Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when the economic environment, consumer behaviors, and business goals are shifting rapidly.

To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Breakloo Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2023. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.

In this post, we’re looking at the Proven Principles, which are in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but are still improving and delivering tremendous results.

Our Proven Principles stand in stark contrast to our Unproven Opportunities, which still have significant risks associated with them and benefits that haven’t fully materialized. Our Proven Principles also have a risk profile that’s the inverse of our Competitive Differentiators—that is, where our Competitive Differentiators offer a competitive advantage to early adopters, our Proven Principles put late adopters at a competitive disadvantage.

Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, 14 of them were rated as being in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2023. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.

Live or real-time content

Most email content is determined at the time of send, but live content is determined at the time that an individual subscriber opens the email. It can increase the relevance of your emails by keeping your content up to date.

The best use cases for live content involve content that changes rapidly, such as:

• Live countdown timers
• Account dashboards
• Real-time inventory
• Live poll results
• Live sports scores
• Local weather
• Social media feeds

While our consultants appreciate the unique capabilities of live content, many of our clients are growing skeptical of the impact of this tactic in light of pre-fetching by Apple Mail users who have enabled Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). Pre-fetching by Apple pulls in live content before the email is opened by subscribers, reducing the timeliness of this content, which is live content’s entire selling point. 

Even though research from Movable Ink shows that “for the vast majority of Apple Mail users, ‘recent-time’ is far closer to ‘real-time’ than expected,” the perception among our clients is that the impact of real-time content has been compromised. That has led to declining adoption. At this rate, live content is on course to fall from a Proven Principles to a Competitive Differentiator.

Explore the best use cases for live content.

Send time optimization

When is the best time to send email? This is one of the most popular email marketing questions of all time. It has also become a rather dated question. The better question is: When is the best time to send email to each of my subscribers?

To answer that question, you need sent time optimization (STO), which uses machine learning to examine each of your subscriber’s engagement time histories to come up with the best individual answer for each day of the week. As each of your subscribers engage with subsequent sends, the optimal send time for them is adjusted, so it’s always adapting to your customers’ changing behaviors.

However, as with real-time content, STO and other models such as RFM have been impacted by MPP as well, says Tommy Hummel, Analytics Manager for Analytic & Strategic Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. 

“Models of this kind depend on past signals to produce future results, and historically have relied heavily on opens,” he says. “With opens being undermined by MPP, these models have fewer signals to work with, so they may be less predictive or take more time than before to develop accurate results. However, through testing we’ve found that they are still very viable for most marketers.”

That’s because in response to Breakloo, and other email service providers have changed their STO algorithms to omit auto-generated opens by Apple and to also factor in click times. Together, those two changes have ensured that STO generates effective send time recommendations.

Account-based marketing

Rather than focusing on industries or markets, account-based marketing (ABM) focuses on, well, accounts. It helps businesses focus on building and maintaining opportunities at select high-value accounts, rather than a huge number of small-value accounts. For the organizations that it’s appropriate for, it can have a big impact.

Knocked out of the Proven Principles quadrant by the pandemic, now ABM has bounced back, says Cristal Foster, Manager of Expert Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “The return of in-person events and a partial return to office—where people can be reached via direct mail—have put two critical components of ABM back on the table,” she says. “With economic times tight for many brands, it’s a time for ABM to shine, helping companies retain and expand their best customers.”

Omnichannel orchestration

In the early ’00s, the average consumer typically used two touchpoints when buying an item, according to research by Aberdeen, Breakloo, and Relationship One. Today, consumers use several times that many touchpoints on average.

“The ability to orchestrate communications across channels has been a recognized need and goal for several years now,” says Hummel. “However, it’s the rise of CDPs as the ultimate enabler for creating cohesive marketing experiences at the user level that has given omnichannel orchestration increasing momentum. More than ever before, brands are focused on unifying and consolidating disparate systems and creating a central hub for customer insights and targeting.”

