Abstract
- Email Marketing Insights. When it comes to email marketing, it's important to comply with evolving privacy laws to avoid legal repercussions.
- Inbox provider priority. Providers like Google and Apple are focused on user privacy and efficient email sorting, which influences their email marketing strategies.
- Subscriber settings. Successful email marketing depends on respecting your subscribers' needs for permission-based, relevant, and engaging content.
Email marketing is complex and powerful at the same time. And its complexity is slowly increasing over time. The reason this is so complicated boils down to one simple fact. Email marketing has multiple stakeholders, each with their own agenda and priorities.
Email marketers have the difficult job of satisfying all of these stakeholders and balancing their sometimes competing demands. Let's talk about who each of these parties is and, more importantly, what each wants from an email marketer.
Related article: 5 Biggest Changes in a Decade of Email Marketing Changes
government
When you think of email marketing compliance, the first thing that probably comes to mind is regulations created by governments. Across the United States, anti-spam and privacy laws are so weak that more states are introducing and passing privacy laws, starting in California with the CCPA, followed by the CPRA.
Canada's CASL and the EU's GDPR are modern anti-spam and privacy laws, setting stronger standards in line with today's consumer expectations. These laws not only set corporate policies for many international US brands, but also set the tone for what new national standards in the US would look like that ultimately surpassed the outdated and largely ineffective CAN-SPAM law. I'm predicting what will happen.
What they want:
These laws set different rules (with the US law setting the lowest standards), but primarily address permissions, data collection, and data use. Consent and transparency are the main focus, so consumers are well-informed and empowered to control the information collected about them and control access to their inboxes.
If marketers fail to give the government what it wants, they face legal action and hefty fines.
Related article: Is the anti-spam law CAN-SPAM no longer meaningless?
Inbox providers and blocklist operators
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other inbox providers are helping consumers to protect themselves from spam from unknown and known senders, as well as from known senders they've given permission to. Very consistent with profits.
Blocklist operators such as Spamhaus also have an important role to play in policing acquisition practices, implementing proper inactivity controls, and encouraging proper list hygiene. They do this using original spam traps, typo spam traps, and other tools.
What they want:
Traditionally, inbox providers have wanted to protect users from unwanted email, especially malicious email from spammers. The new collaborative delivery standards announced by Google and Yahoo, effective February 2024, are part of this long tradition. These standards enforce rate limits on spam complaints, require full email authentication, require list-unsubscribe headers for easy unsubscribes, and require unsubscribes to be honored within two days. doing.
Another core goal of inbox providers is to help users sort and prioritize incoming messages to more easily find the most important messages. The much-misunderstood Gmail tab, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, is one example of such efforts.
But Apple, the nation's largest inbox provider, is expanding its actions to include strengthening user privacy. For example, Apple's email privacy protections obscure the open activities of email marketers and more. Apple's Link Tracking Protection also removes some tracking parameters from emails in some cases.
Of course, inbox providers aren't the only ones being proactive on the privacy front. Digital platforms across the board are increasing privacy protections, from the elimination of third-party cookies to Apple's transparent app tracking.
Related article: The death of third-party cookies increases the role of email marketing
Subscriber
These are your customers, partners, and prospects. In the first place, the reason you send an email campaign is because you want to deepen your relationship with them.
What they want:
As I explain in the fourth edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, subscribers have a hierarchy of needs that starts with wanting a permission-based and respectful email experience. But they also want an email experience that is user-friendly, ultimately functional, and (at least in some cases) good.
After brands build a solid foundation of respectful and functional email marketing practices, they naturally invest more energy into creating valuable email experiences. In short, the purpose is to create relevance.
In reality, it gets complicated quickly. Brands are deploying a wide range of tools and tactics, including personalization, automation, segmentation, inactivity management, predictive analytics, machine learning, generative AI, and more, as they seek to send the right message to the right person at the right time. I am. .
If marketers can't give their subscribers what they want, they'll face lower engagement and more churn.
Related article: 13 Comprehensive Design Changes to Increase Engagement in Digital Marketing
business leader
While subscribers have needs, brands also have needs. To further complicate matters, there are many factions within brands that influence email marketing tactics and strategies. In addition to email marketers managing the channel, there are business executives, marketers running other channels, and people from other departments.
What they want:
This depends on the ingredients. for example:
- Business owners typically want email to drive revenue and revenue for their business, but they may have little understanding of email deliverability, rendering, and fatigue.
- Marketers who oversee other channels may want to integrate more or less with email to make their channels look better. Or maybe it just makes email marketing weaker.
- People in other departments may want to help, whether their aspiration is to make the most of subscriber attention, clearing overstock or advancing brand, PR, philanthropic or cultural initiatives. , want to achieve their goals.
Having clear North Star metrics, a good view of performance across channels and departments, and understanding how they all interact is the key to maximizing email marketing performance and minimizing unnecessary drama. It becomes.
Related article: 4 reasons why brands are getting their digital marketing metrics wrong
complex but powerful
Getting back to the topic, all of this complexity is key to the strength of email marketing. For example, email marketing would be much easier if Google had some form of exclusive rights. At the same time, email marketing is also much more expensive and the audience you can reach is much smaller. At its core, email is just a walled messaging platform like Facebook Messenger, Slack, and all the other platforms that were supposed to make email obsolete long ago.
In other words, the complexity of email marketing is all the signs that make email marketing great. It costs a fraction of the cost to purchase the overwhelmingly consumer-preferred channel for brand communication, with amazing ROI, incredible reach, and powerful targeting capabilities.
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