Email Marketing RulesKnowing Your Customers So Well You Can Predict Their Needs
Posted on March 13, 2020
In part 1 of this series on B2C personalization and automation, we looked at the importance of responsiveness and reacting to customer behaviors. In part 2, we looked at the rules for relationship marketing and how to further level up your communications so that your customers know you know (and love) them.
So you may be asking: What’s next? The next and final step is creating a full 360-degree customer profile that uses data from across your organization and then using it to super-charge your interactions with your customers and exceed their ever-growing expectations. This is the gold standard most organizations are striving to achieve. Pursuing this goal will take you to the cutting edge of relationship marketing. Those who can master it see big returns and have customers who love them and are oftentimes big advocates for their brand.
In this third and final post in this series, Oracle Consulting’s Jonathan McClure looks at some key things this level of personalization can do for you and how it uplevels 1:1 relationships to almost something out of science fiction…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
On-Demand Webinar: The Highest Impact Email Marketing Trends of 2020
Posted on March 10, 2020
To help you determine your email marketing priorities for 2020, we surveyed our more than 500 consultants about 26 tactics and technologies. They rated each one for its current adoption and its impact it will have in 2020. We then organized them into adoption-impact quadrants.
In this 49-minute on-demand webinar, we focus on those email marketing tactics and technologies that our consultants say will have the highest impact this year:
- AI-powered content recommendations
- Omnichannel orchestration
- Send time optimization
- Email segmentation
- Email personalization
- Legal compliance (CCPA, GDPR, etc.)
- Automated or triggered emails
- Responsive email design
Specifically, we do a deep dive on those first four trends in this webinar. Along the way, we share Oracle CX Marketing Consulting client stories and talk about how Oracle technology can help brands make the most of these email marketing trends in 2020. Let’s focus on the trends that are most worth your time and resources.
>> Watch the on-demand webinar
The Last Word on February 2020
Posted on March 5, 2020
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Did GDPR Give Email Marketing A Massive Engagement Boost? (MediaPost)
Special Characters, Emojis, Line Breaks: More Tricks for Optimizing Your Emails for Screen Readers (Litmus)
BIMI: 2019 in Review and a Look Ahead to 2020 (BIMI Group)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
Roses are red, Violets are blue, Scam emails are prevalent, Don’t click thru’!
— Spamhaus (@spamhaus) February 14, 2020
“Email is dead” is dead.
— Email on Acid (@EmailonAcid) February 18, 2020
Respect to anyone who does HTML email encoding all day. This. Shit. Is. Hard.
— Daniel Burka (@dburka) February 11, 2020
“Hello Loren,
Isabelle let me know that you and your husband might be interested in hosting a birthday celebration here at …”
Whether sending a personal or commercial email message, don’t guess at someone’s gender based on their name … trust me, I know what I speak of
— Loren McDonald (@LorenMcDonald) February 28, 2020
Noteworthy subject lines
Walmart, 2/15 – 🎩 PRESIDENTS’ DAY 🎩 save on TVs, décor, & more
Michaels, 2/12 – Attention, Please 💝 Only 2 Days Left ’Til Valentine’s Day!
T.J.MAXX, 2/7 – In store: Love a lot. Spend a little.
MoMA Design Store, 2/4 – Say “Be Mine” with Good Design
Macy’s, 2/12 – ❤️ Got a V-Day gift yet? Shop these deals before it’s too late!
Williams Sonoma, 2/26 – Everything Easter: bakeware, baskets, table settings
Hobby Lobby, 2/15 – Online Only – 66% Off All Remaining Christmas Trees!
Bass Pro Shops, 2/7 – Get your fishing season prep underway and save!
Express, 2/26 – Your one-step solution to spring outfitting
Kohl’s, 2/19 – Stay one step ahead with new shoes 👡👟
REI, 2/25 – As Committed to Running as You
Staples, 2/25 – All eyes on YOU. 25% off signs, posters and banners
Williams Sonoma, 2/12 – Find your perfect shade of Le Creuset 🌈
Banana Republic, 2/26 – Introducing Work Where?
Lane Bryant, 2/4 – Join Lane Rewards to start earning today!
Saks Fifth Avenue, 2/26 – The Milan Fashion Week Memo: from Bottega Veneta’s show to leather everywhere on the streets
Quiksilver, 2/7 – Meet Phoebe Taylor, a musician from Australia
RV Navigator, 2/24 – Perfectly Rated Parks for 2020
Best Buy Top Deals, 2/18 – Another email full of spectacular deals! Get clicking + start saving… ✉️
PINK Sport Sale, 2/19 – AS SEEN ON YOU: Sport! (40% OFF!)
