Email Marketing Trends 2018 (Smart Insights)

Email Marketing Trends 2018
16 Email marketing experts give their views and

examples of the future of e-mail marketing
Author: Kim Greenop-Gadsby
Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit

ONE. Increased
Regulations
Email Rendering
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16 Email marketing experts give their
views and examples of the future of e-mail
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marketing
FOUR. Intelligent
Contents
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
Foreword: From Pure360........................................................................ 3
Introduction: Email marketing: still worth taking seriously................ 5

How is this guide structured?.................................................................................................5
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A Big ‘Thank you’ to our contributors.....................................................................................6
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About the Author....................................................................................................................7
TREND ONE: Increased Regulation....................................................... 8
Writing for Emails

TREND TWO: Email Rendering............................................................ 11
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TREND THREE: Device Friendly.......................................................... 17
TREND FOUR: Intelligent Personalization.......................................... 18 Deliverability
TREND FIVE: Sophisticated segmentation......................................... 23

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TREND SIX: Subject Line Effectiveness............................................. 24

Code like it’s 2018
TREND SEVEN: Writing for Emails...................................................... 35

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TREND EIGHT: Deliverability................................................................ 43
TREND NINE: Code like it’s 2018......................................................... 45

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TREND TEN: Marketing Automation.................................................... 49

© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.
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Foreword
From Pure360
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As 2017 draws to a close, we start to reflect on which channels worked the hardest for us. As
marketers, this helps guide where we focus our efforts in the year to come.
Drilling down into your own data, and analysing it as a team, can help you get to grips with
what you need to refine in 2018. But, sometimes, you need to take a breather from all that
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analysis, and get some fresh perspectives.
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In this email marketing trends guide, you can get just that. Unique insights from some of the
UK’s leading industry experts. Experienced views that will help you refocus your strategy and
kick-start your planning.
So, why is the focus of this guide email marketing and not the wider marketing mix? Put
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simply, its because in most cases email delivers the best ROI of any marketing channel.
And yet, it is one of the channels we often neglect.
Email is a tried-and-tested channel, that some marketers may find a little unsexy. Some -
mistakenly - consider it too mature and fear it is no longer able to cut through the noise.
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Segmentation
But, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite being such a well-known channel, email is
an untapped resource for many businesses.
Email is at the core of customer experience, customer lifecycle management, and
omnichannel personalisation.
Many businesses rely on email to respond to customer behaviour. But, not many have started
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using email to predict - and shape - how customers behave.
And yet, the technology to do just this exists - and is way more accessible than many
imagine.
With the right technology in place, email is a powerful behavioural marketing tool that can
Writing for Emails

totally alter the relationship a brand has with consumers. Personalized recommendations
and other automations can a turn a customers fleeting flirtation with a brand, to a lucrative,
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long-term buying pattern.
Developments in machine learning have made email a more powerful tool than ever before.
This technology has allowed us to lift the lid on consumer behaviour. The data we have gives
us the power to predict and influence what the customer does next. Deliverability
The creative, nuanced, and personalised journeys we are able to create as a result take
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customer experience to the next level. With email at the core, we’re able to strengthen the
bond between the brand and the customer at every available touchpoint.
The impact this has on revenue is game changing. Email is alive and kicking in 2018.
Expect to see successful brands implementing:

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þþ easy-to-understand consent confirmation campaigns

þþ innovations in email rendering and email features
þþ device friendly emails
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þþ intelligent personalization
Automation
þþ sophisticated segmentation
þþ more effective subject lines

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þþ better customer experiences
þþ advances in the way emails are coded
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The brands who do this well - and take advantage of email in the year to come - will be the
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ones who put the basics in place first.
So, before you jump on these trends, test and learn from the cohorts who are opening and
clicking. Understand why others aren’t.
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Embed an agile approach into everything you do. Don’t stop experimenting, analysing, and
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enhancing.
To set your intentions—and excel with email in 2018—read on to learn from those who know
the channel inside out.
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About Pure360 – the report sponsors
Pure360 is a marketing technology company that provides behavioural targeting and personalisa-
tion tools to help retail and travel companies make more money from their eCommerce websites.
We offer a powerful, data-driven marketing automation suite and an industry-leading email
maturity model. Everything we do is focused on accelerating customer results across email,
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Segmentation
mobile, web, and social.
We deliver best in class results for over 1,400 customers including Tetley, innocent, Park
Holidays, Blue Bay, Ultimo and Financial Times.
Our maturity model is delivered through our best practice framework and account managers. It is
proven to take brands through a marketing maturity journey; helping them to improve customer
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Effectiveness
lifetime value, enhance their customer experiences, and drive deeper brand engagement.
With the Pure360 Marketing Suite eCommerce marketers are fully equipped to:
þþ Easily build stunning and responsive campaigns with a cutting edge Drag & Drop Editor
þþ Deliver multi-channel dynamic email and SMS campaigns
Writing for Emails

þþ Increase revenue and recapture lost revenue with the PureTargeting module
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þþ Deliver intelligent real time personalised content
þþ Accelerate results by integrating with third party systems including Faststats, Magento,
Salesforce and more
þþ Grow databases with competitions through social media with the PurePromotions module
Deliverability
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þþ Gain a 360 view of their customer with the PureIntelligence module
The Pure360 team is focused on delivering what really matters: results.

We are committed to putting marketers’ success at the heart of everything we do. In doing
so, we help marketers to put their customers at the heart of their digital marketing.
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Pure360. Improving results together. Be part of the journey.

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director, Pure360
LinkedIn | Twitter
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Introduction
Email marketing: still worth taking seriously
Email Rendering
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The aim of this guide is to showcase some of the latest Email marketing and marketing
automation techniques deployed by brands to engage their subscribers and develop
purchase intent. It pays to keep up-to-date with the latest approaches to email marketing
techniques given its importance to all types of business.
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In 2018, Email Marketing is one the most effective techniques for digital marketers, so
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keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry is super important. Our recent
research on the State of Email marketing in 2017 with partners GetResponse showed that
marketers rate email marketing one of the most effective digital media channels
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Email competes with organic and paid search amongst the main channels driving orders.
Email marketing delivers far higher volumes than PPC (9%) or display (8%).
Writing for Emails

Given the ongoing importance of Email marketing for customer acquisition and retention in
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most organisations, understanding and testing the latest email options and techniques we
cover in this guide is essential for businesses to stay engaging and competitive ‘in the inbox’.
But, we should also take care to get the fundamentals right. Strategy is very important, but if
you don’t have a solid foundation of email techniques and best practices, there is very little
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point in having a strategy.

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How is this guide structured?

We selected some of the key success factors in email marketing as we see them, and then
asked email marketing specialists to give examples of these and other trends. We have 10
trends in total, varying from “Increased Regulation” to “Code like it’s 2018”. Our contributors
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have been a big help in creating this guide. Thank you to them! There are some fresh-faced
specialists who normally work behind the scenes and keep their secrets well guarded. A
rather eclectic mix this year – we hope you gain valuable insight.
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Recommended resources for Smart Insights Premium members

Automation
rr GDPR briefing
rr Email Marketing Strategy Guide

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A Big ‘Thank you’ to our contributors
Creating this report would not have been possible without the generous time of the
contributors to give their examples and guidance. Many thanks to all of the email marketing
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experts from different countries and expertise areas.
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Jen Capstraw, Freelance
Alex Ilhan, Senior Email Consultant & Strategist and
Developer at Email on Acid President & Co-Founder,
Women of Email
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April Mullen, Director
of Consumer-First Jenna Tiffany, Founder &
Marketing at Selligent and Strategy Director at Let’s
Co-Founder, Women of Talk Strategy
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Personalization
Email
Joolz Joseph M IDM,

Ben Harrington, Email Strategic Email Marketing
Marketing Consultant, Consultant and Marketing
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TruffleShuffle Media Mentor at The Virtual
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Marketeer
Catherine Loftus, Senior Jordie van Rijn, Email

Marketing Manager at Trust- Influencer and Founder of
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Email Vendor Selection
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edHousesitters
Chad S. White, Research

Director at Litmus and Kath Pay, CEO at Holistic
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author of Email Marketing Email Marketing
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Rules
Dela Quist, Founder & CEO

- Touchstone Intelligent Komal Helyer, Marketing
Director at Pure360
Deliverability
Marketing | CEO - Alchemy

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Worx
Steve Henderson, UK, Data

Elliot Ross, CEO at Taxi for protection officer (GDPR,

Email e-Privacy, ISO27001) at
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Communicator
Tim Watson, Email

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Heidi Olsen, Senior

Automation
Developer at eROI Marketing Consultant at

Zettasphere

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About the Author
Kim Greenop-Gadsby is the Email Marketing Manager for Smart Insights.
She manages all Smart Insights’ email marketing and automation platform.
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She gets very excited about all things email because she’s an #EmailGeekUK.
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She was born and bred in South Africa and has over 16 years experience in
web development and digital marketing. When she is not being an email geek,
she is spending her time with her husband, two sons and menagerie of pets.
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About Smart Insights
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We’re a publisher and learning platform that helps our members plan, manage and optimize
their marketing using our downloadable planning templates, guides and interactive learning
tools.
We help individuals improve their personal digital marketing skills and businesses of all sizes
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increase their leads and sales by creating action plans to transform their use of digital media,
technology and data. We’re proud to share the exciting potential of digital marketing with our
150,000 active members across 100 countries and a monthly website readership of ½ million.
Get started with a free Smart Insights membership and you can download our sample guides
and templates from our members area and take our digital skills assessment to get recom-
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mendations on how to improve your digital marketing knowledge.
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Writing for Emails
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Deliverability
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Our premium member resources help managers and teams who are responsible for
managing digital transformation create and implement a roadmap to increase the business
contribution of integrating digital media and technology into their business. Premium
members range from SMBs to many mid-sized companies to the largest global brands. All
use our actionable resources to create strategies, roadmaps and campaign plans to increase
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leads and sales from digital channels.

