Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on June 2021
Posted on July 6, 2021
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Losing Open Tracking Will Not Kill Email (Martech Today)
BIMI: Images and Resolutions (The BIMI Group)
How the U.S. Got Boxed in on Privacy (Axios)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Spotify is proof that people don’t care if you have their data when you use it to benefit THEM. https://t.co/6izsmb5Q3g pic.twitter.com/3Tgv6NoiVd
— Val Geisler (@lovevalgeisler) June 3, 2021
Ahhh email marketing, so close 🤦♀️ pic.twitter.com/VWyzaFUO6p
— Imogen Davies (@_ImogenDavies_) June 3, 2021
Driving brand loyalty comes down to using these classic drivers.
📚 are they learning something?
🌲 does your brand have a positive effect on health/wellbeing?
⛰️ can you help them overcome a challenge?
👪 can you make them feel like they belong?
💖 does it fit their values?— Kate Barrett eFocus (@eFocus_marketin) June 23, 2021
My kids school district emails are always just an email with a link to a web page that has a link to a pdf and I get angry EVERY TIME!
— 🅱🅴🆁🆃 (@bertlamb) June 4, 2021
Confession: Every time I write an email to say when I am available for a meeting, I always write “px” instead of “pm”. You can take the woman out of the code, but you can’t take the code out of the woman, I suppose. #emailgeeks
— Anne Tomlin (@pompeii79) June 23, 2021
Noteworthy subject lines
Neiman Marcus, 6/3 – Unique gifts for Dad
Bass Pro Shops, 6/10 – Let Dad know he’s oh-fish-ally the greatest with gear from Bass Pro Shops
Uncommon Goods, 6/13 – Father’s Day gifts for all kinds of fathers 🍺😂🚲
Kohl’s, 6/8 – The gifts every grad wants.
ModCloth, 6/6/ — Happy Pride Month! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
VS PINK, 6/7 – Meet Jari, our inspiration ✨
Crate & Barrel, 6/1 – Home is for comfort, acceptance and Pride
REI, 6/6 – Celebrate with Our Newest Pride Collection
West Elm, 6/16 – Pride Talk: People & places who inspire…
Saks Fifth Avenue, 6/8 – Celebrate Pride: 3 leader on the power of love & community
Williams Sonoma, 6/1 – Williams Sonoma x The Trevor Project
West Elm, 6/15 – Obsessed! Our collab with REI Co-op
Bed Bath & Beyond, 6/2 – Backyard movie night? 🤩📽️ YESSS!!! Plus, your COUPON is inside.
VS PINK, 6/6 – Life’s a Beach
Express, 6/7 – Hit the coast in 🏖️-inspired looks
Neiman Marcus, 6/23 – Bright ideas for your summer wardrobe
Eddie Bauer, 6/6 – We’re Giving Away Camping Gear EVERY DAY This June 🏕️
Patagonia, 6/23 – The Untethered Kit—minimalist gear for the backcountry
Quiksilver, 6/6 – Help Save And Protect The Open Spaces You Love
Gap, 6/24 – Introducing the first ever Gap Home Collection
West Elm, 6/21 – Accents that make a statement
Saks Fifth Avenue, 6/28 – Loungewear you can wear anywhere
Williams Sonoma, 6/15 – The office is open… Morning rush?
Burlington, 6/24 – Starting at $5.99: All your 4th of July party needs
Sears, 6/6 – Don’t pay all at once ⚠️ Quadpay lets you pay in 4 interest-free payments
Applebee’s Grill + Bar, 6/17 – Buy $50 gift card, get $10 bonus card
Saks Fifth Avenue, 6/15 – Going to a wedding?
Victoria’s Secret, 6/8 – Matrimony Must-Haves
AutoZone, 6/7 – Want to wax your car? We’ll make it easy!
REI, 6/21 – What Gear Won Our Editors’ Choice Awards?
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Identifying ‘Real Opens’ Is Key to Adapting to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
EEC: Apple’s Privacy Moves – Sky Falling or Time to Innovate?
