Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on May 2020
Posted on June 12, 2020
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
The Old Reliable: Salesforce Study Shows Email Still Ranks High In Marketing Use (MediaPost)
How to create a BIMI-compatible logo using SVG images (ValiMail)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Opting-in is something someone does, not something that is done to them. Active, not passive.
Consent is something someone gives, or withholds, it’s not something you take from them or assume.
— Steve Atkins (@wise_steve) May 12, 2020
You may be wondering, how did this email get here? https://t.co/ljqUPI3PU1
— The Kristin Bond Virtual Experience (@EmailSnarketing) May 22, 2020
Hey @PSEGNews: Tell your marketing team their subject line/preheader game is on point! 💯💌#emailgeeks #emailmarketing pic.twitter.com/G8mzopLbOV
— Jen Capstraw (@jencapstraw) May 27, 2020
How you handle your business in the next 6 months will have a big impact on your success over the next 6 years. Make it happen. #AgencyChat
— Jay Baer (@jaybaer) May 28, 2020
Noteworthy subject lines
CVS, 5/4 – You Don’t Have to Leave Home for Your Rx.
Target, 5/29 – We’ve enhanced our non-contact shopping options.
Big Lots, 5/14 – Essential supplies. Curbside convenience.
Panera Bread, 5/19 – Chad, save $5 when you order Curbside.
Best Buy Top Deals, 5/4 – Shop these new tech deals, available for Curbside Pickup or fast and free delivery.
Walmart, 5/5 – Our new app is your one-stop shop
Staples, 5/30 – Today’s list: ✔️ Sanitizer ✔️ Masks ✔️ Savings
Office Depot, 5/14 – We’re ready when you are, helping you get back to work
Wegmans, 5/4 – Face coverings required in MA
Gap, 5/1 – We’ve got you covered: masks are here!
VS PINK, 5/9 – PINK Masks are here!
Michaels, 5/25 – Presenting DIY face masks for yourself, an essential worker or a friend.
Uncommon Goods, 5/12 – A kid-friendly handwashing how-to you’ll love, too
Bed Bath & Beyond, 5/4 – ***EXCLUSIVE: TWO coupons are here for you! Raise a glass for your virtual happy hour! 🍸
Express, 5/4 – Need new tops and shirts? They’re all 40% off.
UncommonGoods, 5/6 – Still need a gift for Mom? We can fix that.
Dollar General, 5/6 – Why not make something for Mom?
Wegmans, 5/10 – Show Mom How Special She Is Today
Big Lots, 5/5 – Rock your Cinco de Mayo at home!
Williams Sonoma, 5/5 – This year, Cinco de Mayo falls on Taco Tuesday! Recipe inside…
Staples, 5/5 – Say thanks this Teacher Appreciation Day. They deserve it!
Dollar General, 5/12 – Homeschooling? Stay supplied starting at $1
Uncommon Goods, 5/15 – Dear Class of 2020: grad gifts are on the way
Office Depot, 5/6 – Restock and upgrade on your scholastic essentials
Michaels, 5/19 – This email contains U.S.A. décor and DIYs.
Burlington, 5/25 – This Memorial Day, we honor all who sacrificed for our country
Home Depot, 5/25 – Remembering the Fallen. Serving Their Families.
Uncommon Goods, 5/19 – Care packages for pretty much every one you know
CVS, 5/5 – We’ll Help Keep Your Fridge & Pantry Stocked.
Williams Sonoma, 5/25 – Make ice cream anytime at home with Cuisinart!
Walmart, 5/30 – Hungry? Cook up something yummy. 👩🍳
Banana Republic, 5/5 – Not Cancelled: Floral Styles
Nordstrom, 5/30 – Go hard at home in Nike
AutoZone, 5/12 – Escape to your garage
West Elm, 5/9 – Create a space you need with our FREE Design Crew
Dick’s Sporting Goods, 5/6 – Create a Fun Escape with Up to 40% Off Backyard Deals
Crate & Barrel, 5/24 – Free local furniture delivery makes patio setup a breeze.
Bass Pro Shops, 5/11 – Spend some quality time around the campfire with family
Target, 5/22 – Grow your garden 🌷
ModCloth, 5/6 – Sunning, swimming, and stunning.
Banana Republic, 5/18 – Optimistic Dresses Made for You
Walmart, 5/6 – Kristen Bell & Dax Shepard’s date night tips
Walmart, 5/12 – Introducing Chrissy Metz’s most-loved styles
REI, 5/26 – Introducing our West Elm Collaboration!
