Email Marketing RulesEmail Annotations & Schema: ‘Automatic Extraction’ & Controlling Your Preview Content
Posted on May 22, 2024
To help users get answers quickly, search engine providers display Featured Snippets and other summaries that increase the chance a user won’t actually have to click any of the search results. Google and Yahoo are extending this same philosophy to their email inbox services by occasionally adding previews to commercial emails.
Gmail calls this “Automatic Extraction.” Both Gmail and Yahoo uses artificial intelligence to scan promotional emails and identify:
- Key images
- Discounts
- Discount expiration dates
- And other promotional content elements
They then use that information to either replace a commercial sender’s preview text with their own clickable preview content or add a clickable preview module above the body copy of an email. In both cases, the clicks on that inbox provider–created content diverts subscribers to the sender’s website.
Currently, Automatic Extraction is causing three major problems for brands.
Voice Assistants Reading Emails: How to Create Voice-Friendly Campaigns
Posted on May 13, 2024
Accessibility and inclusive design have become major digital marketing design trends as brands recognize the need to be more welcoming and considerate of consumers with a wider range of needs. Making email campaigns more voice-friendly is one element of this effort. However, it’s not without some contradictions and compromises.
Let’s look at why, and how marketers can best adapt.
Pressure Builds for New US Privacy Law as State Laws Pile Up
Posted on May 8, 2024
Momentum toward a new comprehensive US privacy law started with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which passed in 2018 and went into effect in 2020. Since it was signed into law, more than a dozen other states have passed their own privacy laws to enhance consumer privacy rights, regulate the collection and use of personal information by businesses, and establish mechanisms for enforcement and compliance.
Costs and complexities of complying with the patchwork of state privacy laws is creating headaches for regional, national and international organizations. Because of that increasing frustration among businesses, Congress has finally felt the pressure to act. Last month, it introduced the bipartisan American Privacy Rights Act (APRA).
While that bill winds its way through Congress, facing revisions and uncertain passage, marketers must comply with an ever-growing list of state-level privacy laws from California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee, Indiana, Colorado, and others.
In this post, Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s Brian Sullivan discusses how marketers can adapt to these laws, but first he talks about what these laws currently require.
The Last Word on April 2024
Posted on May 3, 2024
A roundup of digital and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Google Delays Third-Party Cookie Deprecation Until Likely 2025 (CMSWire)
Research on the Google HubSpot Acquisition: 48% Would Consider Switching (Email Vendor Selection)
Beefree Acquires Really Good Emails (Beefree)
Dear Google, it’s time for better CSS support in Gmail (The Email Factory)
F-Shape Pattern And How Users Read (Smashing Magazine)
Career Paths for Email Marketers (Jacques Corby-Tuech)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
2. Fake urgency *DESTROYS* your credibility. There is no offer here…AND IT ENDS IN 3 WEEKS.
Countdown timers don’t really function like they used to, but they are still an effective technique when you are hours *NOT DAYS* away from expiration
— Alex Williams (@alexcwilliams) April 9, 2024
Noteworthy subject lines
Scout from BARK, 4/1 – We now make stuff for cats. Welcome to CatBox.
MoMA Design Store, 4/1 – April Fools’! Designs That Trick the Eye
Zales, 4/1 – Don’t Want Mother’s Day Emails?
The North Face, 4/29 – This year, give mom more outdoors.
Fanatics.com, 4/23 – Game On, Graduation Edition
Tumblr, 4/22 – World Earth Day 2024 🌎🌍🌏
AE Earth Day, 4/22 – Trade in a pair of jeans & get $10 off a new pair! 👖
FIGS, 4/19 – Hurry! Our ♻️ Bin is Almost Full
vineyard vines, 4/3 – And They’re Off: Kentucky Derby Looks Are In
Spirit Halloween, 4/24 – 😱 Spirit’s Grand Opening August 1
Superdry, 4/11 – Lightweight Jackets For The New Season
ECCO, 4/3 – Spring vibes = big spring savings
Gap Email Exclusive, 4/1 – It’s Crochet EVERYTHING season
Patagonia, 4/20 – Made for climbing
Crate & Barrel, 4/13 – Three words: Patio. Pizza. Party. 🍕
Crate & Barrel, 4/19 – The best outdoor get-togethers are spontaneous
Clinique Online, 4/12 – A makeup lover’s MUST DO.
Lego® Family, 4/26 – Become LEGO® Star Wars™ directors!
Abercrombie & Fitch, 4/19 – Be the main character.
Clinique Online, 4/12 – Our treat. Eye drama that’s safe for sensitive eyes 🖤🎉
IKEA Family, 4/12 – Which one do you want to go to bed with?
Williams Sonoma, 4/28 – Join us for an evening with Ina Garten
Bass Pro Shops, 4/20 – Check Out Chris Janson’s New Music Video!
Target, 4/17 – Pre-order Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department CDs 🤩
Bitly Team, 4/23 – Taylor Swift gives a QR Code masterclass?