Webbula: Promotional Tab vs. Primary Tab in Gmail
Webbula: The Industry’s Reaction to Apple’s New Privacy Protections
13 Ways Email Marketers Should Adapt to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Website Optimization Ideas to Explore: An Oracle Consulting Checklist
Pandemic Email Audience Changes: Managing the Risks and Opportunities
Identifying ‘Real Opens’ Is Key to Adapting to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Posted on June 29, 2021
Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection features will have widespread implications for email marketers. Why? It’ll affect everything from email analytics and deliverability to email strategy and design in a significant way. That’s because these changes, which debut this fall, will prevent email senders from seeing Apple Mail users’ open behavior, IP address, location, and device information.
In particular, the lack of visibility around opens will be a challenge.
Apple will pre-fetch every email’s content at the time of delivery. That will not only make open times inaccurate, but will make it appear that nearly 100% of your emails that are received by subscribers who use Apple email clients are opened, whether they actually are or not.
It’s no small problem, since about half of all email opens occur on Apple Mail currently, according to Litmus data. The false opens generated by Apple will dramatically inflate overall email opens, which marketers have traditionally used as a signal of engagement for a variety of purposes.
However, there’s one solution that can help address several of the challenges caused by Apple’s new privacy protections. That is to segment out Apple Mail users. How can you do that? By using device identification. Let me explain…
EEC: Apple’s Privacy Moves – Sky Falling or Time to Innovate?
Posted on June 24, 2021
The Email Experience Council asked me and 11 other industry thought leaders to provide their initial reaction and take on Apple’s newest privacy change to limit email tracking and mask IP addresses on the Apple Mail app, and its potential implications on email marketing. For my part, I said:
“Consumers have been consistent in wanting more privacy and more relevant emails—not fully appreciating that these two things are largely diametrically opposed to each other. With their upcoming release of Mail Privacy Protection, Apple has decided to err on the side of increasing privacy. By generating tons of false opens and obscuring device information and other data, Apple’s MPP has made it significantly more difficult for marketers to send relevant emails and to avoid sending too many emails to their users. To avoid the negative effects of Apple’s privacy changes this fall, marketers will need to make adjustments to their email analytics, deliverability practices, and email designs.”
To see what everyone said and get a sense of the range of reactions…
Webbula: Promotional Tab vs. Primary Tab in Gmail
Posted on June 22, 2021
Some marketers worry a lot about whether their emails land in their subscribers’ Primary tab or Promotions tab in Gmail. To get a sense of whether marketers’ worry with worthwhile, Webbula reached out to me and six other email marketing experts to get our takes.
For my part, I think concerns about tabs are way overblown—and there seems to be a high level of agreement among all the contributors.
To watch my 3-minute video response, as well as the videos from the other six experts…
Webbula: The Industry’s Reaction to Apple’s New Privacy Protections
Posted on June 17, 2021
In the wake of Apple announcing that it would soon be disrupting tracking pixels, obscuring IP addresses, and pre-fetching and cached images for its Apple email client users, Webbula wanted to take the pulse of the email marketing industry and determine how everyone is feeling and what they think this means of our industry. Along with 11 other digital marketing experts, I share some of my thoughts about Apple’s new mail privacy protections:
“Rather than blocking tracking pixels as it initially appeared, Apple’s upcoming Mail Privacy Protection feature will generate tons of false opens that will make it impossible to tell if a subscriber using an Apple email client has opened a marketer’s emails or not. MPP will also obscure IP addresses, location information, device information, and other data. Apple’s new features will undoubtedly affect everything from email analytics to deliverability to email design in a significant way. However, while the new features will change how marketers execute many tactics and strategies, as well as how effective those are, it won’t relegate any of them to the trash heap.”
To read what everyone else thought and get a sense of the spectrum of reactions…
>> Read the entire blog post on Webbula’s Blog
And on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog, you can read our deep-dive into the 13 Ways Email Marketers Should Adapt to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.