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 5/18 – Lowe’s and ABC’s American Idol team up for a huge hit.
Bass Pro Shops, 5/20 – NASCAR is back! Watch tonight and tomorrow
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
CCPA vs. GDPR: Social Listening and Sentiment Learnings
Speeding Up Email Production Workflows & the Potential Consequences
Speeding Up Email Production Workflows & the Potential Consequences
As Coronavirus Restrictions Ease, How to Adjust Your Email Strategy
As Coronavirus Restrictions Ease, How to Adjust Your Email Strategy
8 Email Marketing Improvements to Make During Slow Periods
The Last Word on April 2020
How Coronavirus Has Shifted Consumer Preferences
Posted on June 11, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic clearly drove some new consumer behaviors: 28% of online grocery shoppers surveyed in March, for example, had made their first online grocery order ever that month because of coronavirus concerns, according to CPG marketing agency Acosta.
The unknown is whether those behaviors will stick. Human behavior is incredibly elastic after all. However, some consumer behaviors have already permanently shifted because of the impact of health and safety concerns, stay-at-home orders, the shutdown of non-essential businesses, remote working, travel restrictions, social distancing, supply chain disruptions, and other aspects of COVID-19 pandemic. And the longer these conditions last, the sticker all of these consumer changes will become.
Consultants and analysts at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting and Oracle Data Cloud see significant shifts in consumer preferences around:
- Consumer products brands
- Retail store brands
- Shopping channels
- Work environments
For all the details on how each of those have been affected…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
On-Demand Webinar: Understanding Email Deliverability
Posted on June 10, 2020
Email deliverability can feel out of your control, like your emails are hot air balloons being blown whichever way the inbox provider winds blow. However, this isn’t really true. Businesses actually have a lot of control over whether their emails reach the inboxes of their subscribers, but they have to understand the factors that affect deliverability as well as how to track key performance indicators.
During this 49-minute on-demand webinar, Daniel Deneweth and I dispel the myths and give marketers a true picture of how deliverability works and how to measure it. We begin by talking about the seven factors that determine inbox placement:
- Your email service provider’s infrastructure and your authentication
- Your overall email volume and send patterns
- The content of your emails
- How often you’re sending to unknown email addresses and hitting spam traps
- Your spam complaint rate
- How many of your subscribers are opening and engaging with your emails
- The sender reputation associated with your sender IP addresses and domains
After explaining how inbox providers determine whether to block, junk, or deliver your emails to your subscribers’ inboxes, we discuss the six deliverability KPIs that you should track and the appropriate benchmarks for each:
- Hard bounce rate
- Soft bounce rate
- Spam complaint rate
- Unique open rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Inbox placement rate
We wrap up the webinar by advising you on how to avoid spam traps and discussing the current state of email deliverability, including concerns related to the coronavirus. Watch the on-demand webinar to better understand how email deliverability works and how you can take control of your inbox placement.
>> Watch the free on-demand webinar on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Email Innovations Summit 2020: Prioritizing Which Email Innovations to Pursue
Posted on June 3, 2020
You can’t—and shouldn’t—chase every email marketing trend. To help you prioritize which email innovations you should invest in, we surveyed Oracle CX 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 2020.
In this presentation, which I gave at the 2020 Email Innovations Summit, I share which trends are Unproven Opportunities, Competitive Differentiators, and Proven Essentials—and highlight the risks, controversies, and efforts around some of them. By the end, you’ll have a much better idea of where to direct your email marketing investments this year.
View the slide presentation:
Webinar on June 25: Understanding the Mailbox Provider Landscape
Posted on June 2, 2020
The mailbox provider landscape continues to be dynamic, with ongoing unannounced changes to email filtering and reputation algorithms. That means ongoing headaches for email marketers.
Join Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Clea Moore as she talks about the key mailbox providers and recent changes in deliverability filtering and sender reputation calculations. She’ll discuss:
- The Big Four mailbox providers in US: Google (Gmail.com, Gmail mobile app, Android app), Apple (iPhone, iPad, Apple Mail), Microsoft (Outlook.com, Outlook desktop apps), and Verizon (AOL, Yahoo Mail, Verizon.net)
- The consolidation at Verizon Media Group and how that has and will affect deliverability
- Filtering and reputation changes at Gmail in recent months, along with changes in Gmail tab placement
- And more…
Understanding the Mailbox Provider Landscape: The Key Players & Recent Impacts on Deliverability
Date: June 25, 2020
Time: 1pm ET/10am PT
Duration: 1 hour
Your Presenter:
Clea Moore, Director of Deliverability Strategy for Email Deliverability Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting
>> Register for the free webinar
CCPA vs. GDPR: Social Listening and Sentiment Learnings
Posted on May 28, 2020
The consumer privacy landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. First, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2018, tightening privacy rules across the European Union. Then, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was passed that same year and was enacted on January 1, 2020. When the law goes into enforcement on July 1, 2020 it will affect all companies doing business with Californians.
