1) Dayparting continues to adjust.
One of the easiest ways to goose your positive metrics is to send your emails (a) when people will see them, and (b) when everyone else isn't. So if you've never tested your times, don't think that they vary from summer to winter seasonality, and aren't taking advantage of evening and weekend work for highly motivated readers, you are just leaving money on the table. Anymore from 5 to 20% of it, actually.
2) Your body copy probably never mattered, and it really doesn't now.
After a year of extensive testing for a steady client, I've learned that email service providers are not analyzing body copy and content. They are analyzing subject lines, list hygiene, frequency, complaint rates and so on -- but the stuff that your marketing team really sweats over and edits as if it matters? Not so much. Inboxing, open rates, spam filtering -- that's all on the subject line. Plan accordingly.
3) Your total list isn't helping you.
That's because for most clients, attrition and obsolescence is going to make the unresponsive parts of your list an active detriment. Send to them, and your rates will go down, your sender reputation will tank, and you won't be able to reach the people who actually want to hear from you. Reactivating lapsed users is small beer, by the way -- worth doing, but it's not a game changer. Send only to active members and write the back end off.
4) Go organic, if your brand allows it.
Emojis used to seem like hack work or gimmickry, but since the world has gone away from them, ESPs see them as evidence of human activity again. Odd punctuation, a not quite polished quote copy, something that seems just a little bit off in a way that's more human and less AI? It's all going to work, because it's all going to seem like it's from a human, not a machine. The more tech we have, the more we want humanity.
5) File sizes will not be enforced.
Once upon a time in email, you had to optimize your images to the point of pain, limit animation cycles, worry about deployment times and worry a lot about ESPs gating heavy messages, to the point of always sending plain text test segments to make sure you weren't harming the campaign. Now? Yes, an animated image might take a second or two to pop in, and you shouldn't make your messages huge for the fun of it, but otherwise, don't sweat this. It does not matter.
6) Single KPI sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck.
No marketing department will stand up in public and say that they only care about say, acquisition without conversion... but they will also inevitably prioritize one measurement over all others, because humanity wants to operate on works/does not work binaries, when reality is a continuum. Measure the top of the funnel, the middle, and the close -- or risk your business to myopic moves that will optimize one factor, often at the cost of your entire business.
7) A secret sauce metric: read/glance/skim.
A top client uses Pardot for email, which leaves a lot to be desired, but does have one winning feature: a pixel that loads and tells the marketer if the reader has viewed the email in question for less than 2 seconds (glance), two to eight (skim), and over eight (read). Like all metrics in email, take it with a shaker of salt, but when you compare emails against each other and one has a dramatically better read rate? That's a clue on the efficacy of your body content, formatting, and so on. Don't ignore clues.
8) Check the tail.
Many email analysts will look at metrics after a small period of time and never look again -- but that's another clue that is being ignored. Some emails, dayparts, offers, content and so on is going to inspire interaction for much longer after delivery. That could lead to content changes, different tactics, and so on. It will also impress your client.
9) Email continues to underuse some tech, and overuse others.
Want AI to write subject lines for you? Sure, that's easy (and dear God, just hire a good human already; tech that ends honest work should not be celebrated). How about dynamic content that matches the user's interests, or fits into larger marketing efforts with CTV, AR, QR codes, banners, direct mail and so on? Not so much. (Alas the poor QR code: it's just never really going to be a thing. Especially when a bad actor inevitably uses it to promote malware and it becomes a media firestorm. Inevitable, that.)
10) Painting outside the lines still works.
The single biggest win for one of my clients this year was with an unusual format (a 2 minute broadcast spot), featuring very different creative (a comedy skit) in an unexpected setting (a nation-wide college football broadcast). A steady diet of this would not work, and there was a lot of unique aspects to this that made it happen; the game was a blowout and social media decided the ad was a lot more fun to talk about than the game. Having this be a replicatable success seems unlikely, but it did a lot of good for the client, reinforced the brand, and energized the internal team. It also wasn't an all-in gamble. Consider the wisdom of all of this.
There's more, of course, but we need to save a few things for your next engagement with us. We look forward to working with you.
