill + Bar, 1/28 – Get your favorites carside or carryout
Express, 1/12 – Rent it all, keep what you 💜
Eddie Bauer, 1/3 – Take Your Winter Workouts Outside!
Quiksilver, 1/12 – Is your outerwear made sustainably?
Kohl’s, 1/17 – Find your balance with active & wellness essentials
Great Gap Sale, 1/17 – BRB, in a cuddle bubble
Uncommon Goods, 1/14 – New: 💘 On the mind and your wrist: their name in silver and bronze
Zales, 1/14 – 🏹 Hey Cupid! Save Up to 25% Off Everything!
XOXO Victoria’s Secret, 1/18 – Calling All Sirens
Williams Sonoma, 1/28 – The 2022 Easter collection is here 🐇
Big Lots, 1/31 – SO ready for patio season? 🌻 Here’s your preview!
Bed Bath & Beyond, 1/18 – Your guide to better sleep—tips & picks to catch more zzz’s this year
Williams Sonoma, 1/7 – Introducing Williams Sonoma Open Kitchen: affordable kitchen essentials
West Elm, 1/31 – Plant Kween & Sophia Bush take us on a garden tour
Express, 1/6 – Celebrating National Mentoring Month 🎉
Moosejaw.com, 1/4 – Entrepreneurs wanted. The Moosejaw Outdoor Accelerator is back.
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
First Quarter 2022 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
e-shot: Email Engagement Is on the Up, and 7 More Trends for 2022
SparkPost: Tips to Prevent Burnout and Recharge Email Inspiration
Should Emails Expire? Yes and No
On-Demand Webinar: Effective Testing & Optimization Across Digital Marketing Channels
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
