Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on August 2021
Posted on September 3, 2021
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
What Are Stores Even Thinking With All These Emails? (The Atlantic)
The Conscientious Marketer: Don’t Send Emails to People Who Have Unsubscribed (MediaPost)
How the Pandemic Has Changed Marketing (MarketingProfs)
Why Does Microsoft Hate You? (Spam Resource)
Holiday Email Campaigns: What We Learned In 2020 & How to Prepare for 2021 (Only Influencers)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
You don’t choose the email life, the email life chooses you 💌#emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/sLBDsB1fu3
— Avi Goldman (@theavigoldman) August 17, 2021
95% of millennials say their friends are the most credible source of product information.
— Jay Baer (@jaybaer) August 17, 2021
Have we seen this email escalation piece? 😂 @metmuseum https://t.co/Aoo9UN22kn @NewYorker #emailgeeks
— Kirk Bentley (@VeryBentley) August 19, 2021
E tu, Reebok?? 😩
Re: this tactic sucks. pic.twitter.com/XCDl0q7c8p
— Val Geisler (@lovevalgeisler) August 6, 2021
Noteworthy subject lines
Burlington, 8/5 – Our Nationwide Hiring Event starts soon! Apply today.
CVS, 8/24 – Full FDA Approval for Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.
Uncommon Goods, 8/28 – ⏰ Snag these gifts early—last year, they sold out
Target, 8/5 – Get the kids ready for school early ✏️
Gap, 8/27 – The teacher/style icon: MR JAMISON
Big Lots, 8/19 – Turn school to-do lists into TA-DA lists!
Target, 8/10 – Try out School List Assist to find & shop your class list.
Uncommon Goods, 8/17 – Dorm Style 101: How to have the coolest room at college
Bed Bath & Beyond, 8/10 – Pack & Hold: Shop online or locally. Pick up near campus!
Walgreens, 8/11 – Here’s what’s waiting @ Walgreens! A world of deals is a click away – same-day Delivery = the convenient choice.
Subway, 8/18 – FREE COOKIES. $0 DELIVERY FEE.
Uncommon Goods, 8/31 – Introducing Uncommon Experiences—a selection of hand-picked, virtual classes
Williams Sonoma, 8/24 – Now brewing: pumpkin lattes at home 🎃 ☕ (coffee makers ship FREE!)
Olive Garden, 8/26 – Your first course is always never-ending
Gap, 8/7 – Remember jeans? WE DO
Nordstrom Rack, 8/5 – Don’t miss The Denim Shop—up to 65% off
Quiksilver, 8/29 – New Rashguards Made For Chasing The Hoizon
Williams Sonoma, 8/19 – The patio bar is STILL open
REI, 8/19 – Camping Road Trips > Road Trips
Camping World RV, 8/25 – 🚨Used RV Markdown🚨
ModCloth, 8/4 – “Where’d you get that dress!?”
Express, 8/11 – New selfie-worthy Body Contour styles 🤳
Bass Pro Shops, 8/29 – Everything you need to prepare your meat
Uncommon Goods, 8/7 – A 🌟spotlight🌟 on favorites from our Black makers
Moosejaw, 8/26 – Meet our new friends at Black Outside, Inc.
Nintendo, 8/25 – My Nintendo and LEGO® VIP are teaming up!
Macy’s, 8/19 – Ta-da! Toys“R”Us is now at Macy’s!
Kohl’s Friends + Family, 8/27 – Shop Sephora at Kohl’s to find skincare for every age & every stage.
Target, 8/7 – Hearth & Hand with Magnolia: Fall collection 🍁
Saks Fifth Avenue, 8/10 – Hours left: Get 20% off when you create an account
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Only Influencers’ Email Metrics Project: Ask the Right Email Questions
LiveIntent’s Real Time Banter Podcast: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Audience Acquisition Source Ideas to Explore: An Oracle Consulting Checklist
How Many of My Subscribers Will Be Affected by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection?
Hide My Email: A New Reason to Only Accept Corporate Email Addresses
The 7 Factors that Determine Email Deliverability
The 2 Social Contracts Being Broken by Apple’s New Privacy Protections
Email Marketing’s Increasing Role as Third-Party Cookies Disappear
Posted on September 1, 2021
While some think that Google giving marketers two more years to prepare for the depreciation of third-party cookies will lead to complacency, I hope that brands maintain the momentum of recent months. Without a doubt, this change across the entire online advertising industry is causing a major shift in digital advertising targeting and identity management. Every marketer would be wise to use this extra time to collect alternative IDs and more zero- and first-party data assets so they can continue to create effective ad campaigns. Email marketing will have a role to play in addressing both of those needs.
Let’s look at five ways that email marketing’s role will grow as priorities shift to cope with the sunsetting of third-party cookies…
Only Influencers’ Email Metrics Project: Ask the Right Email Questions
Posted on August 26, 2021
Email metrics are confusing and can be easily misunderstood and misused. To help marketers avoid mistakes, Only Influencers has launched The Email Metrics Project at oimetrics.com. This website is home to definitions, articles, and videos to educate marketers on how to calculate and appropriately use email marketing metrics.