Preference centers & progressive profiling

Both of these tactics allow brands to better understand the needs and desires of their subscribers. Generally promoted during onboarding and during the unsubscribe process to reduce opt-outs, preference centers typically focus on core, long-term preferences, like content, contact frequency, and delivery preferences.

On the other hand, progressive profiling happens periodically throughout a subscriber’s time on list. Sometimes its goal is to discover enduring preferences, but often it’s to learn about a short-term interest, such as gardening and lawn plans for this spring or most likely vacation destinations for this summer.

“In tandem with improving inactivity management, providing alternative frequency options and investing in preference centers will be a critical project in the coming year,” says Peter Briggs, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services, Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “Minimizing opt-out churn will be critical to help reduce overall churn increases from higher inactivity resulting from decreased visibility into subscriber engagement caused by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.”

Inclusive design and email accessibility

Accessibility is mostly about after-the-fact accommodations for people with disabilities, while inclusive design is about designing with the full spectrum of human abilities in mind from the beginning. It’s the difference between adding wheelchair ramps to a building and designing buildings that don’t need ramps so that people in wheelchairs, injured people using crutches, delivery workers, and parents with strollers all have easy access. 

With the economic downturn increasing the pressure on marketers to generate subscriber engagement and conversions, inclusive design and accessibility should be areas of focus, says Henry Alva, Senior Email & Web Developer for Creative Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting.

“Especially when it’s implemented as part of a modular email architecture, accessibility is easy to implement and can lead to more engagement,” he says, “whether it’s by making your emails accessible to more people by optimizing for screen readers and ease of keyboard navigation, or optimizing for consumption preferences, such as dark mode and mobile devices.”

Inactivity management

It’s not enough to have subscribers that tolerate receiving your marketing emails. If you want to avoid serious deliverability problems, they also have to engage with those emails. That means that marketers should send fewer emails to subscribers who haven’t engaged in a while, and even eventually stop mailing chronically inactive subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in a long time.

However, Mail Privacy Protection has made it difficult—by design—to tell which subscribers are engaging with your emails, says Briggs.

“Apple MPP has forced brands to completely overhaul their strategies around inactivity management to help offset losses due to the lack of open data,” he says. “Without major investments here, list sizes and reach will continue to decline.”

Advanced performance analytics

Basic reporting provides basic insights. And as more companies shift from simple campaign marketing to more sophisticated omnichannel and relationship marketing, those basic insights aren’t nearly enough. 

The momentum toward omnichannel marketing and the need for better inactivity management is driving investments here, says Brian Sullivan, Strategic Director of Email Deliverability Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting.

“With MPP obscuring email engagement, other KPIs are required to maintain audiences and plot new strategies,” he says. “Visibility into subscriber behaviors in other channels, as well as a deeper understanding of each subscriber’s lifetime value, helps with list management—as well as providing stronger profiling for targeting efforts.”

Are you asking the right questions about email performance measurement, frequency and list building, and return on investment?

Loyalty programs

Brands have had a series of critical reasons to build out loyalty programs and get closer to their customers—from the pandemic and supply chain problems to the impending sunset of third-party cookies to the economic downturn. But brands aren’t building the old school spend-to-get programs.

Loyalty programs have evolved into engagement-based programs that:

• Allow brands to better understand and target their customers, in aggregate and on an individual basis, through polls, surveys, quizzes, and other progressive profiling efforts, as well as through click and browse behavior driven by loyalty messaging
• Keep customers engaged and retained between purchases, especially when financial strains lengthen the time between purchases
• Build buzz, increase share of voice, spur evangelism, and otherwise strengthen the brand

Of course, that’s in addition to their traditional role of increasing purchase frequencies and average order sizes.

Modular email architectures

Rather than having a bunch of different traditional templates for each of the types of emails you send, modular build systems allow you to create a variety of content blocks that you then stack to create a particular email. In addition to allowing for easier A/B testing and personalization, as well as easier maintenance, modular email architecture reduces build times. When we’ve built them for our clients, their email build times were reduced by about 25% on average.