Learn more about the benefits of individual membership and business membership.

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TREND ONE
Increased Regulation
Email Rendering
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There has been an increased focus on legal regulations within the email marketing world.
Marketers are currently in a frenzy with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) because of the worry of fines. It is important to remember that this regulation is being
created to protect consumers and help marketers to stay within the law. Ethical marketers will
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agree this is a good thing since we are responding to consumer concerns and this should
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improve brand perceptions.
Steve Henderson, Data protection officer at Communicator Corp

Back in 2013, while the GDPR was still in the early stages of planning, review and rewrites,
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the then Vice-President of the European Commission, Viviane Reding spoke of her ambition
for the GDPR to become the international gold standard for data protection. Part of this vision
included1 using a harmonised approach between the EU and U.S. to set models for others to
follow. While that harmony may not have progressed as anticipated, Jan Philipp Albrecht is
continuing this rhetoric, holding the GDPR up to serve as the “global gold standard for every
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new innovation, for consumer trust in digital technologies and for an entry point to the growth
Segmentation
opportunities of an emerging digital market.”
Lack of trust in digital economy

This year / 2017 saw a new wave of fake news, data breaches, ransomware attacks and an
increase in online identity theft. Study after study2 show that consumer trust just isn’t there.
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When looking specifically at email, the latest 2017 DMA “Marketer email tracking study”
showed that trust is the most important factor in getting people to sign up in the first place,
but that email marketers are abusing that trust “with fewer than one in 10 marketers (9%)
saying all their emails are relevant to their customers and more worryingly, only two in five
(42%) say that at best ‘some’ of their emails are relevant”.
Writing for Emails

Rachel Aldighieri, MD at the DMA, summed this up perfectly: “If email is to continue to grow
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and thrive as a channel, then marketers need to heed consumer concerns and give them
what they want.”
Marketers need data to make sure emails continue to be welcome in the inbox. Consumers
want an enhanced, but safe online experience. Trust is going to determine whether both Deliverability
marketers and consumers get what they want.

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We know that 2018 will see the GDPR coming into force, but is this going to change anything
and will it be the promised gold standard?
Enforcement in the UK
Last year the ICO appointed a new Information Commissioner to lead the ICO as the GDPR
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comes into force. And Ms Denham has hit the ground running, saying “Sanctions for bad
actors are necessary and healthy for a digital economy”. Within the first ten weeks of the new
leadership, the ICO had launched investigations into Yahoo and Facebook. Since then we’ve
seen record fines for breaches of marketing and data protection regulations. This year we’ve
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1
Towards a more dynamic transatlantic area of growth and investment
2
ICO survey shows most UK citizens don’t trust organisations with their data

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1
seen what I believe are the first significant fines in the UK for email, with Flybe, Honda and
Moneysupermarket.com falling foul of what could be seen as the ICO gearing-up for a new
enforcement regime.
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This is what the ICO published on Twitter one year before the GDPR:
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The language is gentle, but the message is very clear. Earlier this year “Spam emails” was
added by the ICO as an option on their “Nuisance calls and messages” complaints page
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Writing for Emails
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Deliverability
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And the ICO has lobbied for funds to hire 200 more lawyers, analysts and investigators.3
It would be easy to read these headlines and be worried, but Ms Denham has also stated
that the ICO would continue to be a “proportionate, rational regulator”, and that “[Companies]
don’t want to be fined by the regulator, they don’t want an enforcement notice, they don’t
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want the publicity.” And the numbers back her up, with only 16 out of 17,000 concluded cases
resulting in fines.4
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UK watchdog to hire hundreds as it prepares for country to adopt a ‘once in a generation’ crackdown on data
3
misuse
4
GDPR – sorting the fact from the fiction

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Consumer education
There’s been a surprising lack of consumer education. Individual companies run campaigns
to educate their own customers, but with almost 2 million cyber-related fraud incidents a year
Email Rendering
in the UK alone, there should be more.
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However, we already make it known when we don’t like something, as Spotify found out. In
the run-up to the GDPR coming into force, consumers will be exposed to more headlines,
re-engagement campaigns and items popping up in their social feeds. Awareness of rights
and obligations will increase. Our customers and subscribers will know more, ask more and
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demand more. Expectations will increase and it will be your job to meet them.
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Consent confirmation campaigns
In the 2014 run-up to CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law) we saw organisations across Canada
and the U.S. sending high numbers of re-engagement emails. I expected to see the same
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in the UK, but high-profile fines in 2017 has made organisations think twice before sending
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mass emails to existing mailing lists to confirm subscriptions and re-validate data. The
ICO has confirmed that sending out emails asking for consent re-confirmation IS
marketing, so to send those emails you need to have evidence of consent. Because
there’s no clear guidance on how to validate data and upgrade consent while avoiding fines,
this work has stalled.
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This work still has to be done. Only intelligently. 2018 will see more firms tentatively reaching
out to customers and subscribers and we’ll start seeing examples of language, design and
techniques which we can showcase and copy. If we can learn from what happened with
CASL, consumers will quickly understand accept that many or most of the brands they use
will be sending emails of this type and they’ll be happy enough to click through and confirm
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details for the brands they still want to hear from.
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Innovation, not enforcement which drives international reform
It’s not just in (re)confirmation emails where we’ll see innovation, but anonymous and guest
online purchase processes, better sign-up forms, privacy policies that you can actually read
Writing for Emails

and understand, online marketing and third-party data. The early adopters and innovators
coming up with the best processes, the best language and the best products will benefit.
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Others will copy.
I’ve already mentioned that consumer expectations will rise. But this will not be because of
the GDPR. Regulations are our minimum standard and while it’s true that these standards
are rising, your customers will expect more from you than the legal minimum. As one brand
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sets a new standard others will have to follow or lose customers.

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And this is why I feel innovation, rather an enforcement, is what will start to realise Viviane
Reding and Jan Philipp Albrecht’s vision. In the UK and across the EU the trend we’ll notice
in 2018 is consumer trust driving success in the digital economy. And outside the EU, if the
GDPR is seen as the Gold Standard, it will be these successes, rather than the fines which
others seek to emulate.

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TREND TWO
Email Rendering
Email Rendering
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2
When an email is dispatched from your email system, it’s then sent to the customers on
your dispatch list. All these customers have different desktop, webmail and mobile clients.
Not to mention different versions of these too. And the marketing email you sent will display
differently on each of them. This is because each email client has its own way of interpreting
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HTML and CSS.
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Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at eROI
With dozens of popular email clients, each of which has its own quirks, it can be
overwhelming to build an email that looks good and works well. To allow time to create
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dynamic emails, it’s important for your team to create efficiencies in your workflow.
Frameworks like MJML and HEML have emerged to help automate your email builds. Using
their own markup language, these frameworks help save time, provide less room for error
and most importantly helps establish a system to ensure your emails render consistently
across all major clients.
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MJML Syntax
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Writing for Emails
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Deliverability
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These frameworks require basic knowledge of the command line and Node.js. The
documentation is thorough and both have an active community to help you participate and
extend the functionality of the frameworks to fit into your own designs.
Depending on your needs, a more DIY-approach might be more your speed. Victoria Purgh
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outlines a Gulp-approach to automating your workflow that will give you full control over how
your emails render. This approach is perfect for email developers who cannot leverage the
functionality of a sophisticated ESP for modules and dynamic content. By storing data in
JSON files, she was able to generate numerous personalized emails without having to create
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each one by hand.

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Dynamic Content stored in JSON files
Email Rendering
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2
Device Friendly
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Once a system is established, you could create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to allow
other team members or clients to create their own emails.
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Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant at Zettasphere
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I’m seeing a growing interest in the use of interactive email features. The number of brands
experimenting with them and number of emails arriving at my inbox has notably increased in
2017.
Examples of interactive features are drop-down menus, carousels or hide/reveal content
Writing for Emails

sections. Things that customers can touch to interact with the email content, without leaving
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the inbox.
The big vision for interactive emails is to have a complete website in an email, so customers
never need to leave the email.
That’s a very big vision and it won’t be happening in the foreseeable future, it may not even
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be desirable.
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However, there are more specific use cases that make more sense. Such as running a
feedback survey or quiz within an email. Why take someone to a website for a simple activity
and when there is no wish to let the customer explore all web content.
In a Litmus survey, 10% of designers said they have used an interactive feature and plan on
creating interactive emails again. In the same survey, Litmus asked the question to find out
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which interactive email elements are the most popular.