VS PINK, 2/4 – PINK GRL PWR PROJECT: It’s BACK! Apply now!
XOXO Victoria’s Secret, 2/7 – Shop V-Day gifts by price 💝
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Email Marketing Trends for 2020: Proven Essentials
Centralizing Data and Speaking as One Company
Creating a Single Brand Experience to Grow Relationships
Email Marketing Trends for 2020: Competitive Differentiators
When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: The Best Email Frequency
Posted on March 3, 2020
How often should I email my subscribers? Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Head of Strategic Services, Clint Kaiser, says that without a doubt that’s one of the top 5 most frequently asked questions my clients have asked him over the years.
First, it’s important to start with the customer, he says. This rocks some worlds but…the customer may not want as many emails as you are sending. That can be tough for many brands to accept because cutting back email volume is associated with cutting back revenue. Some see the “send button” as the “revenue button.” While it’s true that every time you push send, conversions and revenue spike, there are many long-term negative implications of over-mailing, including high list churn, poor deliverability, and brand damage.
But you can avoid those negative consequences while not forsaking your short-term revenue goals by being thoughtful about figuring out which subscribers should get each of your non-triggered promotional emails. The frequency of promotional emails across the industry continues to grow, so the risks are growing, too. Ironically, volumes are growing in part because of the ongoing effectiveness of email.
So what are the best ways to smartly, even surgically, select who should get those emails that are sometimes sent multiple times in a day? In this blog post—just as he did in his previous posts on the best time to send emails, optimizing automated emails, and fixing email performance problems—Clint looks at the Good, Better, and Best approaches to email frequency…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Email Marketing Trends for 2020: Proven Essentials
Posted on February 25, 2020
In the ever-changing world of email marketing, it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, 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. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
Today, we’re going to look at the Proven Essentials, which are those tactics and technologies in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but still deliver 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: 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, they put 8 of them in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2020. Let’s talk about each of them in turn…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Centralizing Data and Speaking as One Company
Posted on February 20, 2020
Building out your audience and then segmenting that audience to ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right people is critical. However, it can be confusing to determine how best to improve your efforts. That’s why Oracle developed the Marketing Maturity Model, which helps you determine where your organization is in developing its various capabilities and what should be done to enhance those capabilities.
In this post, which is the second of three posts in this series, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Otilia Antipa discusses B2B audience building and segmentation capabilities and how to move from a cross-channel approach to a data-driven approach. Moving up to a data-driven approach entails centralizing data from all of your channels and departments so you can ask WHY questions, not just WHAT questions. It also means having access to enriched and real-time data, so your analytics and targeting efforts become more flexible and actionable.
Let’s look at how your organization might level up its audience building and segmentation efforts…
>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Creating a Single Brand Experience to Grow Relationships
Posted on February 18, 2020
In Part 1 of this series on personalization, we discussed the importance of responsiveness and reacting to customer behaviors. These leading indicators of activities you want to accelerate or mitigate in a timely fashion are key to building a highly personalized brand experience. Let’s say you’ve nailed that though. What’s next? Data-driven relationship marketing, which takes a huge step toward meeting customers’ ever-growing expectations.
There are a handful of rules here that will help guide you down this path. As you might imagine, the more sophisticated we get, the more complex they can become to manage. For the customer though, it should feel that much more seamless.
Let’s look at the rules for relationship marketing and how to further level up your communications so that your customers know you know (and love) them!
- You are one brand to your customer
- What’s old is new again…introducing RFM 2.0
- Real-time gets real serious
- There is no finish line when it comes to testing
For a full discussion of each of these…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
Email Marketing Trends for 2020: Competitive Differentiators
Posted on February 11, 2020
In the ever-changing world of email marketing, it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, 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. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
Today, we’re going to look at the Competitive Differentiators, which are those tactics and technologies in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but 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 most adopters are already seeing a sizable return on investment. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns, gives them a distinct advantage over most of their competitors, who have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, they put 14 of them in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2020. Let’s talk about each of them in turn…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
The Last Word on January 2020
Posted on February 7, 2020
A roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Most Email Marketers Will Invest This Year Despite Challenges: Study (MediaPost)
2020 State of Email Report (Litmus)
Sometimes, It’s You (Spamtacular)
Were You Aware of Verizon Media’s “Off Switch” to Email Verification? (Webbula)
Insightful & entertaining tweets
design is 95% designing something, and 95% fiddling with it until the deadline
— Elliot Ross (@iamelliot) January 7, 2020
AWS accidentally sent me their email newsletter template, and it’s kinda great.