I’m honored to have contributed several of my articles about email metrics, as well as recorded a video with Lauren Meyer about how marketers need to Ask The Right Email Questions when using email metrics. In that 26-minute video, we talk about:
- Common questions that email marketers ask that can lead to the wrong tactics and strategies
- The differences between business metrics and email metrics, and the differences between campaign, channels, and customer metrics
- How having a super-high ROI means you’re leaving tons of money on the table
- What marketers really want are insights, not data
- Why open rates are the most misunderstood email metric
- The usefulness of external benchmarks
- How to use internal benchmarks effectively
- And much more
>> Watch this 26-minute video on oimetrics.com
And for a much deeper dive into asking the right email questions, watch…
The Questions to Ask Instead: Email Performance Measurement
The Questions to Ask Instead: Email Frequency & List Building
LiveIntent’s Real Time Banter Podcast: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Posted on August 20, 2021
I talk about all things MPP with LiveIntent’s Kerel Cooper and Jessica Muñoz. We discuss:
- What exactly is Mail Privacy Protection?
- How will Mail Privacy Protection affect testing within email?
- What metrics should marketers hone in on during this time?
- How should marketers approach data hygiene with these changes?
- What do these changes mean for consumers?
- Will the industry be ready in time for Mail Privacy Protection?
LiveIntent gives you two ways to watch our conversation—either listen to the full 37-minute podcast or dip into the answer to each of those 6 questions.
Audience Acquisition Source Ideas to Explore: An Oracle Consulting Checklist
Posted on August 18, 2021
Checklists can inspire you, help you identify gaps, allow you to take inventory, and provide an easy-to-follow action plan. At Oracle Marketing Consulting, we use checklists all the time with our clients. In fact, we love them so much that we wanted to share some of our most useful checklists, including this one about audience acquisition source ideas.
Whether you’re building your audience in email, SMS, mobile push, web push, direct mail, or another channel, where you attract those subscribers or followers from can have a profound impact on your performance. While more acquisition sources generally equals faster audience growth, not all audience growth is created equal. Some acquisition sources will generate healthy engagement and revenue increases for you, while others may generate little—or, worse, waste time and money, while also harming your deliverability, reputation, or brand image.
On the pages that follow, we list major audience acquisition sources. In addition to having our digital marketing consultants share advice about optimizing each of these acquisition sources, we also organize them into three groups to help you better understand the risk profile of the sources you’re using:
- Low-risk sources, where you’re recruiting subscribers or followers during or after transactions in owned channels who are very familiar with your brand
- Medium-risk sources, where you’re recruiting subscribers or followers before transactions in owned or leased channels who are generally somewhat familiar with your brand
- High-risk sources, where you’re recruiting subscribers or followers in paid channels who are generally unfamiliar with your brand, or where you’re using handwritten or verbal data collection methods
We hope this checklist helps you inventory the audience acquisition sources you already have, understand the risk profile of those sources, make improvements, and explore other promising sources.
How Many of My Subscribers Will Be Affected by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection?
Posted on August 16, 2021
Marketers now realize that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will impact a wide range of email marketing functions. By generating false opens, distorting open times, and obscuring IP addresses and device information, Apple’s changes will affect everything from email analytics and deliverability to email strategy and design in a significant way. However, some marketers are unclear exactly how big the impact will be on those aspects of their email programs.
Here are five aspects that are critical to understanding the reach of Apple’s new privacy protections:
- Mail Privacy Protection won’t affect Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and other email apps that run on Apple’s operating systems.
- Apple email clients are extremely popular.
- Mail Privacy Protection affects any emails received in Apple Mail apps.
- Any email account can be affected by Mail Privacy Protection.
- The majority of Apple users will likely turn on Mail Privacy Protection within months of availability.
For more details on each of those elements, and to watch a 3-minute explainer video…
Hide My Email: A New Reason to Only Accept Corporate Email Addresses
Posted on August 10, 2021
Lead-generation forms and promotional email signups are a value exchange between B2B marketers and their intended audiences. In exchange for research and other content, B2B brands hope to:
- Improve how form-completers think of their brand, hopefully nudging them toward an eventual conversion
- Identify the form-completer and the company they represent, and then connect this form completion to other actions to understand their level of interest through lead scoring
- Form an ongoing relationship with the form-completer, if they opt-in to receive promotional messages from the brand
However, when people enter a non-corporate email address into a lead-gen or email signup form, that can undermine those last two goals. That puts B2B marketers in the position of having to decide if it’s still worth enough to them to accept those email addresses. Some have decided that it’s not, and that camp is likely to grow as Apple rolls out a new and improved Hide My Email feature this fall.