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Email Rendering
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2
Device Friendly
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Here’s an example of an email using a hamburger menu from Net-A-Porter.
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Writing for Emails
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But how smart is that? Nielsen reported that hamburger menus negatively affect discoverabil-
ity, increase task time and perceived difficulty of the tasks.
Deliverability
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For example, in the Net-A-Porter email a conventional horizontal menu bar may be a better
choice, reminding customers of the range of products available, that they might not see
otherwise.
There is a clear need to understand what interactive concepts are useful and what are not.
Virgin Trains East Coast used an interactive feature to hidden content on mobile devices.
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This allows quick scannable headlines and for customers to read more about the areas that
interested them.
The screenshot shows the ‘Great Problem Solver’ headline expanded. Each of the other
headlines similarly expanded with an image, copy and call to action button.
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Regulations Email Rendering Device Friendly Personalization Segmentation Effectiveness Writing for Emails Deliverability Code like it’s 2018 Automation
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First Direct took a similar approach for mobile readers when sending information about
changes to their terms and conditions.
Email Rendering
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2
Device Friendly
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As with the Virgin email, clicking the down arrow expanded the section to (copious)
information about the exact detail of the change.
The approach is smart because customers select what’s of interest. Not got an ISA, fine skip
that section in a few pixels.
Writing for Emails

The GDPR and forthcoming EU ePrivacy regulation expect brands to better inform
customers. This needs to be done in a way that doesn’t overload but allows customers to
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consume the information. Having a summary with drill down allows a scan read and more
detailed information. A good solution.
A clever interactive feature might impress your boss but unless it gets the results it’s your
own goal.
Deliverability
There are three barriers to using interactive emails.

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1. Email client support is limited. It needs HTML5 compatible email clients, which
means Apple and mostly other mobile email clients. Based on average market share
stats that means about half of users. Fall-back strategies for the email content for
other clients are needed.

2. The difficulty of coding them. They need to be hand-coded currently. As adoption
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spreads we can expect to see more email solutions supporting and making
interactive features easier to deploy with drag and drop interfaces.
3. Interactive features can reduce click rate. customers might determine from the
additional information provided in the email that they aren’t interested in an offer.
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Thus, never clicking through. Conversion measurement is needed to compare static

against interactive emails.

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Rebelmail have developed methods to make interactive feature usage measurable. A
somewhat hackier solution is to use the Google Analytics measurement protocol. Not for the
faint-hearted and the preserve of expert developers currently.
Email Rendering
In summary, think carefully about making an interactive email. Do it with a purpose, to solve a
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customer experience problem. 2
þþ Use User interface (UI) designs in the email that customers will be familiar with from
websites or Apps. Enabling readers to immediately understand how to use the interactive
feature.
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þþ Only hide content that is secondary to the main message. If the content is needed to
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overcome friction to click through then hiding it will damage results.
þþ Only add interactivity that improves the customer experience. Just because you can do it
doesn’t mean you should do it.
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails
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Deliverability
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TREND THREE
Device Friendly
Email Rendering
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Device friendly emails or mobile-friendly emails have been steadily increasing in dominance,
over the other email client market share. The reasons for this, is simple. We are adapting our
working hours and how we work. Shouldn’t our emails too? Litmus shared in June 2017 the
market share had mobile at 50%, webmail is second at 30%, while desktop is 20%.
Device Friendly
Something to remember is that if clients are reading your email on different devices, you
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cannot continue to send the long text-based emails as before. 3
Elliot Ross, CEO - Taxi for Email

Now that Gmail supports responsive design, there is no excuse for not considering mobile
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email design. Serving up an optimal experience for almost all mobile users is now within our
grasp, so marketers should work with their design teams and agencies to achieve this. For
the very small remainder of email clients where responsive design isn’t supported, we can
still layer on hybrid and fluid design techniques to deliver an improved experience.
FIVE. Sophisticated
Many brands have been sending mobile email for a number of years, and we’re now seeing
Segmentation
third or fourth iterations of their mobile approaches. With mobile audiences topping 80% for
some brands, it’s not surprising that organisations are taking a strong mobile-first approach
- almost to the detriment of the experience on desktop. Now we’ve got an idea of the basics
(short-yet-punchy copy, easily tappable buttons, high impact imagery), we’re seeing brands
explore the minutiae of mobile optimisation.
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It’s important to consider that mobile email sits alongside social apps on the phone, and
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it’s worth considering how users consume content in a mobile context. Brands are crafting
their email content into smaller, more easily digestible chunks, so they’re easier for users to
consume.
Writing for Emails

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Deliverability
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TREND FOUR
Intelligent Personalization
Email Rendering
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Email personalization is one of those trends that has been awhile, but hasn’t been utilised as
much as it should have. If you don’t personalize your email, what do you have? An email that
will get lost in your clients inbox.
Intelligent personalization has moved much further on than simply saying “Hi Kim”. Projects
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like building personas and behaviour triggers should be high priority for anyone who wants to
THREE.
take personalization seriously.
Jordie van Rijn, Email Influencer and Founder of Email Vendor

Selection
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
Sticky engagement makes its way into email 4
For apps and social networks engagement is an important measure of success. They try
to become more sticky, keep you engaged and get you to return to the site. But brands
are not very different. Being top-of-mind and promoting email marketing engagement your
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
subscribers is either a true goal (if you have an advertising business model) or a step towards
conversion and loyalty.
Sending email alerts and reminders is a common practice for social networks and apps.
In-app and on your phone these are highlighted by the red notification dot. The dot is now
making its way into email.
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Effectiveness
Linkedin, for instance, has brought the notification into a live updating element of their emails
showing the number of notifications that are still open. It makes a lot of sense as a form of
“flowvertising”, where you experience brand interactions in flow across multiple devices and
media.
Writing for Emails

SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
Many brands can use this mechanism, even if they don’t have their own app. Think about
highlighting the number of items in (abandoned) shopping carts for instance or steps to
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complete in a registration process.

Humans have the instinct baked-in to pay attention to the new, act on the urgent and want
things complete. Combined with a little “reward” each time we complete the task, makes
those notification Dots simply irresistible. I predict we will see more of these small sticky
TEN. Marketing
engagement elements in email in the period to come.

Automation

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Predictive content personalization
One personalization mega-trend that has been the bedrock of successful email are product
recommendations. If your email program includes products / offers, there are always product
Email Rendering
recommendations, even if manually picked or segmented by hand.
TWO.
But automation of product recommendations is the real trend. A product recommendation engine
will take all the data it has available from the subscriber and others and make a prediction which
products and content are most likely to be interesting for this user. A recommendation engine will
win over gut feeling or the HIPPO (Highest Paid person’s opinion) every time.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
4
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Source: Recommendation Engines for Email Marketing
Effectiveness
Doing product recommendations and predictions has had several practical problems in the
past, for instance to have the product data available in a parse-able format when there wasn’t
enough sales data to base predictions on. But a smart private site crawler can now index, tag
and segment all of your site inventory for you. Or catching site behaviour to base the recom-
Writing for Emails

mendations on, these are now covered by Customer Data Platforms (or capture is built-in in
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the recommendation engine). Making this an automation for email marketing content.
Deliverability
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Although many of these prediction engines might not strictly speaking be self-learning, but
rather rule based, in the form of “people that liked X also like Y”, The attention surrounding
A.I. and wish for intelligent automation is likely to give this another push in the coming year.
Email Rendering
TWO.
Jenna Tiffany, Founder & Strategy Director - Let’s Talk Strategy
Providing the right content in the right context remains king in the digital experience with 75%
consumers more likely to buy from retailers that provide personalization5.
But the truth is that many brands are still playing catch-up – with emails being sent without
Device Friendly
including the very basics of a first name and website pages littered with products which are
THREE.
already bought or completely irrelevant to the consumer. Personalization has to be smart and
more intuitive if it is to fit seamlessly into the digital journey to be truly effective.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
4
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
Intelligent personalisation is all about engaging your subscriber and remembering that even
Writing for Emails

if you send a message to your entire customer base, you will always only be speaking to a
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single human at any given time.
One of the most effective digital marketing channels for creating Personalized campaigns is
email marketing, yet 59% of consumers are stating they are receiving irrelevant emails on a
regular basis6. Deliverability
Personalized conversations bring people together in the real world, and the same can be
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replicated through email marketing. However, the majority of marketing emails don’t include
the first name. The first thing we do when we meet someone new is to introduce ourselves
with our names. Forgetting someone’s first name or not acknowledging it, isn’t really
relationship building.
Show the customer that you want to start a valued relationship by addressing them by their
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first name. This will start to build a relationship with your customer. The more they engage
with you, the more personalized the content should be within your email campaigns.
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Automation
5
Accenture: Personalisation Pulse Check Survey 2016
6
DMA Consumer Tracker report 2017