We were curious about how businesses and consumers were adapting to these laws and how their attitudes about privacy laws in general might be changing, especially since more privacy laws are on the horizon. To get a partial picture of how people reacted to both GDPR and CCPA, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Social Media Strategy & Analytics Services team used social listening to check the reaction on social media. We compared social media mentions of GDPR to that for CCPA during key time periods, looking for similarities and differences in what people were saying about the laws.
While some of our findings weren’t shocking, others were definitely a surprise, as Oracle Consulting’s Vicky Czarniecki shares in this post…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Speeding Up Email Production Workflows & the Potential Consequences
Posted on May 18, 2020
It generally takes about 2 to 3 weeks to create, approve, and send a marketing campaign. If your company is larger, more decentralized, or more highly regulated, it can take even longer. Usually that’s not a significant problem, but sometimes you need to be more nimble or reduce production costs due to heightened uncertainty or financial pressures. Some companies are experiencing one or both of those currently because of coronavirus.
While there are absolutely ways to speed up email production, each comes with a trade-off that might put your email program on thin ice. You may find some of the trade-offs more acceptable than others. Here are the five stage where you can speed up email production:
- Email planning and analytics
- Copywriting, design, and coding
- Data logic and A/B testing
- QA and troubleshooting
- Review and approvals
In this blog post, we discuss each stage and what you are potentially sacrificing by cutting back the time you spend on it.
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
As Coronavirus Restrictions Ease, How to Adjust Your Email Strategy
Posted on May 12, 2020
We’ve talked in recent weeks about how marketers should respond to the systemic shock caused by coronavirus—how you start by sending crisis messaging and then adjust your promotional messaging strategy to stay aligned with new email behaviors and new consumer preferences. Now businesses are facing questions around how to handle the easing of coronavirus restrictions as economies re-open.
Oracle’s CX Marketing Consulting experts see companies as needing to make adjustments that are similar to the adjustments they made in response at the start of the crisis, but with some notable differences. Many of those differences stem from this critical fact:
While the stay-at-home orders on the frontend of this crisis were a sudden and largely national experience, the reopening will be a gradual experience at the local and regional level.
While it adds complexity, the phased reopening will allow brands to test and learn in a way that was simply impossible early on in this crisis when everything happened so quickly. The more gradual nature of the re-opening is a huge factor in our advice for brands, which starts with your reopening messaging and then involves adjusting your email strategy to be able to respond to your subscribers in a much more targeted fashion.
For a full discussion…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Webinar on May 20: Understanding Email Deliverability
Posted on May 11, 2020
Deliverability is one of the most misunderstood aspects of email marketing, often because of the outdated and flat out wrong information on the internet. Join Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Daniel Deneweth and me as we dispel the myths and give marketers a true picture of how deliverability works. We’ll discuss:
- How mailbox providers make inbox placement decisions.
- Why it’s simply impossible for businesses to fool mailbox providers or run away from a poor sender reputation.
- How deliverability has evolved dramatically, including new factors added to filtering algorithms and how the weighting of factors has shifted radically over time.
- What information marketers need to properly benchmark their deliverability and understand the significant opportunities for improvement.
- Deliverability considerations during the current coronavirus crisis.
Understanding Email Deliverability: Key Factors & Key Performance Indicators
Date: May 20, 2020
Time: 1pm ET/10am PT
Duration: 1 hour
Your Presenters:
Chad S. White, Head of Research at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting and author of Email Marketing Rules
Daniel Deneweth, Head of Email Deliverability Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting
>> Register for the free webinar
The Last Word on April 2020
Posted on May 8, 2020
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
How Retailers Can Reach Consumers Who Aren’t Spending (Harvard Business Review)
2020 Small Business Email Marketing Statistics (AWeber)
How Coronavirus Brings Out the Heart in Digital Marketing (Relative Insights)
Leaked screenshots show new Inbox tabs for Outlook on the web (Neowin)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Talk about amazing customer-centric messaging from @WholeFoods! Why? It answers the questions we have before we even ask:
– how are we gonna brunch?