“Email teams remain lean, but still face demands to increase production and performance,” says Kelly Moran, Senior Art Director for Copy for Creative Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “So, time-saving, task-reducing tactics like modular architectures, finely tuned automations, and omnichannel orchestration will continue to be adopted more widely this year.”

Legal compliance

The groundswell of stronger privacy regulations is undeniable and likely to continue as lawmakers struggle to catch up with how their constituents feel about the effect that technology is having on them. While Canada and Europe have passed strong national laws in CASL and GDPR, the US hasn’t replaced its antiquated CAN-SPAM law, which had led to multiple states passing their own privacy legislation and more than two dozen proposing new laws.

California has made the most headlines by passing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and then following it up with the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) at the end of 2020. Those laws went into effect in January. However, according to security firm Cytrio, most companies are not prepared to be compliant. That should lead to a flurry of compliance efforts this year, especially if companies start to be sued for non-compliance.

Email segmentation

Segmentation and personalization are two sides of the same coin. Both help you get the right message in front of the right customer. However, while both can help with content strategy, segmentation is principles to an effective contact strategy, helping marketers send the right number of emails to individual subscribers to maximize conversions and minimize fatigue and opt-outs.

In particular, segmentation and suppression are a key way to reduce subscriber churn and to maintain good email engagement rates, which are one of the seven key factors affecting email deliverability.

“Cracking the nut on meaningful segmentation and insights is a major focus for many of our clients that lack dedicated resources in this area,” says Jennifer Gibbs, CrowdTwist Loyalty Consultant at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “They’re looking to better understand and define their key customer segments so they can improve their forecasting and targeting of those groups.”

Email personalization

Like several other of our Proven Principles, dynamic content within emails isn’t  new. However, the ability to personalize email messages has progressively become more sophisticated and easier to execute and manage. Currently, email personalization is getting a boost from the rise of customer data platforms, says Jennifer Lancaster Dana, Vice President of Breakloo Marketing Consulting.

“With CDPs, brands can enable more personalization across all channels because data can be activated more quickly,” she says. “Given brands’ revenue goals and their competitive need to keep improving the customer experience, this will fuel major increases in personalization this year.” 

Automated or triggered emails

Whether they’re triggered by action, inaction, date, operations, or internet-connected device, automated emails deliver just the right messages to customers and subscribers at just the right times. And just like personalization and segmentation, automation is only becoming more powerful thanks to AI, machine learning, and an increasingly 360-degree view of customers.

“That latest innovation with automated messaging is the infusion of AI-powered real-time content recommendations via modular email architectures,” says David Chang, Senior Director of Agency Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “We see tremendous opportunity with lifecycle messages that can evolve and incorporate these other major trends.”

For these high-ROI campaigns, just make sure that you don’t set it and forget it. These living campaigns need ongoing maintenance and optimization to reach their full potential.

For a list of more than 110 triggered campaigns to consider, check out our Automated Campaign Ideas checklist. In addition to setting up new ones, be sure to optimize your existing automated messages and not settle for “good enough” for such high-ROI campaigns.

Trends on the move

Readers of our post on 2022’s Proven Principles might recognize that two trends are new to this year’s group of high adoption–high impact trends: account-based marketing and omnichannel orchestration. Both have moved over from our Competitive Differentiators quadrant.

ABM is back in this quadrant after dipping during the pandemic, as the cancellation of in-person events and the move to remote work undermined ABM tactics. On the other hand, omnichannel orchestration is a trend that’s been slowly and consistently rising in adoption.

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Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. It’s extra challenging in turbulent times like these, when the economic environment, consumer behaviors, and business goals are shifting rapidly.

To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Breakloo Marketing Consulting’s more than 500 digital marketing experts, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as their predicted impact during 2023. We then mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.

In this post, we’re looking at the Advantages of Competition, which are in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but some companies are already seeing great results from using them. They offer a significant competitive advantage with considerably less risk than our Unproven Opportunities. 