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Ben Harrington, Email Marketing Consultant, TruffleShuffle Media
Without question, 2018 will be the year of Intelligent Personalization.
Email Rendering
It is forecasted that more and more businesses will take intelligent personalization on-board,
TWO.
and see the benefits of making their communications more data-driven and personal.
Personalization itself is nothing new, being around since the beginning of time and
marketing–or at least so it seems.
Device Friendly
When I started using personalization in emails, it included just a simple name in the
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subject line, the usual “Hi Ben” in the content, and was sent afterwards to the most basic of
segments. Skip five years, and we have workflows set up here and there that are all running
from data that is being dragged from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems,
websites and all sorts of software.
Everything is now integrated into one big email marketing lifecycle.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
With that in mind, over the past year or so, I have come across businesses that still hit the 4
send button to their entire subscriber list and wonder “why are my open and click through
rates so low?” without doing any personalization whatsoever. Personalization can be as
simple and basic as a business wants it to be, but without constant tweaking, it will only be
FIVE. Sophisticated
able to provide subpar results.
Segmentation
Using the technology available now–with plenty of choices nowadays–the possibilities are
endless in regard to what you are able to do with data, and how you can manipulate it to
create a personalized customer journey.
Ecommerce powerhouses are a perfect example of a productive customer journey. They are
able to target their prospect in relation to how they interact with the website, sometimes even
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Effectiveness
the physical store, and use behavioural triggers that send relevant content at a relevant time
to their subscribers.
Obviously, not every business has the budget, time, or know-how when it comes to
implementing such a strategy, yet every modern business does hold relevant data about their
customers. Though scattered and disorganized, it is still a good starting point.
Writing for Emails

As GDPR gets closer (May 2018) there may be no better time to begin sorting out that data,
SEVEN.
and devise a personalized strategy to take a business to the next level.
Commercial entities can use their data gathered to build behavioural triggers and customer
personas/profiling. This will also prove helpful with lead scoring, which in turn will facilitate the
creation of personalized emails that gather an increase in engagement, sales and interaction.
Deliverability
Given the premises that intelligent personalization will most certainly be one of the key
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developments for all email marketing in the near future, one must also keep in mind that
subscribers are quite fond of their privacy. It all depends on how far a business wants to go,
but while the brevity is the soul of wit, the same applies to the business environment, where
subtlety is the trademark of proficient marketing.
To conclude, intelligent personalization works and works well, but as with every tool out there,
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it’s how you use it that matters most.

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Automation

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Komal Helyer, Marketing Director - Pure360
Personalization has been more than just inserting a name (or any other demographic) for a
long time. These tactics are now not enough to drive better results. There are a plethora of
Email Rendering
contextual personalization tactics that brands can use. These include anything from product
TWO.
recommendations, personalized landing pages, intelligent real-time content that changes
depending on geography—or even weather—to campaigns predicting what the consumer will
do next. As marketers have a wealth of technology available to easily implement these, we
will see these intelligent personalizations feature in the successful campaigns of 2018.
Device Friendly
THREE.
Jen Capstraw, Freelance Consultant & Strategist and President &
Co-Founder, Women of Email
Debbie Downer here. Skimming my own inbox on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I’m
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
disappointed with the state of personalization in email. My clients tell me often they *want*
to be more personalized—they’ve heard the message loud and clear that personalization 4
delivers greater engagement and conversions—but when it comes to the business-as-usual
campaigns that fill our inboxes, marketers are largely missing the mark. They’re beholden
to editorial calendars, status quos, and inefficient processes. Personalization at scale is
FIVE. Sophisticated
incredibly hard, and significant transformation—and investment—is necessary to realize it.
Segmentation
Because even mediocre email marketing performs well enough, we’re not seeing radical
change, save for a handful of trail blazers. Sadly, this will continue in 2018. On the upside
though, greater attention is being paid to behaviour-based triggers. Marketers are exploring
creative ways to harness email, website and app engagement to deliver highly targeted
campaigns. While this type of messaging makes up a mere sliver of the email ecosphere,
SIX. Subject Line

behavioural email is tops when it comes to ROI, and the accessibility and affordability of
Effectiveness
solutions that integrate easily with most environments is driving wide adoption.
Writing for Emails

SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
NINE.
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Automation

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TREND FIVE
Sophisticated segmentation
Email Rendering
TWO.
Do you market to your whole database? Unfortunately, marketing this way, you will
experience subscriber fatigue, loss of revenue and an increasing spam score to mention a
few. You will be sending another blast email - the phrase that strikes fear into every email
marketer.
Device Friendly
Segmentation allows you to treat your clients differently. More personalization means an
THREE.
increase in conversions because it will help you to keep relevant with your lists ever-changing
needs.
Elliot Ross, CEO - Taxi for Email
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
The idea of the hyper-personalized segment-of-one has long been the holy grail of email
marketers. However, there have always been challenges achieving this - one is that the
signals historically haven’t been strong enough for us to accurately tailor messaging. Another
has been that physically creating many versions of content has been cost and/or time
prohibitive. Developments in technology, from smarter content management apps to products
FIVE. Sophisticated
that harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, are beginning to enable
Segmentation
marketers in this aim. 5
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
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Deliverability
EIGHT.
NINE.
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Automation

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TREND SIX
Subject Line Effectiveness
Email Rendering
TWO.
Since the beginning of marketing emails, there has been much debate over what makes a
good subject line. Does it need to be short, long or do you use emojis to entice your clients to
open your email? However, what worked 10 years ago or 10 days ago may not work for you
or your subscriber base. Once you understand your subscribers and have a testing plan in
Device Friendly
place, you are halfway there.
THREE.
April Mullen, Director of Consumer-First Marketing at Selligent and
Co-Founder, Women of Email
After your “from” name which has a lot of brand equity with your customers, the subject line
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
(along with the pre-header), has the biggest impact on your email opens. While it’s a simpler
task in the email production process, it’s one of the most important given that it drives the first
of micro-conversions that is required to reach the end conversion. Here are my predictions
for subject lines in 2018:
rr Given that mobile opens consistently hover above 50%, it’s no surprise that subject lines
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
are getting shorter and will likely continue to do so. A recent study7 claims that subject
line character counts that hover between 1 and 20 characters have a higher open rate,
click rate and click-to-open rate (CTOR).
rr Emojis will continue to be used to grab attention in the inbox. A recent study8 showed
inconclusive results, but my Black Friday and Cyber Monday-filled inbox shows that
SIX. Subject Line

marketers love using them. They’re easy, they help keep character counts low and they’re
Effectiveness
informal/conversational. 6
rr Speaking of conversational, subject lines are getting increasingly casual. The use of
conversational language, humor and puns will be a hit in 2018, as marketers embrace
less formality in their brand image.
Writing for Emails

rr Lastly, subject line testing is the most common type of email test because it is easy to
SEVEN.
create several versions without having to touch HTML assets. In 2018, subject line testing
will grow up a bit, due to advancements in artificial intelligence. What used to be a test
that marketers would have to plan in advance, will become a fluid and dynamic process
that self-optimizes across all send using intelligence technologies like Phrasee, Persado
or even ESP/marketing cloud AI testing capabilities.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
Joolz Joseph M IDM, Strategic Email Marketing Consultant |

Marketing Mentor at The Virtual Marketeer
With the use of folders now commonplace in popular email clients, many recipients simply
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glance through their promotional emails every few days, meaning it’s more challenging than
ever to make an impression.
There are a number of tools out there to help improve your subject lines and these tools will
get smarter and their use will become more prevalent. Two such examples include Adobe
TEN. Marketing
Automation
7
Email Client Market Share Trends for 2017
8
Email Subject Line Length: Is Brevity Better?