The 7 Factors that Determine Email Deliverability
Posted on August 9, 2021
Poor email deliverability can be costly, causing a brand’s emails to end up in the spam folder or blocked entirely instead of reaching their subscribers. While deliverability can sometimes feel out of a business’s control, inbox placement is actually governed by seven factors, all of which are directly or indirectly under their control:
- Infrastructure
- Volume
- Content
- Bounces & Spam Traps
- Spam Complaints
- Engagement
- Reputation
For a discussion of each of these factors…
The Last Word on July 2021
Posted on August 6, 2021
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
The Real Impact of Email Tracking (Taxi for Email)
Screen Reader User Survey #9 Results (WebAIM)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Copy Experiment:
Don’t write a “call to action”
Write a “call to value” — Here’s what I mean…
[Get started] -> [Plan your finances]
[Sign up] -> [Grow your following]
[Try Now] -> [Launch your site]See the difference ?
Test it and see what works best for you.
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) July 19, 2021
When you test your email in different email clients #emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/FnE7drUNjR
— Rodrigo Santander (@Ro_Santander) July 1, 2021
When you type ‘goo’ into the browser and the first result is https://t.co/9cQnZel2wr not Google – you know you’re an #EmailGeek – thanks @M_J_Robbins for this awesome resource!
— EmailJay (@emailjay_) July 2, 2021
I feel this in my soul#emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/zDJSzNHOla
— Avi Goldman (@theavigoldman) July 23, 2021
Noteworthy subject lines
Big Lots, 7/1 – We’re hiring part time! Check out the perks!
Williams Sonoma, 7/4 – 🎆 Let the cookout begin 🎆
Belk, 7/4 – No sparklers needed! ✨ Sparkle with 60% off fine jewelry
Tractor Supply Co., 7/1 – Get Ready for the 4th of July – Propane Refill Made Easy with the TSC App
Gap, 7/7 – Hours left! App users get HALF OFF sale
West Elm, 7/4 – Long weekend goal: Outdoor dining upgrade!
Belk, 7/3 – Who’s ready for vacay? 🙋 Pack up with 65% off luggage
Nordstrom, 7/ 4 – Easy + comfortable = these sandals
Big Lots, 7/16 – Save BIG on vacation must-haves!
MoMA Design Store, 7/14 – Going Somewhere?
Quiksilver, 7/8 – Win a trip to Hawaii
Saks Fifth Avenue, 7/25 – Our top 4 road trip hot spots & what to wear
Nordstrom Rack, 7/29 – The Wear to Work Shop: Up to 65% Off
Patagonia, 7/14 – Industrial hemp tees for a life outdoors
Eddie Bauer, 7/14 – Camping Made Easy 🏕️
Express, 7/26 – When it’s too hot to wear anything else 🌡️
Subway Restaurants, 7/26 – Introducing NEW Subway® Delivery.
Target, 7/8 – Get the kids ready for school early ✏️
T.J.MAXX, 7/8 – Send your students back in saving style 🎒
Gap, 7/28 – Backpacks that POP 💥✨
Uncommon Goods, 7/1 – ❤️We’ve given those high school history lessons an upgrade. 💙
Michaels, 7/14 – Clutter-free confirmed: You’ve got affordable classroom storage ideas!
Kohl’s, 7/14 – Get move-in ready with major back-to-college must-haves.
Burlington, 7/23 – Snag these deals on college campus essentials
Crate & Barrel, 7/14 – Lounge-worthy ways to reimagine your living room.
ModCloth, 7/22 – Houston, our 30% moon sale is ending! 🚀
Williams Sonoma, 7/12 – Five myths about cooking with cast iron
Williams Sonoma, 7/16 – Le Creuset or Staub: which one’s for you?
AutoZone, 7/12 – When should you replace your brakes?
Quiksilver, 7/28 – Sweat Is Just Salt Water
Express, 7/23 – Say 👋🏻 to ALOHAS vegan footwear
Wegmans, 7/20 – 5 Products on Our “Love It” List 😍
Gap Cyber, 7/29 – Babies in bear ears? Yes please!
Victoria’s Secret, 7/8 – Most loved on @vsbeauty
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 7/16 – Feel zen with Hannah – our latest curator.
IKEA, 7/26 – IKEA Family, be the first to crack the case 🔎
Uncommon Goods, 7/26 – ☠️ Pirates, puzzles, and you. An interactive experience awaits. ☠️
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Webbula: If You Could Only Use 2 Email Metrics
How to Optimize Web Modals and Boost Visitor Engagement
Drive Your Customer Loyalty Program with Automated Campaigns
The Advantages of Gender-Neutral Messaging
The 2 Social Contracts Being Broken by Apple’s New Privacy Protections
Posted on August 4, 2021
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will have broad implications for how brands operate their email marketing program. These changes are most disturbing because they disrupt norms that have been in place for more than a decade—norms that have served consumers well and kept marketers honest. I would go so far as to say that these norms amount to social contracts, which Apple is now putting marketers in danger of breaking.
The first social contract is between mailbox providers and marketers, and it is: “Send emails that recipients not only tolerate, but engage with—or your emails will be junked or blocked.”
The second social contract is between subscribers and marketers, and it is: “Send relevant emails at a reasonable cadence—or we’ll opt out.”
For a full discussion of each of these…
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
