Email Marketing RulesThe Marketing Book Podcast: “Email Marketing Rules” by Chad S. White
Posted on July 7, 2017
I had the honor of being the very first email marketing book author on The Marketing Book Podcast, which is hosted by Douglas Burdett. During episode #130, Douglas and I talk about:
- How email marketing is de-siloing and being integrated with other channels and business functions
- How email is granted media, not owned media
- The role of inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook
- The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs
- How email deliverability now hinges on both negative feedback and positive engagement
- Why buying email lists is so dangerous
- Why brands focus too much on open rates
- Misconceptions around subject lines
- Optimizing your preview text
- Mobile-optimizing your emails
- Defensive email design and the use of fallbacks
- How subscriber expectations are rising
- The books that have influenced me and what I’m reading now
For all the details and lively discussion…
>> Listen to the Marketing Book Podcast
Webinar Recording + Q&A: Building Successful Email Workflows
Posted on July 6, 2017
Based on our 2017 State of Email Survey of more than 3,500 marketers, our second annual State of Email Workflows report takes a detailed look at every stage of email creation—from planning and creation to quality assurance and sending. The report is focused on industry averages, but what does the exceptional email workflow look like?
In this webinar, Product Manager Kevin Mandeville and I answer that question, sharing insights about the behaviors and processes that separate successful email programs from less successful ones. Some of those behaviors include the use of a year-round content calendar, the creation of email briefs for every email, the use of partials to speed up email development, and utilizing an extensive pre-send checklist.
If you didn’t make the webinar, there’s no need to worry. You can watch the whole thing, plus see the answers to the questions we didn’t get to during the live webinar.
>> Watch the webinar on the Litmus blog
How to Get Buy-In for Email Marketing Projects
Posted on July 5, 2017
Although being data-driven is the aspiration, the majority of companies are pretty far off from that due to a myriad of challenges, from bad data to poor integration to cultural issues. The result is that budgets and projects are driven by many factors other than any kind of return on investment calculation or forecast.
Litmus reached out to marketing experts at eMailMonday, Shaw + Scott, Adobe, Merkle, Barkley, Oracle, RAPP, and Red Pill Email for their advice on how to get buy-in for email marketing projects and they recommended:
- Promoting sexier adjacent activities
- Positioning email more broadly
- Leveraging transformative initiatives
- Leveraging regulatory and brand compliance requirements
- Collecting case studies
- Establishing proof of concept
- Celebrating your successes
- Finding champions
For all the details on each of those tactics…
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
Webinar: Building Successful Email Workflows on June 27
Posted on June 20, 2017
Based on our 2017 State of Email Survey of more than 3,500 marketers, our second annual State of Email Workflows report takes a detailed look at every stage of email creation—from planning and creation to quality assurance and sending. It gives you a great idea of what the average email marketing workflow looks like. But what does the exceptional email workflow look like?
During this webinar, Litmus Product Manager Kevin Mandeville and I will share the behaviors and processes that separate successful email programs from less successful ones. We’ll discuss:
- Content planning
- Production cycles
- Email design and development tools
- Quality assurance
- Approvals
- Interventions and apology emails
- And more
Building Successful Email Workflows
June 27, 2017
10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 5:00pm GMT
Can’t make it on June 27? Don’t worry. Register and you’ll receive the recording of the webinar.
>> Register for the free webinar
The Fate of Yahoo Mail: Will Verizon Shut It Down?
Posted on June 16, 2017
In the wake of a rocky transition of verizon.net email accounts over to AOL, which included many accounts simply being shut down, there are now questions about how Verizon will handle Yahoo Mail. Will Yahoo Mail users also be migrated over to AOL accounts? Will these users lose their yahoo.com email addresses?
I recently spoke with Jess Nelson of MediaPost, who wanted to know: What Will Happen to Yahoo Mail? This is what I told her:
“The Verizon email service didn’t have a lot of features or good spam filtering. It also didn’t have many users, compared to AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail, which are now both part of Verizon. So it made a lot of sense to migrate verizon.net email accounts to AOL, which delivers a much better user experience. That said, the transition could have been much smoother and less threatening for users.
Yahoo Mail should be a completely different story. While neglected and tainted by being hacked in recent years, Yahoo Mail has decent capabilities, a ton of brand recognition, and a much larger user base of accounts. I would be shocked if Verizon did a forced migration of Yahoo Mail accounts.
Instead, I expect Verizon to consolidate backend systems, merging the systems of AOL Mail and Yahoo Mail into one email system and user interface. They will then use that single backend system to service both AOL and Yahoo email accounts. On the surface, those will have different branding, but under the hood, they’ll be one system.
Although Verizon says there won’t be oath.com email addresses, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did just that once that consolidation of email infrastructure is complete—perhaps as part of an effort to service corporate email needs to match Gmail’s success with business users. But even then, I expect Yahoo Mail to live on for a long time.”
For all the details and additional perspective…
>> Read the full article on MediaPost.com
Would You Describe Email Marketing as ‘Failure-Friendly’?
Posted on June 15, 2017
Litmus posed that question to more than 1,000 marketers and to a group of email marketing experts and got very different answers. While marketers were very mixed, the experts said that failures in email were, at the very least, less painful than in other channels; and at most, necessary for optimizing the channel.
In this blog post, we explore why email marketing should be a failure-friendly channel, as well as share strategies for changing the culture at your company if it is unforgiving of email failures.