14 Ways Email Marketers Should Adapt to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Posted on June 16, 2021
Apple’s announcement on June 7 of new privacy protections, debuting this fall in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8, has generated mixed reactions. Some marketers fear the demise of email marketing, while others have dismissed the announcement as a non-event. We think the actual result will fall somewhere in the middle, but marketers should prepare for impact to analytics, deliverability, and email design.
To serve subscribers well and maintain email marketing performance, marketers will need to adjust email marketing activities. Before we discuss those adaptations, let’s talk about exactly what changes Apple is making, keeping in mind that the following descriptions and our recommendations are based on our current knowledge and understanding and may change based on what Apple ultimately releases.
Website Optimization Ideas to Explore: An Oracle Consulting Checklist
Posted on June 11, 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 optimization ideas for your website, mobile app, and other landing pages.
Because these destinations represent the critical last mile for many of your digital interactions with your customers, it’s essential to always be watching how your customers react to the experience you’ve crafted for them. Routine A/B testing and optimization dramatically accelerates that flow of customer insights, so you can adapt even faster to what your customers want. In working with our clients, we focus our initial efforts around six pillars of optimizing a website:
- Determine the goal of your content and express that in a clear call-to-action
- Use prime real estate above the fold on desktop and mobile
- Figure out the optimal path forward for each visitor
- Simplify the content as much as possible, so it’s easy to understand
- Remove friction and distractions that may keep a visitor from moving forward
- Streamline the number of steps it takes to complete a journey
For a checklist of more than 80 optimization and testing ideas that will help you act on those six pillars, includes ideas that are geared toward specific industries, such as retail, travel and hospitality, financial services, and others…
Pandemic Email Audience Changes: Managing the Risks and Opportunities
Posted on June 10, 2021
List building has been challenging over the past 18 months, which has now made managing subscribers a challenge. Before talking about the issues that are pressing now, let’s look at how we got here…
When coronavirus lockdowns started in March last year, consumer behaviors started to rapidly evolve. Many stores were closed and many people didn’t want to go to the stores that were open, which heavily impacted subscriber acquisition efforts in those settings and shifted most list growth to online signups. Grocery delivery exploded in popularity, and ecommerce as a percentage of retail sales gained several year’s worth of growth in several weeks. Roughly half of the people who had never bought anything online made their first online purchase ever during those early weeks. Retailers and restaurants hastily rolled out curbside pickup and same-day delivery to try to serve online customers better. Meanwhile, widespread out-of-stocks had people shopping around and trying new brands at record levels. Layer on top of that massive shifts in employment and considerable urban flight.
Stating the obvious, that’s a lot of change. And it’s change that has posed risks in terms of not being able to adapt to subscribers’ evolving needs and then losing them, but also presented opportunities in terms of gaining brand new customers who have been driven to try new brands. The next phase of change is upon us and presents similar risks and opportunities…
The Last Word on May 2021
Posted on June 1, 2021
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Senators Roll Out Bipartisan Data Privacy Bill (The Verge)
Email Marketing for Gen Z: Statistics and Strategies (MailPoet)
Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry (Mailchimp)
US 2020 Messaging Engagement Report (Twilio SendGrid)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Email marketer culture is sending a test to yourself and promptly remembering something you meant to do before sending the test #emailgeeks
— Najmah ‘Two Sheds’ Salam (@najmetender) May 17, 2021
Great, now do Outlook please #emailgeeks
— Anthony Noel (@anthony10695) May 20, 2021
Noteworthy subject lines
Zales, 5/3 – ✨To: The Best Mom Ever | From: Your Favorite Child
DICK’S Sporting Goods, 5/3 – Mother’s Day is on Sunday! She’ll love these gifts.