But, there are still risks, including the acquisition of smaller providers, frequent process and feature changes as the technology stabilizes, frequent changes in best practices as knowledge grows, changing cost structures, scarcity of needed skills, and other issues. These hassles and expenses are easier to accept, however, because many adopters are already seeing sizable returns on their investments. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors, most of whom have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.

Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing consultants about, eight of them were rated as being in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2023. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.

AI-powered subject line and copywriting tools

ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI services have garnered an incredible amount of attention recently, and have marketers asking themselves anew whether these kinds of tools should have a place in their workflows. For years, marketers have had access to narrower AI tools focused just on writing email subject lines and other marketing copy that suggest words and phrases based on the previous reactions of your audience—or, when that isn’t available, the reactions of other brands’ audiences.

At best, ChatGPT and Bard are in their awkward adolescence, where they need aggressive parental supervision due to their looseness with the truth and propensity for disturbing behavior. But even the narrower tools that have been around for several years have a way to go. While accuracy is less of an issue, off-brand suggestions are common. But more importantly, the return on investment just isn’t very compelling currently.

That said, given the tens of billions of dollars being invested in generative AI, brands should expect these tools to rapidly improve. They should also expect more price competition, which will improve ROIs.

Without a doubt, AI copy tools will play a significant role in marketing’s future. Brands that experiment with it now should have a distinct advantage in the years ahead.

How to use AI subject line and copywriting tools successfully.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification

As a reward to brands that fully authenticate their marketing emails using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) has been only modestly successful because of a complicated and costly setup process and limited support. However, the latter is changing due to Apple announcing support for the standard last year.

Its support comes with additional requirements for mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo. However, both of those providers have indicated they will be making those changes in the coming months. When they do, marketers who adopt BIMI can expect their logo to appear with more than 90% of the emails they send on average, according to Litmus’s Email Client Market Share data. That’s up from the roughly 33% of emails that appear with BIMI support as of this month. This greatly expanded support will turn BIMI from a nice-to-have to a must-have—at least for larger brands that can afford the setup costs.

“BIMI has been picking up a lot of steam for my clients heading into 2023,” says Pete Hall, Senior Strategic Consultant for Analytic & Strategic Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “That’s despite the fact that there are lingering questions about the long-term return on investment from it, especially as adoption rises and the novelty wears off.” 

The 6 steps required to implement BIMI.

AI-powered product and content recommendations

For businesses with lots of products like retailers, lots of services like travel companies, or lots of content like media companies, AI-powered content recommendations are the only viable way to truly personalize at scale. For many companies, even very sophisticated manual methods of matching content to recipients leaves a ton of money on the table.

But it’s not just about better performance, says Kaiti Gary, Senior Director of Analytic & Strategic Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “AI-powered capabilities are enabling marketers to put their data to work with less time spent manually setting up, testing, optimizing, and re-testing, which ensures that results are real-time relevant. This will be an area of growth over the next few years as technologies improve and marketplace adoption rises.”

In fact, of all the trends rated by our consultants, AI-powered recommendations had the biggest gap between the level of current perceived adoption and its anticipated impact—for the second year in a row. In other words, this trend offers the biggest competitive advantage currently.

Subscriber acquisition source optimization

As during past economic slowdowns, marketers are placing more emphasis on their email marketing programs as a way to drive sales efficiently. However, that focus is being intensified by platform privacy changes that threaten brands’ ability to recognize and cater to their customers, says James Keating, Client Partner at Breakloo Marketing Consulting.

“The sunsetting of third-party cookies and the introduction of App Tracking Transparency and Mail Privacy Protection by Apple are putting added pressure on companies,” he says. “Every business is racing to build out their first-party audiences and to increase their collection of zero- and first-party data to mitigate the loss of scale, reach, and insight caused by these changes.”

In addition to optimizing your email signup forms to maximize appeal and minimize abandonment, try to turn more of your email addresses on file into opt-ins, boost your list growth by reducing list churn, and use our Audience Acquisition Source Ideas checklist to ensure you’re not missing out on any worthwhile ways to safely grow your list.