>> View the entire post on the Litmus blog
Webinar Recording + Q&A: 2017 State of Email Report
Posted on June 14, 2017
Email is a constantly changing landscape of email clients, support, and marketing trends. The email client ecosystem continues to be fragmented and dynamic, and email clients can drop and add support for critical email elements without warning. Combine that with the fact that consumers’ definition of spam is changing, and it’s pretty clear that email marketers have a lot to contend with as they adapt their email programs in 2017.
In this webinar, Kayla Lewkowicz, Kevin Mandeville, and I share the findings and our advice from the 2017 State of Email Report so you can arm yourself and your team with knowledge to navigate these changes and build email campaigns that surprise, delight, and ultimately, convert.
In particular, we focus on:
- Changes in email clients, including support for HTML5 video in iOS and responsive design in Gmail
- Changes in how consumers define “spam” and the reasons that drive consumers to report emails as spam
- Trends around interactive emails and gamification
- The biggest trends in email marketing for 2017
- Email workflow trends and opportunities to streamline your email production
To view the webinar recording and download the slides…
>> Visit the Litmus blog
LiveIntent’s Everything Email Podcast: The 6 Stages of the Subscriber Lifecycle and More
Posted on June 13, 2017
In this episode of the Everything Email Podcast, I join the show’s hosts, Ali Swerdlow and Kerel Cooper, to discuss:
- The 6 stages of the subscriber lifecycle: acquisition, onboarding, engagement, super-engagement, re-engagement, and transition
- How email attention spans have increased over the past 6 years
- Email virality, including what drives it, what subscriber lifecycle is most conducive to creating it, and how it differs from social virality
For the full discussion…
>> Listen to the podcast on the LiveIntent blog
And for a deeper dive, check out:
More Email Marketing Workflows Incorporating Task Runners & Static Site Generators
Posted on June 7, 2017
We continue to see web development tools being adopted by email developers. Two such tools are task runners and static site generators.
Task runners automate repetitive tasks such as inlining CSS and sending test emails. Static site generators are build systems for flat files that allow you to templatize and break down email elements, making them easier to edit and control
Usage of both of these have increased among email marketers, according to our 2017 State of Email Workflows report. Eight and a half percent of email marketers are now using task runners as part of their email production workflow, up from 6.7% in 2015. And 9.2% of email marketers are using static site generators, up from 5.2% in 2015.
>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog
What People Are Saying about the 3rd Edition of ‘Email Marketing Rules’
Posted on June 6, 2017
I’m beyond thrilled with the initial reaction to the latest edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, which is thoroughly updated and greatly expanded. Compared to the 2nd Edition, the 3rd Edition has…
- 30 new rules, with many of them focused on best practices around deliverability and workflows
- 7 new chapters, including ones on subject line and preview text writing, subscriber journeys, the minimum viable email, recovering from email mistakes, and email marketing attribution
- 3 times as many charts and diagrams, including ones about the transactional email spectrum, components of an email opt-in, and the email audience funnel
- 152 more pages, making it perhaps the most comprehensive email marketing book ever written
Here is some of the early praise for the new edition:
“Chad is dead on with this book. Stop chasing the next new thing and get good at email.”
—JOE PULIZZI, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute; author of five books, including Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing
“Email marketing is more critical than ever. Email Marketing Rules is timely, relevant, and necessary. Highly recommended!”
—JAY BAER, President of Convince & Convert; author of Hug Your Haters and Youtility
“Chad is honestly one of the brightest minds in email marketing, and this book is the gold standard on email best practices.”
—MATHEW SWEEZEY, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce; author of Marketing Automation for Dummies
“Avoid leaving money on the table. Email Marketing Rules gives you a well-structured, easy-to-follow template for reviewing and improving your program.”
—DR. DAVE CHAFFEY, CEO & Publisher of SmartInsights.com; digital marketing author
“I train hundreds of email marketers and reference this book regularly. A must-have.”
—KRISTIN BOND, Sr. Email Marketing Manager at Girl Scouts; Co-Founder of Women of Email
“Chad White lays out the key ‘rules’ required to take your program to the next level. Ignore them and you risk being left behind by competitors.”
—LOREN McDONALD, Marketing Evangelist at IBM Watson Marketing
“The Wikipedia of email marketing. You simply can’t find a more comprehensive all-in-one resource.”
—JUSTINE JORDAN, VP of Marketing at Litmus; 2015 EEC Email Marketing Thought Leader of the Year
“Chad White is one of the top thinkers in the email world! Anytime I am asked how someone can learn more about email, I reference this book.”
—SIMMS JENKINS, Founder & CEO of BrightWave; author of The New Inbox and The Truth About Email Marketing
“A clearly written guide…from a master of retail email marketing. A must-read.”
—DON DAVIS, Editor in Chief of Internet Retailer Magazine
“Chad White provides a clear reminder that email marketing done right remains one of the most powerful marketing tactics available today. Read this book.”
—JEFFREY K. ROHRS, Chief Marketing Officer of Yext; author of AUDIENCE
“Incredibly thorough and packed with the most useful content of ANY book on email marketing!”
—JOEL BOOK, Senior Director of Digital Marketing Insight at Salesforce
The 3rd Edition of Email Marketing Rules is available in paperback and Kindle versions.
>> Get your copy today on Amazon.com
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