– how to deal with a cooking rut?
– what exactly are we doing with all the leftover Easter ham???https://t.co/XndcxS90hM— Val Geisler 💌 (@lovevalgeisler) April 6, 2020
“We bought this bankrupt company’s list.”
That list couldn’t even keep the first company in business.
— Mickey Chandler (@mickc_pro) April 13, 2020
I cannot state enough how much I love this: https://t.co/ibz8xWx6lX#EmailGeeks
— Catherine Mears (@catmears) April 6, 2020
Name a worse trend in cold email outreach than the fake “Hey FNAME! Lol kidding! :)”
— Val Geisler 💌 (@lovevalgeisler) April 15, 2020
.@NYTParenting Giving us the subject lines we all need right now. (Can I borrow someone’s car?) pic.twitter.com/8xFdFMtgjM
— Kristin Social Distancing Bond (@EmailSnarketing) April 8, 2020
Noteworthy subject lines
Everlane, 4/22 – An Earth Day To Remember
Eddie Bauer, 4/22 – You + American Forests = 8+ Million Trees Planted!
Patagonia, 4/22 – Every day is Earth Day
Banana Republic, 4/22 – Our love letter to nature
Uncommon Goods, 4/22 – Dear Mother Earth: Thank you for hosting us all these years.
MoMA Design Store, 4/29 – Gifts for Mom & Mother Figures
Macy’s, 4/22 – Mother’s Day gifts for every budget
Bass Pro Shops, 4/19 – LAST DAY: stretch your payments!
UncommonGoods, 4/29 – Florence Nightingale was born May 12. Who do you celebrate in May?
Staples, 4/7 – She turned her minivan into a mini photo studio.
Williams Sonoma, 4/28 – We miss dinner parties too. How to host one digitally.
Williams Sonoma, 4/25 – No flour? No problem. Here’s what to bake instead.
Olive Garden, 4/7 – Get a $1 Kids Meal ToGo.
Office Depot, 4/22 – Customize your home office and eliminate the clutter
Crate and Barrel, 4/7 – WFH 2.0: Save on top home office & storage
MoMA Design Store, 4/22 – What Our Staff Is Using at Home
Walgreens, 4/22 – Staying home doesn’t mean sacrificing self-care. Shop our DIY spa day essentials today.
Neiman Marcus, 4/4 – Your at-home spa awaits! Hours left for $50-$100 off beauty
Walmart, 4/19 – Ways to stay entertained at home
Saks Fifth Avenue, 4/22 – Everything you need to make things more homey
Lowe’s Home Improvement, 4/20 – Help keep your home safe and secure.
Nordstrom, 4/29 – All about that at-home life
Everlane, 4/29 – It’s All About Sweatshirts Right Now
VS Pink, 4/24 – Sport looks for your home workouts: in your fave neutrals!
Belk, 4/19 – Workout from home: 40% off Under Armour
Wegmans, 4/26 – Try These Ideas for Family Fun at Home
Michaels, 4/20 – Hey, parents: Check out these fun and creative projects for your kiddos.
Dollar General, 4/28 – Backyard activities starting at $1.
Big Lots, 4/26 – Essentials for family-fabulous back yard
West Elm, 4/26 – Up to 60% off! Step into your new dream backyard…
Sears, 4/19 – Together, we’ll build your outdoor oasis
Banana Republic, 4/29 – Introducing our Summer Collection ☀️
ModCloth, 4/20 – “Love this swimsuit! She looks amazing.”
REI, 4/27 – Final Day to Save During Our Inside/Outside Sale
Gap, 4/12 – Virtually best dressed
Banana Republic, 4/12 – Dress up to lift your spirits up
Walmart, 4/24 – Add some “feel good” to your Friday 🌤️
Omaha Steaks, 4/6 – Help someone be prepared.
Walmart, 4/27 – Together, we can help fight hunger in the U.S.
Omaha Steaks, 4/17 – Help American families. Donate with your order.
Petco, 4/29 – Adopt, Foster, Donate to Save Pet Lives!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Behavior Changes in the Age of Coronavirus
6 Reasons Why Being in Gmail’s Promotions Tab Is Actually a Good Thing
Email Deliverability Quarterly: ISP Performance Feeds, Validity Acquires 250ok, and More
Systemic Shocks: Adjusting Your Email Messaging in Times of Disruption
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