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Campaign (which uses AI to suggest the best subject lines for an email) and Alchemy Worx
Touchstone (which is designed to identify the best performing subject line from options you
provide).
Email Rendering
One of the biggest trends which I think will continue, is the use of emoji’s, which are
TWO.
increasingly prevalent in our inboxes. Whilst they can increase opens, overuse will make your
email look like spam, so it is important to get the balance right.
Ensure your use of emoji is in line with both the email’s content and your brand. With over
2,000 emoji to choose from, you should be able to find one or two that are relevant!
Device Friendly
Whilst it can be great to use a series of emoji’s to tell a story, if appropriate to your audience,
THREE.
make sure you do your research on your recipient email clients. If their browser, email client,
or mobile device doesn’t support the emoji you use, it will be replaced with a generic square
 or question mark ?. A subject line with a lot of emoji can look empty or pointless in these
clients.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
One company that uses emoji really well is Mo You London and they couple them with capital
letters to make their emails stand out in the inbox.
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
6
Writing for Emails

Alongside subject lines is the pre-header text and I don’t believe one can be mentioned
SEVEN.
without the other. Once almost always filled with the words ‘Click to view in your browser’,
smart senders are using pre-header text effectively to extend their subject line or
complement it. I love emails which elaborate on the subject more or tease me about the
content in the pre-header. Deliverability
Another trend which I have been using for many years, but which I have noticed a lot more of
EIGHT.
recently, is a 2nd send of the same email several days later, with a different subject line. This
is a smart way to maximize opens for smaller companies who don’t have the budget for larger
automated, optimizing campaigns.
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Dela Quist, Founder & CEO - Touchstone Intelligent Marketing | CEO -

Alchemy Worx
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so
it goes away. Puzzling.”
TEN. Marketing
Automation
When it comes to email few would argue with that the subject is, one of if not THE, single
most important part of an email. Here’s why. Average open rates are between 15% and

25
!
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Regulations
25% range depending on industry, so for the 75% to 85% of recipients who do not open any
given email they receive, the Subject line IS the email. Everyone with an email address
is exposed to multiple subject lines on a daily basis. According to the latest research by the
Email Rendering
Radicati Group, an astounding 3.7 billion people have an email address. This year 269 billion
emails will be sent to - and by, those people. Globally, each address gets an average of 72.5
TWO.
emails every day. That’s a LOT of subject lines! No wonder “How do I improve my Subject
lines?” is the No.1 FAQ of all time. I am here to answer that question. It’s deceptively simple
TEST!
Device Friendly
Why you need to Test
THREE.
To help you understand the impact of testing I would like to share some data taken from
Touchstone a virtual test platform for subject lines (SL’S). What we found surprising was
when it comes top testing effectively A/B is not enough.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
Performance Curve – No test
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
6
Writing for Emails

SEVEN.
This bell curve taken from the campaign data held with Touchstone shows the distribution of open
rates for every SL in the database. All open rates are computed relative to the sender’s average
open rate, so an open rate of +20% here means that it performed 20% above average.
Let’s start with how many SL’s you should test to ensure you get a significant lift. The term
A/B test would imply that two is ok, but the data would suggest otherwise. The data shows us
Deliverability
EIGHT.
that any given SL has roughly 1 chance out of 3 of performing at least 20% above average.
In other words, to be sure to get a 20% lift in your open rate, you should test at least 3 SL’s on
every single campaign.
We can also see what happens if you don’t test, or test too little. If you use only one subject
line, there is a 1/3 chance that it will underperform the average by at least 20% and a 1/10
chance that it will perform 42% below average. So if you select only two subject lines in your
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test, then each has a 1/3 chance of underperforming by >20%. In other words, there is a 1/9
chance that both will be 20% or more below average. SL “A” is bad, “B” is worse – bad beats
worse, but they are both crap!
The more SL’s you test the greater the chance that at least one of them will be one of those
TEN. Marketing
Automation
great SL’s to the right of this chart, and reduce the chances that you’ll send one of the less
effective SL’s on the left.

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As you will see from the next 3 charts every incremental SL you test improves your chances
of getting a lift.
Email Rendering
Predicted Performance from 2 Subject Line (AB) test
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
Predicted Performance from 3 Subject Line test
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
6
Writing for Emails

SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
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Predicted Performance from 4 Subject Line test
Email Rendering
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
The same is true whether you decide to optimize for Click Rate or Click-to-open (CTO) rate
FIVE. Sophisticated
as this handy chart taken from the data demonstrates.
Segmentation
Predicted Gain
Variations Open % Click % CTO %
2 3% 0% 0%
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
3 21% 42% 25% 6
4 33% 79% 47%
5 44% 111% 65%
6 53% 141% 80%
Writing for Emails

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7 60% 169% 94%
8 68% 194% 106%
9 74% 220% 117%
10 81% 242% 128%
Deliverability
EIGHT.
So if you test 3 SL’s the chances are you can expect a 21% improvement in your open rate,
42% in click rate and 25% improvement in your CTO. The need to test is something that
even the AI language generating services such as Persado or Phrasee cannot sidestep.
Both services promise/deliver an uplift – but require you to test between 10 and 20 SL’s. So it
doesn’t matter who or what writes your subject lines you MUST test to guarantee a lift.
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What to optimise
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and
call that handful of sand the world.”
TEN. Marketing
Automation
Email marketing practitioners (and the people they report to) tend to see the SL as the
primary way to get someone to open an email, and opening an email is seen as the primary

28
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Regulations
thing we want subscribers to do. So the theory goes: write a good SL, get more people to
open – gets more clicks – gets more conversions; write a bad subject line - fewer people
open the email – get fewer clicks get fewer conversions. Armed with this highly simplistic
Email Rendering
view, they then set about trying to optimize their subject lines.
TWO.
The reality could not be further from the truth!
As the chart below shows, the number of actions and decisions that an SL influences for
better or worse is exponentially more complicated than Open Yes or No? If Yes – Click, If NO
delete/mark spam. Click Yes or No? If Yes – Convert If NO delete.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
If you think that is complicated you need to remember that every one of those actions is 6
influenced by the emails and SL’s you have already sent and will influence those you are yet
to send.
E.G: someone gets an email from GAP saying “Great deals on leggings in store and online”.
Writing for Emails

They do NOT open the email, but happen to be walking past a GAP store that day. They
pop in to take a look at them and work out the best size as they don’t have enough time to
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make the purchase. Two days later another email arrives from GAP repeating the message
or reminding them the offer is about to expire. The person opens that email then clicks and
buys. Throw in things like what device each SL was viewed on, whether they “read” or just
“skimmed” the email content and you will see what I mean. Deliverability
So it’s not only possible, but quite likely that an email with a very high open rate will generate
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fewer sales (if you take other channels into account) than one with a very low open rate that
“nudged” thousands of people who did not open but went into the store or direct to your site.
For further evidence of the nudge effect of email SL’s you need go no further than the 2016
DMA Consumer Tracking Report.
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Automation

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Email Rendering
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
As you can see from the chart, at least 4 and arguably 5 of the 6 most likely actions taken by
the consumers surveyed, as a result of receiving a marketing email do not involve a click. If
the SL is informative enough the email may not even have been opened!
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
So if you really are serious about optimising your SL’s you have to look beyond the opens and
clicks immediately generated by your subject line and THAT requires you to (re)consider your 6
attribution model for email.
“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then
you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
Writing for Emails

SEVEN.
Attribution
If you truly want to optimise your SL’s you have to measure and understand the effects of
an email, and my first recommendation is to reconsider where you place the cut-off point for
attribution. Deliverability
Timing
EIGHT.
When do you stop counting opens or clicks generated by the email? Do you stop attributing
after a day, week or when the next email is going out? The reason that it is important goes
back to the first chart. Even straight forward and very measurable actions like an open or
a click come with a sting in the tail. Open Later Click Later or Buy Later, which begs the
question. How late is later? The chart below is taken from an attribution audit conducted by
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Alchemy Worx for a large retailer. We analysed every campaign sent over a 3 month period,
with no cut-off for email attribution and compared it with a 7 day cut-off the existing attribution
model being used.
We found that after 7 days the existing cut-off for email attribution was 95% of the final total
TEN. Marketing
for Opens and 96% of total for Clicks had occurred. But crucially 49% of revenue generated
Automation
by those emails failed to make the cut.

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Email Rendering
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
To better understand what was going on we zoomed in on sales. Both lines here represent
average daily sales attributed to their campaigns. The darker line represents average sales
per day post-deployment and the lighter line represents average sales per day from last
SIX. Subject Line

click. The difference is startling. While 20.76% of sales happen within a day of the email
Effectiveness
being deployed, 45.48% of sales happen within a day of the last click. This attribution gap 6
highlighted by the red arrow is caused by people clicking and in some cases opening an
email a day or more after it was sent. If that doesn’t make you sit up then consider this,
around 25% of sales came 21 days or more after the email was sent.
Writing for Emails

“Is it hard?’
SEVEN.
Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes that’s hard.”
In order to truly optimize your SL’s you need to measure and understand its impact even
when there was no open or click – what we call the halo effect.
Firstly, it’s important to understand the most common attribution models (that determine how
Deliverability
sales and conversion are determined) email marketers are using. Typically, the following
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three measurement criteria are considered.

The type of action – opens, clicks or conversion.
The time frame – do you cut-off after days, weeks, or months from send.
Touch – first touch, last touch or any touch.