cc @dabit3 😉 pic.twitter.com/MYm6nHU3nD
— Kilian Valkhof (@kilianvalkhof) January 13, 2020
I think *think* possibly my test email isn’t rendering correctly… if you zoom in a look closely, there’s a tiny spooky emoji in there too. #emailgeeks pic.twitter.com/CwOLWlNzit
— Sean Hinton (@SeanHinton18) January 21, 2020
PSA: Don’t call it a 1-Click Unsubscribe in your footer if I have to click, then enter my email address 🙄, then click submit, then end up at a preference center, then uncheck all of the lists I’m apparently on, then (finally) click the last submit button.
— Val Geisler 💌 (@lovevalgeisler) January 27, 2020
Emotional Tone for Unsubscribes https://t.co/Ge1oyhnebF pic.twitter.com/lrp3aWHMl8
— Chris Coyier (@emailisgood) January 29, 2020
Noteworthy subject lines
Dick’s Sporting Goods, 1/1 – New Year’s Resolutions Start Here 🎊
T.J.Maxx, 1/1 – 🎉 NEW YEAR = NEW ARRIVALS 🎉
Eddie Bauer, 1/1 – Happy New Year, Happy New Gear!
Bass Pro Shops, 1/1 – NEW fishing gear for 2020
Bed Bath & Beyond, 1/1 — 🥗 + 🚰 + 😴 + 😌 + 🏃 = your resolution to be healthy in 2020! + 20% Off Coupon
Kohl’s, 1/14 – Becoming your best self has never felt so rewarding 😍
Williams Sonoma, 1/14 – 7 kitchen essentials for the new year
Staples, 1/21 – GOALS —> 2020 planners + calendars. Get after it!
Michaels, 1/28 – Save on the gear you need to celebrate football’s biggest matchup!
Williams Sonoma, 1/23 – For the win: game day food favorites
DICK’s Sporting Goods, 1/14 – 🏆 Officially 4X National Champions!
UncommonGoods, 1/28 – They’re back – just in time for ❤️Day
Zales, 1/23 — 💎 Better Than Roses 💎
Everlane, 1/28 – The Forecast Calls For Cashmere
Starbucks, 1/28 – Cozy is a flavor
Saks Fifth Avenue, 1/9 – These 7 hydration heroes will save you skin
Dollar General, 1/8 – Switch to save $3.50 on flu relief at DG.
Nordstrom, 1/22 – New wedding-guest dresses to wear this season
Hobby Lobby, 1/23 – Say “I Do” to 50% off Wedding
Patagonia, 1/14 – Industrial hemp workwear for the greater good
Bass Pro Shops, 1/22 – Johnny Morris honored by National Professional Anglers Association
Banana Republic, 1/22 – Celebrating Melodie McDaniel’s bold vision
Gap, 1/13 – Code MORE is all yours
Olive Garden, 1/22 – How do you say Piccata: [peek-KAH-tah]
Petco, 1/27 – Is howl-itosis a problem? 👅
UncommonGoods, 1/23 – Free 👏 shipping 👏 all day 👏 every day 👏
Kohl’s, 1/27 – 📱 Make your life easier with the Kohl’s App (aka your trusty Kohl’s sidekick)!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Webinar: The Highest Impact Email Marketing Trends of 2020
How Marketers Should Adapt to Dark Mode for Email
Bringing More of Your Data Together for B2B Audience Building and Segmentation
Design Analytic: Identify and Solve Actual Problems
Take the First Step Toward One-to-One Marketing
Email Marketing Trends for 2020: Unproven Opportunities
Posted on February 4, 2020
In the ever-changing world of email marketing, it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy. To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, 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. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.
Today, we’re going to look at the Unproven Opportunities, which are those tactics and technologies in the low adoption–low impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not fully vetted and may not generate the adoption or impact necessary to be broadly worthwhile. If all goes well, they offer a sizable competitive advantage to the pioneering companies who embrace them at this stage.
However, 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 that, big investments of time and energy in these trends should be made cautiously. And for most brands, the best strategy is likely to wait…and let others work out all the details, uncover the best practices, and stress-test the technology.
Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, they put four of them in the low adoption–low impact quadrant for 2020. Let’s talk about each of them in turn…
>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog
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
