By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing
It’s almost Thanksgiving, which always puts me in a reflective mood, while we’re thinking about eating turkey, ham, stuffing, etc. So, I thought it would be cool to put together a quick list of things for email marketers to be thankful for in 2021. Check out the list below.
The CAN-SPAM Act
It may seem counterintuitive to be thankful for regulation, but way back in 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act created the ground rules for email to remain an incredibly effective marketing channel in the U.S.l, while improving the consumer experience. Nearly 20 years later, email marketing continues to thrive and while CAN-SPAM has been updated somewhat over the years (increased fines, etc.) the core aspects of the regulation have remained largely unchanged. So, today email marketers have a solid well-established understanding of how to deliver compliant email campaigns that drive results.
Many newer digital marketing channels are now grappling with evolving privacy laws and technological developments that are all making it harder to target consumers and track the results of their campaigns. While email is also affected by these changes, the impacts are typically less disruptive, because the channel already has its own very specific rules and regulations. So, it’s a good time to be thankful for the guidelines that CAN-SPAM has kept in place for nearly two decades, empowering email marketers to continue creating cost-effective campaigns year after year.
Email is Back in the Marketing Spotlight
The last two years have brought unprecedented disruption to society and the economy. Consumer behavior changed in ways that couldn’t have been predicted prior to the pandemic as people stopped commuting to work and couldn’t go to many stores or restaurants for many months. With a suddenly expanded remote workforce, digital marketing took on a significantly more important role in virtually every company’s marketing strategy, and one channel that stepped up to the plate was email.
While companies had often struggled to efficiently ramp up channels like social, video, or display, while maintaining strong ROI, email took on more prominence for many marketers. While many companies had previously looked at email as the mainstay of their digital marketing program, it wasn’t necessarily the highlight. But, when the spotlight came on, email took it in stride and just kept on delivering great results, as more budget was pushed into the channel. So, email marketers should be thankful for the opportunity to demonstrate that this old school digital marketing channel can not only hang with the younger generation, but can deliver a few lessons in how to drive performance.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Wait a minute. Aren’t a ton of email marketers concerned about the impact of MPP on the ability to track open rates? Yes indeed, they certainly are. But, this may fall into the category of a blessing in disguise. Open rates have been used as a KPI by many email marketers for decades. But, the metric has always been flawed and highly inaccurate (both over and under-counted at the same time). It did have value as a directional measure over time, but really never should have been a true KPI that was used for campaign optimization.
With MPP effectively putting open rate out to pasture as a trackable metric, email marketers will be forced to focus on more important (and trackable) metrics from click thru rate to conversions and revenue. At its core, email has always been a direct marketing channel and having more marketers focusing on its true value will only help the channel deliver stronger results and impact the bottom line in 2022. We can thatnk MPP for pusing more email marketers toward this strategy.
Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.