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Most email marketers will choose some combination of the three depending on what works
best for their business, typically in relation to its sales cycle, but the popular approach is to
focus on tracking conversions via last click.
However, the truth is a click doesn’t necessarily tell a marketer anything. Not everyone
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that clicks through from an email will actually go on further and make an immediate
Automation
purchase. It also doesn’t account for the likelihood the clicker might go on to purchase via
another channel at a later date. Clearly, there is value to a SL that is not being taken into

31
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consideration, if you just focus on clicks or opens for that matter. The question then becomes,
how can we measure this?
My initial advice is to run an analysis of revenue from all channels as a starting point. Then
Email Rendering
deduct the email specific revenue as you currently attribute it (opens and clicks, first or last
TWO.
touch) and break down this new number into days when emails to the majority of your list,
were and weren’t sent out. We have done this for a number of clients. The results consistently
show the average daily revenue on days in which email was sent to more than 30% of the
list was higher for the non-email channels too. We then looked at the source of the lift in
revenue, where the lift was most marked based on last touch and first touch. Email had an
Device Friendly
impact on every other channel search, both natural and paid, affiliate programs, even social.
THREE.
So what does this all mean? Essentially, our main conclusion was that email SL’s are
certainly driving sales in other channels and this is one way to prove it. I must, admittedly
caution marketers from defining email and the halo effect too broadly and overstating the
revenue generated by email or defining it too narrowly and underestimating. However, if
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
marketers can find the right balance and look at email as part of the bigger picture, they’ll
quickly see that it can work in a capacity similar to broadcast and drive additional revenue in
other channels.
This brings us back to the importance of attribution models. If email SL’s are driving sales
in other channels on and offline, then marketers need to consider that fact and look for a
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
model that takes this into account. If marketers are able to look beyond simple click-based
attribution, and make sure they are tracking and analysing sales holistically both online
and offline, they will find demonstrating the true value of their email marketing and getting
additional funding for testing will become much easier.
“For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.”
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
What to Test: The golden rule and top 10 tips 6
The golden rule is to plan ahead.
In my view every SL that goes out the door should be tested. Ideally it will be an ABCD
(or more) test and never less than ABC. The only way to do that is to have a good sense
Writing for Emails

what you want to test and plan ahead. More variables = Better results. A plan that lays out
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the variables you want to test and when you test them will not only save you time when it
comes to writing your subject line – you’ll already know your content and how you’re going to
approach it, it will give you better results.
So what variables should you test?

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1. Test extreme lengths

A lot of advice tells you SL’s should aim to be around 35 characters and unfortunately most
people – whether they know it or not seem be following that advice. Looking at the data we
found 63% of subject lines that are sent are between 20 and 65 characters in length. What
may come as a surprise to you is SL’s of that length tend to underperform!

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So if your idea of short is 25 characters and long 65 characters your SL length tests will give
you no joy.
2. Test CTA’s
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Although one of the key aspects of successful copywriting is telling readers what they need
to do, this is often overlooked in SL’s, where your focus is often trying to catch attention rather
than drive action. We found for one client that telling subscribers what to do by including a
direct CTA helped to boost engagement. So rather than just saying ‘Summer Sale’ it became
‘Summer Sale – take a look at the latest offers in store and online’.
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Segmentation
3. Test questions
Using a question instantly makes your SL look and feel very different in the inbox. It also
helps you come up with completely new ways of promoting your email content. For example,
you might go from ‘Save 50% today’ to ‘New favourite dress? Save 50% today’ – a jump that
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would have been hard to make without the framework of a question.
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6
4. Test original words
We’ve written before that using original words in subject lines can boost click rate by 34%,
yet less than a third of subject lines feature original words. Try using a thesaurus or taking
inspiration from the dictionary definition to change some of your most-used words.
Writing for Emails

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5. Test personalization
While first name personalization is very common now, it can still have an effect if you don’t
overuse it. Look at available data fields to see what other personalization you can include in
the SL – such as surnames, recent purchases or locations including a city name can perform Deliverability
well, for example.

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6. Take inspiration from elsewhere

We find that being reactive and riding on the back of current events is a great way of
boosting response but the lift often doesn’t last for long because other brands jump on the
bandwagon. The email itself doesn’t have to be themed, as long as your SL makes sense
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and doesn’t mislead. For example it could be as simple as sending ‘Bored of the tennis?
Escape with top 10 weekend breaks’ during Wimbledon.
7. Test emoji strategically

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Emoji can be used in 3 different ways syntactic (as punctuation), lexical (to replace a word)
Automation
and illustrative (as a decorative or design element). It’s a useful framework that can help you
test them effectively and strategically.

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8. Test tone
Within a brand voice there is still a lot of room for variation in tone – for example in the
difference between a promotional email and a service email. Try mixing them up where
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appropriate – so rather than ‘Hurry - check out our latest events’ you might use ‘we wanted to
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let you know’. But remember it’s about subtly changing the tone, not misleading customers.
9. Test pronouns
One of the first things you learn about copywriting is to use ‘you’ more than ‘we’. But ‘we’
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and ‘our’ can be effective if your customer trusts your brand and sees you as an authority.
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Try positioning your subject line from both points of view and see which is more effective, for
example instead of ‘Top picks for you’ you might try ‘Top picks from our team’.
10. Keep testing and optimizing

Our subject line tool Touchstone lets you test and optimise hundreds or iterations of your
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subject line. So once you know your approach, you can continue to edit and improve it before
you send a single email.
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails

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Writing for Emails
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Writing for emails is a art in itself and one that few get right. Email is a medium completely
different from websites or books. You need to ask yourself, “what is the purpose of the
email?” Is it to get the customer to your landing page? But then why include text that is
already on the landing page. You are enticing your client. Don’t give away the ending before
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they even click.
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Kath Pay, CEO, Holistic Email Marketing
Historically, because email is a push channel, we marketers have used it to ‘push’ our
message out about how awesome we are, how wonderful our products and services are, with
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Personalization
little or no thought of the person and their needs at the receiving end.
However, customers are now savvier and less tolerant of these brand-centric messages
and are demanding more meaningful, relevant and personalized experiences from we email
marketers. This means that brands need to become customer-focused - not only in their
approach and doing what’s easiest and best for the customer, but also in their messaging
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throughout the customer journey and lifecycle.
Segmentation
Customer Experience
Customer experience marketing is the new trend, and I can’t see it going away anytime soon.
The people have spoken loudly with their opens, clicks and conversions – ignoring brands
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who are still writing from a brand-centric approach instead of a customer-centric approach.
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In fact, I predict that we will soon be competing as much on delivering a satisfying online
customer experience (of which email marketing is an essential contributor) as on price. If you
don’t offer an easy, pleasant customer experience the first time, you very likely won’t get a
second chance, as they’ll turn to your competitor who is giving the consumer the experience
they desire.
Writing for Emails