Williams Sonoma, 4/12 – Entertain like a queen 👑 Shop the Bridgerton Collection
Fanatics.com, 4/8 – NEW! Darius Rucker Spring Collection!
kate spade new york, 4/17 – Just dropped: Disney x kate spade new york
Gap, 4/13 – New Disney DROP
Scout from BARK, 4/11 – Now Boarding on BARK Air: Your Dog 🛫
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
AMP for Email: The Present & Future of the Standard
The Biggest Email Marketing Opportunities for B2B Brands
Second Quarter 2024 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
When to Use Retina Images in Emails and When to Avoid Them
How to Prioritize Email Personalization’s Perennially Moving Target
The Right Success Metrics? Depends on Your Email Marketing Business Model
Posted on May 1, 2024
As frustrating as it is to hear “It depends” when you need an answer, it’s far worse to get an overly simplified answer that flattens all the nuance out of a situation. Often, that’s the case with email marketing success metrics.
Email opens? Clicks? Revenue? Chances are you’ve seen those held up as the end goal for email programs. And they may be for you. However, they’re most likely not. And even if one or more of those metrics are, they’re likely not the only metrics you should care about.
That’s because every industry is unique, and that uniqueness should be reflected in the overall mission of your email program, as well as your key performance indicators. That said, there are some commonalities. In the fourth edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, I discuss four buckets that companies’ email programs tend to fall into:
- Revenue-driven email programs
- Lead-driven email programs
- Retention-driven email programs
- Engagement-driven email programs
Each of those types of programs have their own goals, and therefore their own KPIs. Let’s talk about each one.
AMP for Email: The Present & Future of the Standard
Posted on April 22, 2024
When AMP for email was officially launched in March of 2019 by Google, it promised to bring standards-based interactivity and real-time content to inboxes, allowing brands to bring landing page and app-like functionality into their emails. With AMP for email components allowing marketers to create forms, carousels, accordions, drilldown menus, and much more, the potential payoffs for brands and consumers were huge. Indeed, some marketers using AMP for email have seen their engagement rates more than double.
However, most brands have found that reaping those benefits are impossible given the current barriers. Let’s talk about what those are and how they might be overcome.
The Biggest Email Marketing Opportunities for B2B Brands
Posted on April 11, 2024
B2B marketers have tons of upside opportunities to improve their email marketing programs. That’s the positive spin on one of the central findings of the inaugural State of Email Trends report from Litmus and Oracle Digital Experience Agency, which found that B2B brands have adopted a wide range of email marketing trends at substantially lower rates than B2C brands.
I know B2B brands don’t like to be compared to B2C brands. Some think it’s unfair, while others think it’s just inappropriate. Apples and oranges.
However, I’ll confess I think the differences are more like apples and pears at this point. For example, B2B brands used to have very different deliverability circumstances because most businesses ran their own email servers. Today, lots of businesses use G Suite or Office 365, which use the same spam filtering algorithms and email rendering engines as consumer inboxes Gmail.com and Outlook.com. Plus, lots of employees access their work email via Apple Mail and other mobile email apps consumers use, too. And since every B2B customer and prospect is also a consumer, the experiences they have with B2C brands affect their expectations for how B2B brands should treat them.
I’m not denying there aren’t significant differences between B2B and B2C businesses, but they have shrunk over time and don’t justify the differences in adoption of email marketing elements, tactics, and technologies we found in our research. Again, that means B2B brands have many opportunities to take advantage of that can boost the performance of their programs.
Second Quarter 2024 Holiday Marketing Quarterly
Posted on April 9, 2024
The holiday season doesn’t have an off-season. Having a successful holiday season means executing a successful year-round strategy. Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s Holiday Marketing Quarterly gives B2C brands a quarter-by-quarter plan for how to achieve more during the critical holiday season with their email marketing and other digital marketing channels.
Our second quarter checklist is focused on finishing your review of the 2023 holiday season and then making a range of improvements to everything from subscriber acquisition to performance reporting to campaign production. In this Holiday Marketing Quarterly, we cover:
- Holiday Messaging Competitive Intelligence
- Audience Acquisition Source Optimization
- Unsubscribe Process Optimization
- Improving Analytics & Reporting
- Experimentation & Testing
- Accelerating Campaign Build Processes
For the full checklist…
>> Get the Holiday Marketing Quarterly via free, no-form download
When to Use Retina Images in Emails and When to Avoid Them
Posted on April 8, 2024
Because of the prevalence of full- and ultra-HD monitors and smartphone screens, marketers need to use retina images to ensure that their emails look crisp and professional. However, that doesn’t mean that every image in an email needs to be retina-quality.
Marketers should use retina images in their emails only when it creates a significantly better experience in terms of readability or impression. Otherwise, they should avoid them.
We’ll explain exactly why that is and exactly when to use retina images, but first let’s be clear about what we mean by a retina image.
How to Prioritize Email Personalization’s Perennially Moving Target
Posted on April 4, 2024
Email personalization has been a major priority for marketers for well over a decade. In Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s annual Email Marketing Survey, personalization has been among the top three trends in terms of both adoption and impact for all five years that we’ve done the survey. This finding is echoed by lots of other surveys, all of which indicate marketers putting significant effort into using their subscriber data to make their campaigns significantly more individually relevant.
You might react to this long-term trend by thinking one of two things:
- Wow, personalization is perennially a good investment that pays off.
- Yikes, personalization is clearly really difficult to execute on, otherwise we’d be moving on to other priorities as an industry.
When I recently spoke with Everyone Hates Your Brand podcast host Rob Voase, the latter was top of mind for him. He asked me:
What is it that is so hard to get right about personalization? Is it poor data? Is it legacy systems? Is it just too much hassle to do it? Why does personalization seem to be continually on the top of the list of things to do?
Those are all great questions, but let’s start with the last one, because that one gets at the core of the issue.
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
