Interview
For all things email, Chad S. White is your man. He's the author of "Email Marketing Rules" and head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting. He writes the dos and don'ts of email marketing and how to adjust your marketing campaigns to various situations, such as the upcoming recession, natural disasters, business scandals, PR crises and wars.
He's a font of email marketing wisdom and brings along with that wisdom a cartload of nuts-and-bolts fixes that just about any business would benefit from. In his recent piece Messaging During Recessions: 3 Opportunities for Marketers, Chad says marketers need to make the best of the current circumstances by tuning into consumers’ economic anxieties and concerns by highlighting deals, emphasizing lower costs and filling more than one need. You can read Chad's columns here. And the video interview above stems from his article, 6 Ways to Review and Improve Your Automated Marketing Emails.
This is part of our end-of-year series celebrating our top CMSWire Contributors of the Year for 2022. These are regular CMSWire Contributors whose articles this year greatly resonated with our community of professionals. These Contributors simply serve as great ambassadors of our brand in the world of marketing and customer experience.
Make the Best out of Bad Situations and Be Positive
What excites you most about the space you cover?
I love the change. As a former journalist, I’m addicted to the next new story. For the past 16 years and counting, email marketing hasn’t disappointed.
In recent years, Mail Privacy Protection, the sunsetting of third-party cookies and pandemic-related consumer behavior changes have driven lots of change. In the years ahead, the rise of customer data platforms, omnichannel orchestration, and AI and machine learning will transform email and digital marketing.
Related Article: 6 Ways to Review and Improve Your Automated Marketing Emails
What trend(s) do you think will emerge in 2023?
I’ve already mentioned CDPs. Adoption of those will accelerate in 2023, laying the groundwork for vastly improved omnichannel orchestration in the years ahead. It will also open the door to much smarter channel attribution. Too many brands still rely on first- and last-click attribution, which have become wildly unrepresentative of the behavior of today’s consumers, who often use six or more channels in the course of converting. Once brands get better visibility into cross-channel behaviors, I predict that lots of them will discover they’ve been significantly underinvesting in their email marketing programs.
Another trend that will be big in 2023 is Brand Indicators for Message Identification, or BIMI (/bē mē/). Open to brands that fully authenticate their emails with SPF and DKIM, and that set up a DMARC record with the preferred “p=reject” policy, BIMI allows brands to have their logo displayed next to their sender name in inboxes that support the standard.
While BIMI has been around for years, it will go from a nice-to-have to a must-have in 2023 because of new support from Apple. Once Gmail and Yahoo comply with Apple’s BIMI requirements — which they’ve indicated they will — then marketers who adopt BIMI can expect their logo to appear next to their sender name with more than 90% of the emails they send on average. While implementing BIMI requires six time-intensive steps and some significant costs, the effort is more than worth it now for many businesses, especially enterprises and other large organizations.
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Related Article: 8 Reasons to Pause Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
What’s the best career advice you ever got?
“Don’t lose sight of your personal goals.” A friend and coworker gave me that advice when I was between jobs early in my career.
Sometimes employers or prospective employers want you to be or become something else. While it’s great to be open to new opportunities, experiences and growth, make sure you don’t put someone else’s goals above your own.
Related Article: 4 Ways Brands Go Wrong With Digital Marketing Metrics
What’s the best personal advice you ever got?
“Be a positive leader.” Sometimes things don’t go the way you hope they will, and that can be frustrating. Sometimes very frustrating. In one of my first jobs, I let that frustration get the better of me. Worse, I shared my frustration with my co-workers, making a challenging situation worse.
My boss at the time sat me down and told me point-blank that leaders have to make the best of bad situations and need to be positive for the sake of the team. I remember that conversation every time I’m faced with a situation that seems unfairly lousy. Then I try to look for the bright side and the path forward. That advice has been good for both my professional and personal life.
Related Article: 5 Truths About Inactive Email Subscribers
Tell us something about you not related to your work field of interest.
While lots of people in the email marketing industry know me because of my "Email Marketing Rules" series of books, I’m also an aspiring novelist. I’m actively working on a dystopian sci-fi series. I’ve got a near-final version of book 1 and am about a quarter of the way through a draft of book 2. Plus, I’ve got an idea for a romantic dramedy I’ve been sketching out.
I’ve wanted to write novels since I was in high school. And I worked at two publishing houses before getting into email marketing. And writing three editions of Email Marketing Rules has given me the confidence that I can finish book-length projects. My wife Kate, who’s now a two-time author herself, has also been super supportive of the long hours it takes to write.