Douglas van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding states:
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7
“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law
asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually
gravitate to the least demanding course of action. ……Laziness is built deep into our
nature” Deliverability
In other words, we need to make it easy for the customer and deliver the benefits rather than
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features. If we only deliver the features within our copy, we’re then expecting the customer to
convert these features into benefits. As a marketer, this is what we should be doing.
Hilton Hhonors has a great example below of customer-centric copy – focusing nicely on the
customer and using lots of lovely persuasive trigger words.
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Customer-Centric Calculator
A good way to determine whether your copy is brand-centric or customer-centric is to
calculate the ratio of ‘our’, ‘we’, ‘us’ etc. against ‘you’, ‘your’ etc. The below email from tails.
com is a lovely example of customer-centric copy with 6:2 ratio of being customer-centric, or
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in other words, it’s 75% customer-centric.
Segmentation
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Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
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Use Stylised Alt-text
Styling your alt-text was featured heavily in the email community more than a few years ago
now, and marketers still need to be taking more advantage of them – especially those who
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have emails with minimal live text within them. These stylised alt-text can be persuasive
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and informative and even act as a Call-To-Action, as seen in the example from Dunelm. Too
often, with many retailers, this is a huge missed opportunity and I would like to see this trend
increase. By not only adding alt-text, but stylising them with different fonts and sizes, we are
helping our customers, which in turn, helps us.
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails
Increasing use of Rule of 3
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One of my favourite tactics, I’ve been applying and teaching about this for many, many years. 7
The number 3 resonates with we humans. We learn from patterns and 3 is the first pattern
you can create. Comedians, photographers, script writers, authors, all live by the rule of
three. If we want something to be easily consumed, remembered or actioned, then package it
up in 3’s, as seen in this lovely Boden example.
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AI devised Subject Lines
AI has made its way into Subject Lines with providers such as Phrasee and Persado offering
machine-learning services to write your winning subject lines for you.
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Note though, whilst they do the hard work of writing the subject line for you, these still need to
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be tested to determine which will give you the best response. An easy (and accurate) way of
doing this is by using a tool such as Touchstone, which will allow you to virtually test up to 10
subject lines at once.
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Creative Call-to-actions
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Think out of the box when it comes to call-to-actions. Call-to-actions in emails have one job
– and that is to incentivie the reader (through colour/shape/copy) to click through the email
onto the landing page/website. All too many CTA’s though, are dry and boring, with very little
thought going into these important and necessary ‘fixtures’ and simply using the traditional
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‘Read more’ and ’Shop now’. This is another opportunity to provide value to the reader and to
Personalization
provide either attention-grabbing or persuasive, relevant CTA’s, as seen here in the Holistic
Insights newsletter.
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails
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Catherine Loftus, Senior Marketing Manager at TrustedHousesitters
Persona, not personalities
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Along with many brands, we’ll be focusing on developing a distinct brand persona that
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will inform the way we write and speak. This applies not just within email, but across all
touchpoints including other marketing channels, website and 121 contact with customer
service teams.
The brand persona roots your way of writing to the way a specific person, or type of person,
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would speak, such as a chef or a teacher. This persona governs voice, visuals and behaviour
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to create one consistent and memorable experience.
The ultimate goal is to create a visual and verbal identity that is so distinct and so consistent,
you could cover the logo on an email or webpage and still know which brand it belongs to.
Internally, you should not be able to tell which team member wrote the copy, as you write as
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the persona, not as individuals.
Personalization
Consistency is key in creating the brand persona, starting with fundamental writing principles,
including use of abbreviations, acronyms, capitalization and numbers. This then develops out
to more complex and personalized messaging that considers the different types of customer
and different lifecycle stages, whilst always retaining the persona principles.
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Some brands are already leading the way in beautifully consistent, instantly recognisable
Segmentation
communications. This example of a seasonal style email from fashion retailer New Look
uses snappy headlines, product-focused animated gifs and category terms, for an output that
seamlessly matches the online and in-store shopping experience:
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Writing for Emails
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Writing for the customer, not the channel
Brands are looking beyond marketing channels in isolation and are instead bringing the focus
back on the customer. Besides, customers don’t look at channels in isolation, they want
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useful communications relevant to their point in the lifecycle.
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Of course, there will always be specific ways of writing for email. Transactional, acquisition
and winback communications have their own necessary style. But while the voice, messaging
and style is tailored to different types of customer at different stages of the journey or
lifecycle, this should always be underpinned by consistent elements.
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When writing for email, the cross-channel experience must always be considered, now more
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than ever. Is the purpose to enlighten, attract, inspire, reassure or congratulate? Is this a
first-time contact or are you communicating with a loyal repeat customer?
Airbnb have really nailed this consistent experience. This example of a booking confirmation
email is not a standalone piece, but a perfect continuation of the online and on-app booking
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experience.
From browsing…
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails
…to booking
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And now my trip is booked, they reach out to upsell me to becoming a host. I already know
exactly what ‘becoming a host’ means because of the consistency with which the term has
been used throughout the journey, meaning the copy in this email can focus fully on the
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benefits.
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Writing for Emails
Develop and test using email
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Fast response times, segmentation and multi-variants make email the perfect place starting 7
point for testing new copy and tone of voice. Best performing variants can then played out
across many channels. For example, your acquisition email subject lines tests could inform
your PPC ad copy; CTAs and imagery could inform social media messaging. Deliverability
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Deliverability
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If our marketing email arrives in the subscribers’ inbox, that is a successful delivery. However
many things could affect our emails deliverability, like Internet Service Providers (ISPs),
bounces, spam issues to name a few.
You need to monitor your deliverability. For example, if you are having high bounce rates,
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it could mean your domain is on a blacklist somewhere. And ISPs take notice of reputable
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blacklists like SpamCop.
With deliverability, you don’t want to be complacent. Even if you monitor it once a month in a
report, its better than nothing. Just remember this is your reputation at stake.
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Personalization
Chad S. White, Research Director at Litmus and author of Email
Marketing Rules
2018 will be a year of carrots and sticks for email deliverability. The carrot will be in the form
of the emerging Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard. It will display
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senders’ logos next to properly authenticated messages.
Segmentation
Email authentication protects your brand from being spoofed and boosts your deliverability.
Yet, despite those benefits, only 39.7% of brands use all three authentication standards
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and the newest
standard, Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) - according
to Litmus’ 2017 State of Email Deliverability report. BIMI will give brands a powerful, visible
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Effectiveness
reason to embrace authentication. In doing so, they’ll improve their deliverability.
The stick will be the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union’s new
privacy law. Going into effect on May 25, 2018, GDPR raises the bar on email permission
practices and covers any emails sent to EU residents. Under the law, affirmative consent
will be required, which means passive opt-in methods like pre-checked boxes will be a
Writing for Emails

violation subject to massive fines. Plus, brands will need to collect and save records of email
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consents.
While the tightening of email permission requirements will constrain list growth, it will increase
list quality and boost subscriber engagement. Most major inbox providers now pay close
attention to what percentage of your subscribers are opening and engaging with your emails
and use that to determine inbox placement. So having more engaged subscribers should
Deliverability
increase deliverability rates.

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Together, BIMI and GDPR will spur brands to make deliverability improvements they wouldn’t
have otherwise made.
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Keeping abreast on the latest updates from email clients is a task in its own. A slight change
from Gmail for example could mean that your email that displayed correctly one day, won’t
the next. But that type of coding is from last year.
There is more to this trend than just keeping up with code changes. It’s using the knowledge
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that is out there to stand out from the crowd in your subscribers inboxes.
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Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at eROI
With mobile subscribers on the rise, email design is shifting its focus to smaller screens. That
means an increasing interest in card-based layout, an organizational pattern that works well
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
with responsive design because card sizes and grids can restructure themselves to fit any
screen size.
In response, brands experimenting with CSS Grid, a CSS-based layout method, to implement
a masonry-style framework that features cards structured in a grid of equal spacing. This
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makes the content both easy to digest and scan.
Segmentation
CSS Grid is only supported in Apple Mail 10.3+, AOL (Firefox/Chrome), Freenet.de (Firefox/
Chrome) and Outlook 2016 for Mac. Using progressive enhancement developers can still
ensure that all subscribers will receive the intended message, even if it doesn’t visually look
consistent.
So far I’ve only seen companies like Action Rocket and Litmus implement CSS Grid for
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Effectiveness
aggregated content in their newsletters. This is a great audience for such experiments since
the subscribers are more likely to be forgiving for any rendering issues and excited to see the
progression that is made.
EmailWeekly by Action Rocket
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Progressive enhancement continues to be a great strategy when it comes to email design.
Progressive enhancement provides a stable, accessible experience for all subscribers and
increasingly adds more functionality to provide the best experience possible for clients that
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support it.
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This approach also allows developers to use CSS animations in place of animated GIFs.
CSS animations have various benefits including that they are lightweight and fast to load,
render smoother than a rasterized GIF, and look great on retina-display.
When done well, animation can create a level of feeling and perception close to what a
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person experiences when interacting with a physical object in real life. A popular use case is
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to animate call-to-action to visually confirm that the button is clickable. CSS animations can
also be used to provide a hint to the user that an element is interactive, like a tooltip.
eROI Dare to Be Campaign
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Segmentation
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Writing for Emails
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Another favorite use case is to animate backgrounds. Rarely is it worth it to use a large
animated GIF for a decorative background, so CSS animations provide a great alternative.
The clients that do not support CSS animation will still receive the marketing message, but
those who do will have a better branded experience.
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Taco Bell Holiday Email
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CSS animation can also provide a lightweight, more accessible alternative to video in email.
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Kristian Robinson developed a “faux-video” technique that uses image sprites and CSS
Segmentation
animation keyframes to give the effect of a video. Him and his team at CACI Email Studio
created emails that leveraged this technique for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2017 tournament.
They also went a few steps further to update the CSS stylesheet in order to update the score
as the game progressed. Not only is it impressive technology, the end use case provides
actual value to the subscriber.
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UEFA Women’s Euro 2017 — Channel 4.
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One large downside to leveraging CSS animations is that it requires knowledge to know how
to create and troubleshoot, especially since it will require testing in live devices. Currently
CSS animations work great in iOS, Apple Mail, Android Native, Outlook for Mac, AOL, and
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Thunderbird.
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Alex Ilhan, Senior Email Developer at Email on Acid
New trends are always at the lips of email geeks around the world. We all want to know what
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the next hot trend will be and we want to be early adopters.
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It’s very easy when asked this questions about what the future will hold for email
development to say interactive email will be the big thing in 2018, or to say that we’ll switch to
using fun new development techniques like CSS grid, finally ridding ourselves of the dreaded
HTML table.
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I think we can look a little closer to home to answer this. The one thing I want to see
everyone doing, and I truly hope becomes a trend, is better email accessibility.
It’s amazing to hear these extra voices reaching out to discuss accessibility. We were blown
away by the support we received whilst hosting an email accessibility webinar and, at Email
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on Acid, we’re really putting research into learning how folks who are affected by accessibility
Segmentation
issues not only interact with their email, but how they interact with the devices they use to
consume email.
I believe we are only just scratching the surface with accessibility. The changes we already
suggest make such a huge impact on email consumption for those with disabilities that it
makes me excited to see what changes we can make next.
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As we move into 2018, I believe we can work toward an industry-wide minimum accessibility
specification that helps email developers, designers and marketers make positive changes to
their email accessibility with a minimal amount of effort.
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TREND TEN
Marketing Automation
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Automation by definition is where you introduce systems that will generate actions due
to certain triggers that you set up. Applying this to email marketing, it means that once a
customer subscribes to a certain email journey, they will automatically receive your emails
without you having to do anything else.
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This is a brilliant function for you, an email marketer, as it means once you’ve set these up –
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they can run themselves and you can spend your time on other tasks.
Komal Helyer, Marketing Director - Pure360