The Home Depot, 5/6 – 🌹 REMINDER: Make Mom’s Day – May 9 🌹
ModCloth, 5/9 – 🌸 Don’t forget to call mom! 🌸
DICK’S Sporting Goods, 5/9 – See how the moms of DICK’S Sporting Goods are celebrating Mother’s Day
Uncommon Goods, 5/13 – Dad is always trying to get you to be early ⏰
Zales, 5/12 – 🎓 Voted Most Likely To…SHINE
Express, 5/3 – Honoring Teacher Appreciation Week ✏️
CVS Photo, 5/25 – 45% Off Photo Cards and Invitations. Celebrate Grads With Great Savings.
Williams Sonoma, 5/5 – What we’re making for Cinco de Mayo
Walgreens, 5/12 – Busy? Our NEW Delivery in under 2 hours makes everything easy!
Big Lots, 5/15 – An on-point pantry is just a click away
Kohl’s, 5/4 – Hit refresh on your work-from-home routine.
Target, 5/13 – Bored with your bedroom? Get inspired here ⭐
West Elm, 5/8 – You deserve a spa day, every day
Williams Sonoma, 5/9 – Make Flour Shop’s Rainbox Explosion Cake at home
Kohl’s, 5/10 – Bring on the backyard barbecues…
Lane Bryant, 5/5 – BOGO $20 bikini bliss is going, going…
Nordstrom, 5/20 – Water-friendly sandals from Birkenstock and more
Express, 5/20 – Vacation-bound? Pack these 🌴☀️
Saks Fifth Avenue, 5/18 – Our perfected packing list for Celebrity Cruises’ new Beyond ship
Petco, 5/3 – We’re making pet health more accessible for your dog
Crate & Barrel, 5/15 – Meet the multitasking machine that blends and juices.
T.J.MAXX, 5/15 – “Thanks! It’s from Italy.” 👠 👛
Uncommon Goods, 5/15 – New: 💩Cacamamie Party Game–immature adults and potty mouths welcome
West Elm, 5/6 – BIG News: Heather Taylor Home for West Elm
Banana Republic, 5/18 – Introducing: Pride 2021 Shop
Michaels, 5/9 – Maker Spotlight: Explore the colorful world to TK Tunchez, a creative who does it all.
Gap Flash Sales, 5/3 – @everyone: your FLASH DEAL + a bonus will disappear soon
Eddie Bauer, 5/11 – Free 90-Day Membership To The #1 Camping App
REI, 5/6 – Let’s Chat!
Bed Bath & Beyond, 5/4 – IG Live TODAY! Chriselle Lim shares tips & answers questions. ** Click here to access your coupons.
Express, 5/27 – Astrologer @alizakelly shares a top for every 💫 sign
Moosejaw.com, 5/11 – RSVP for our free virtual yoga class 🧘 Learn the basics this Thursday
West Elm Warehouse SALE, 5/29 – Your FREE design session is waiting—book now
IKEA, 5/17 – Let’s make progress together
Saks Fifth Avenue, 5/15 – New on The Edit: Celebrating AAPI designers, Mental Health Awareness tips & more
Mental Health at VS PINK, 5/24 – ASMR, Journaling, and Social Media – Don’t miss out!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
What Is and Isn’t a Transactional Email?
Dyspatch: 9 Ways to Get More Email Survey Responses
Email Marketing Audit: Spotlighting 4 Commonly Neglected Areas
Doug & Friends Podcast: How to Become a Niche Expert with Chad White
Email Evolution Conference Keynote: The State of Email Marketing
What Is and Isn’t a Transactional Email?
Posted on May 28, 2021
This question is more challenging than you think. And how a company answers it has a major impact on the size of the audience it’s able to reach with that message, as well as legal ramifications.
That’s because transactional emails can be sent to all customers for whom you have email addresses. This includes those who haven’t opted in to receive your promotional messages, as well as those who have unsubscribed from receiving your promotional emails. Under the United States’ anti-spam law, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act, these emails also don’t need to include an unsubscribe link.
But be sure to properly identify your emails as transactional because CAN-SPAM, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can impose hefty fines if a company falsely sends promotional emails as transactional.
For all the details on the legal definitions, properly classifying transactional emails, and which promotional messages are most commonly misclassified as transactional…
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