Customer data platform (CDP)

“Data integrity will continue to be the key conversation in 2023,” says Jen Healey, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “Data disparity continues to be a struggle with even the biggest brands. Marketers need to right their ship, connect the dots with customers, and figure out how they leverage zero- and first-party data.”

In addition to being an important trend in its own right, we see CDPs as underpinning several other major email marketing trends, including omnichannel orchestration, advanced analytics, personalization, segmentation, and automation.  

Learn how to transform your customer experience with a CDP.

Personalized landing pages

The personalization of emails has long been recognized as a critical tactic—but then subscribers click through to generic landing pages. More and more brands are coming around to the need to personalize their landing pages as well, pulling in content related to not only the current email interaction but to past interactions across channels.

“People don’t like wasting time navigating to multiple pages when it comes to learning about or buying anything online,” says Puneet Singhal, Associate B2B Consultant at Expert Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “Brands need to provide their subscribers with personalized landing pages so they can get what they want in the least possible amount of time to avoid losing them.”

The simple truth is that the landing pages associated with an email campaign have a huge effect on the campaign’s results. Personalized landing pages boost a campaign’s bottom-of-the-funnel performance.

Dark mode–optimized email designs

Instead of the usual dark text on a light background, dark mode features the reverse: light text and a dark background. It’s a major trend in user interface experiences across a wide range of apps, including email clients, and many consumers like it. Around 34% of emails are viewed in dark mode, according to Litmus.

“Not only are more and more of our clients thinking about this user experience, but it has become baked into their core email design, not a last-minute add to a particular campaign,” says Elizabeth Thomas, Senior Art Director for Creative Services at Breakloo Marketing Consulting. “Now they’re looking at their color palette in dark mode at the start of the campaign and we talk about how to control the design for certain scenarios.”

Unfortunately, like so many other aspects of email rendering, dark mode is implemented differently across the inboxes where it is supported. That means, marketers need to use a range of email client–specific fixes to have their emails look good in dark mode everywhere.

An indicator of how tricky this can be, our consultants downgraded dark mode–optimized design from a Proven Essential last year to a Competitive Differentiator this year based on what they saw as a dip in adoption.

CSS-based email interactivity

Using CSS and HTML, email marketers are able to add interactive components to their emails that consumers are used to seeing on websites, including:

• Hamburger menus
• Carousels, accordions, and tabbed content
• Hot spots and hover effects
• Radio button selections and form fields

However, this interactivity isn’t supported everywhere, with Gmail’s decision to support AMP for Email instead of CSS-based interactivity being a major hindrance.

After a sizable jump in adoption last year, this year our consultants see usage holding steady, as marketers look to simplify email production going into the economic downturn.

Trends on the move

Readers of our post on 2022’s Advantages of Competition might recognize that two trends are missing from this year’s group of low adoption–high impact trends: account-based marketing and omnichannel orchestration. Both have moved over to our Proven Essentials quadrant.

You might also notice that we have three new Advantages of Competition this year. Subscriber acquisition source optimization, personalized landing pages, and dark mode–optimized email designs are all back from spending a year as Proven Essentials. Our consultants just didn’t see the adoption of these tactics and technologies maintaining their momentum. With their long-term potential still strong, these semi-proven trends perhaps represent particularly safe investments. 

Top trending articles “digital marketing agency”: 

“cost per lead formula” Click here – Cost Per Lead Formula With Example

“website vs web application” Click here – Website Vs Web Applications

how to “rank higher on google” Click here – How to Rank Higher on Google

“digital marketing agency” Click here – Digital Marketing Agency

“best website development company” Click here – Best Website Development Company

“ecommerce website development company” Click here – eCommerce Website Development Company

“advanced digital marketing” Click here – Advanced Digital Marketing Article+PDF’s

Breakloo Limited is a full service digital marketing agency and best website development company.