Marketing automation will grow in significance in 2018. New low-cost, easy-to-integrate
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Personalization
technology will enter the market and marketers’ capabilities to use the tech available to
them will grow. The need for marketing automation businesses to offer more guidance—and
support brands through their growth in sophistication—will also become essential.
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Segmentation
Joolz Joseph M IDM, Strategic Email Marketing Consultant |
Marketing Mentor - The Virtual Marketeer
According to Forrester, trigger-based marketing can generate 4x the revenue of standard
communications, so automation is no longer a should, it’s a must. Almost every Email
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Service Provide (even many free offerings) offer some form of automation within their service,
Effectiveness
making it accessible for everyone.
The customer journey is increasingly complex. With so many touchpoints, email is becoming
more thoroughly integrated with other channels. That means more responsive, automated
communications that build on conversations started elsewhere and solidify relationships.
Writing for Emails

Because it is a win-win, improving both efficiencies and the effectiveness, automation is also
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being increasingly adopted by smaller retailers looking to maximise revenue from the channel
and compete with the bigger players who already embrace it.
At one end of the scale is a simple welcome email. A fundamental communication which
should be central to the strategy of every email marketer and has been for some time.
At the next level, responsive drip campaigns are being widely used and as they have proven
Deliverability
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themselves, more sophisticated workflows that educate, inform and persuade throughout the
sales process are coming into play. Understanding common pain points and sales blocks,
you are able to send content that is highly effective in nudging subscribers along the sales
funnel based on previous behaviour.
More recently, I have noticed clients asking for automated onboarding and client nurturing
campaigns. These are effective at reducing churn as well as increasing revenues and also
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reviews which are increasingly important for social proof. ‘How To’ videos ensure news
clients can use products effectively, personalised replenishment reminders can be triggered
on likely behaviour in even very simple systems and there are often a number of predictable
cross and upselling opportunities to be capitalised on.
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Automation
Two companies that do beautiful, simple but effective automated comms are Dropbox
and Uber. Dropbox inject personality into their emails but keep the messaging straight to 10

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the point. Uber have a great welcome email which tells you how the service works with a
beautifully laid out communication.
Predictive Intelligence can be used to suggest products or offers likely to be effective based
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on profiles and behaviour. It is important to remember that when GDPR comes into place,
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profiling can only take place with the appropriate consent and to get that in place today.
The future, and true automation lies in the application of Artificial Intelligence to analyse
and predict user behaviour – truly sending the right email with the best content at the right
time. With AI, the machine teaches itself (rather than the marketer setting the rules) based
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on previous recipient behaviour. Self-optimising content, better subject lines and predictive,
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personalised recommendations are being effectively utilised by the largest e-commerce
brands right now. This is true for 1-to-1 marketing and will become increasingly prevalent as
we seek to optimise the channel even further and use the Big Data that we collect.
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Personalization
Jenna Tiffany, Founder & Strategy Director - Let’s Talk Strategy
Your subscribers are more than an email address - they are real people. Humans relate to
other humans so don’t let your email marketing become robotic, or impersonal - even with
automated journeys.
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
We as email marketers want to wow our subscribers with relevancy. The best place to start is
to personalise the customers experience throughout the five stages in a consumer’s decision
making process (John Dewey, 1910). The more expensive the item, the longer this process
typically takes. We all go through this process subconsciously even when buying a bar of
chocolate but don’t take very long deliberating over it before deciding because the value is
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low. This can be referred to as an impulse purchase.
Effectiveness
Think about this in the context of where a customer is on their decision-making process with
you. Brands that continue to struggle to provide any form of personalisation are going to
switch consumers off with irrelevant messaging.
Email marketing brand will appear over several stages to influence a consumer’s decision,
Writing for Emails

so it may be at the stage where a consumer has a problem. For example, when a subscriber
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is looking for a hotel. Rather than trying to guess the location that they are looking for,
Travelodge help them in providing a quick and easy their search field in their email:
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In this email the subscriber can add their airport name directly into the email and then select
‘search’ and the subscriber is then taken to a web page with only the hotels that are relevant
to what the subscriber is looking for.
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Defining your email marketing strategy is key to incorporating intelligent personalisation
within your email campaigns. This is because your strategy should identify the objective and
goals you are aiming to achieve. One brand that had a clearly defined strategy and goal
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was EasyJet with their 20-year anniversary email campaign. The key objective was to drive
an emotional response. Easyjet could have just sent a campaign that patted themselves on
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the back for flying for 20 years. Instead the brand utilised all of the purchase data they had
about subscribers to send over 12.4 million unique emails. The content included interesting
facts related to the distance their customers had flown, other destinations they could have
visited and how kms they had flown since they have been a customer with Easyjet. Did this
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achieve their objective of driving an emotional response? It sure did! This email campaign
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used personalisation effectively and engaged subscribers across multiple channels such
as social media with 78% of subscribers used the words ‘love’ on social media to describe
the campaign. Across social media alone the campaign had an estimated reach of 685,000
people and achieved more than 1.1 million impressions (Campaignlive, 2017).
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
This single email campaign demonstrates the true value of personalisation which doesn’t
just have to be focused on including the first name, but can also be used to drive emotional
responses to engage an audience.
Time targeted personalisation enables you to always send email content that is relevant, as
the content automatically updates within the inbox. Sporting matches are prime examples of
FIVE. Sophisticated
how email content can be updated automatically, here in the form of a live score with game
Segmentation
statistics (Kickdynamic, 2017).
SIX. Subject Line

Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
The first email is sent before the match and is updated throughout the course of the game
with the scores changing to reflect the actual score of the game. Detroit Pistons saw
increases in their click through from the email as well as overall engagement time spent
reading the email because subscribers knew that the content would contain the latest match
information.
Personalisation isn’t just effective for B2C brands, it is also incredibly effective in enhancing
NINE.
the experience for B2B subscribers too.

Wave is a cloud accountancy service that provides a weekly newsletter detailing that
customers ‘week in numbers’. As a business owner, monitoring the financial numbers on a
regular basis is crucial and Wave are providing that sense check automatically each week
TEN. Marketing
Automation
in the inbox. The summary of the week is personalised to the individual business, without a
10
need for that subscriber to log into the system.

52
!
ONE. Increased
Regulations
Email Rendering
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
Example online quote – automation that enhances the customers experience
Automation is incredibly effective for closing the online and offline gap in a customers
experience with a brand. Hiscox Insurance are a brilliant example of effective automation that
doesn’t interrupt the customers experience, but enhances it. Their automated email instantly
provides all the key information from the customers sales journey to date with Hiscox –
SIX. Subject Line

providing a seamless and effortless multichannel customer experience.
Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
NINE.
TEN. Marketing
Automation
10

53
!
ONE. Increased
Regulations
Email 1
Email 1 is sent to subscribers straight away after completing an online quote, containing all
the information about the product that would be most suitable for the customers need. This
Email Rendering
quote is bespoke based on the information the customer has provided.
TWO.
To complete the purchase a customer has to then telephone the contact centre. This could
be a huge barrier to conversions for most brands, but Hiscox overcome this by recognising
a customer as soon as they answer the call as the reference number is provided using the
keypad before being connected to an advisor.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
SEVEN.
Deliverability
Email 2
EIGHT.
Following purchasing the insurance on the phone, email 3 is then sent with all of the policy
details straight away following the call.
NINE.
TEN. Marketing
Automation
10

54
!
ONE. Increased
Regulations
Email Rendering
TWO.
Device Friendly
THREE.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
NINE.
Email 3
Monthly emails are then sent to new customers (who have opted in to receive them) with
TEN. Marketing
Automation
content focused on insurance news and latest updates that are all relevant to the service that
Hiscox is providing the customer. 10

55
!
ONE. Increased
Regulations
Recommended Smart Insights resources from our Email marketing toolkit
rr GDPR briefing
Email Rendering
rr Design a welcome email journey Quick Win
TWO.
rr Email sequence contact strategy template
rr Email marketing platform RFP template checklist
rr Marketing Automation Best Practices Guide
rr Email Marketing and Marketing Automation toolkit
Device Friendly
Find all of our Email Marketing and Marketing Automation resources in our toolkit, from
THREE.
our strategy guide to helpful templates, research reports and much more.
FOUR. Intelligent
Personalization
FIVE. Sophisticated
Segmentation
SIX. Subject Line
Effectiveness
Writing for Emails
SEVEN.
Deliverability
EIGHT.
NINE.
TEN. Marketing
Automation
10

56
!

Email Marketing Trends 2018 (Smart Insights)

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Email Marketing Trends 2018 (Smart Insights)

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Email Marketing Trends 2018

16 Email marketing experts give their views and

Author: Kim Greenop-Gadsby

Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit

Introduction: Email marketing: still worth taking seriously................ 5

SIX. Subject Line

TREND ONE: Increased Regulation....................................................... 8

Writing for Emails

TREND FOUR: Intelligent Personalization.......................................... 18 Deliverability

TREND FIVE: Sophisticated segmentation......................................... 23

TREND SIX: Subject Line Effectiveness............................................. 24

TREND SEVEN: Writing for Emails...................................................... 35

TREND EIGHT: Deliverability................................................................ 43

TREND NINE: Code like it’s 2018......................................................... 45

TREND TEN: Marketing Automation.................................................... 49