Email Marketing Trends Smart Insights

Reference
Email marketing trends 2019

10 email marketing experts give their views and examples of the future of
email marketing
Editor: Dr. Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights
Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit

CONTENTS
Introduction��2
Trend One: Consumer engagement and loyalty��7
Trend Two: Email design�� 10
Trend Three: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning�� 18
Trend Four: Intelligent personalization�� 23
Trend Five: Email experience and copywriting �� 28
Trend Six: Subject line optimization�� 36
Trend Seven: Continuing privacy regulation updates�� 42
Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. 1
INTRODUCTION
FOREWORD - FROM PURE360

Many marketers share a common predicament – they understand the strategic value of using
technology to improve customer engagement but don’t have the knowledge of how to tactically
use the appropriate tools to achieve this. Email marketing is no exception. Despite email delivering
impressive ROI, the internal business case for taking it beyond simply sending a newsletter is a
challenge because, more often than not, email marketing isn’t being properly initiated. There is
a great shortage of time and thought given to what email could deliver a business and how this
is achieved. As a result, its value often fails to be recognized, meaning lost revenue opportunities
for brands, yet it holds the key that brands need to stand out amongst growing competition and
provide subscribers with the relevant experiences that serve to build loyalty.
Through this report, we want to highlight the critical trends and techniques that could help
transform the brand-customer relationship and shine a spotlight on how impactful email can
be, if it’s used properly. Very often, understanding where the focus and investment should be, in
addition to the tools available, is critical to actually achieving it. Thanks to technology evolving at
such a rapid pace, there will always be temptation from the latest tech fad, but whilst it may be
new and exciting is it really going to cater to customer expectations?
Businesses should never be afraid to take a step back and evaluate their marketing maturity
– and identify what level of support they require in order to meet their objectives and deliver
growth. In an era where customer experience counts for everything, investing in the tools that
allow marketers to take control of their customer data and leverage it effectively will prove critical
to delivering results.
Beyond recognizing where and how to focus email marketing efforts in line with business
objectives, compliance remains a critical topic for the industry. As we approach the 12-month
mark since the GDPR deadline, it’s important for marketers to remain on top of compliance.
Unsurprisingly, it has climbed up the consumers’ agenda and is now critical to building and
maintaining trust. As a result, brands that are serious about leveraging email marketing strategies
to drive long-term loyalty must demonstrate commitment to putting data protection and privacy
at the fore front of their agenda.

INTRODUCTION
About Pure360
Pure360 is a marketing technology company that provides behavioural targeting and person-
alisation tools to help retail and travel companies make more money from their e-commerce
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,
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
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
þþ Increase revenue and recapture lost revenue with the PureTargeting module
þþ Deliver intelligent real time personalized 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
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.
Pure360. Improving results together. Be part of the journey.
Komal Helyer, Marketing Director, Pure360
LinkedIn | Twitter

INTRODUCTION
Introduction
The aim of this report is to showcase some of the latest email marketing and marketing automation
techniques deployed by brands to engage their subscribers and develop purchase intent.
In 2019, email marketing remains one the most effective techniques for digital marketers, so
keeping up-to-date with the latest trends, best practice techniques, and technologies for email
marketing remains extremely important. Our recent Managing Digital Marketing in 2019 report1
shows that over two-thirds of marketers rated email marketing as providing the highest or
medium return-on-investment (ROI) when compared to other channels.
Given the ongoing importance of email marketing for customer acquisition and retention in most
organizations, 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 it’s not only about cool design techniques, we should also take care to get the communications
fundamentals right. Email works best when it is part of an integrated communications strategy
aligned to goals for customer acquisition and retention.
How is this guide structured?

To fit the ‘actionable advice’ for which Smart Insights is known, we have selected seven key trends
covering success factors in email marketing. In each section we ask a specialist in that area to
contribute their insight explaining why the trend is significant and gives examples of best practices.
1 Smart Insights: Managing Digital Marketing in 2019 report

INTRODUCTION
Our contributors
A big ‘Thank you’ to our contributors! Creating this report would not have been possible without
the generous time of the contributors to share their expertise and give their latest examples and
guidance. Many thanks to all of the email marketing experts from different countries and expertise
areas.
Komal Helyer
Marketing Director at Pure360
Dave Chaffey
Co-founder Smart Insights and co-author of Digital Marketing
Excellence
Chad S. White
Research Director at Litmus and author of Email Marketing Rules
Heidi Olsen
Senior Developer at Bumped Inc
Tim Watson
Email Marketing Consultant at Zettasphere
Jordie van Rijn

Email Influencer and Founder of Email Vendor Selection

INTRODUCTION
Jenna Tiffany
Founder & Strategy Director at Let’s Talk Strategy
Kath Pay
CEO at Holistic Email Marketing
Dela Quist
Founder & CEO - Touchstone Intelligent Marketing | CEO - Alchemy
Worx
Steve Henderson,
Head of Deliverability at Emarsys, Deputy Chair of the DMA Email
Council and Chair of the Legal Hub for the Email Council

1
TREND ONE:
CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT
AND LOYALTY
To improve inbox cut-through, we must consider how marketing emails vie for attention in the
inbox with personal and business email and compete for time with other many other channels,
most notably social media. Two recent reports highlight consumer preferences for email. The
engagingly titled ‘Email addiction report’2, while not proving addiction, highlights a continued
preference for emails amongst the consumers surveyed by channel preference for receiving
promotions.
Email is the most popular communications preference, standing above all other channels with
83% saying it is one of their preferred methods of communications with brands. Facebook is
accepted as well, with 38%, and postal mail scored 27%. The top three channels share in common
that they are direct media which can be personalized.
The research considered addiction based on the number of times email was checked each day
with over 65% of respondents checking emails more than three times a day and with 28% checking
their emails more than 10 times a day, which was defined as strong email addicts.
The report also considers consumer email frequency preferences and engagement with brand
emails, including the puzzling question of why many subscribers remain inactive, but don’t
unsubscribe. Over 50% of respondents gave interest in future offers or products as a reason to
remain subscribers.
The DMA/Pure360 report: Customer Engagement Report 3 also considers loyalty based on an
interesting segmentation of consumer loyalty to retailers. It shows that the maxim that ‘the Internet
gives infinite choice and so reduces loyalty dramatically’ doesn’t hold for many consumers, with
the proportion of ‘actively disloyal consumers’ relatively small compared to other, more loyal,
categories.
2 Zettasphere / Email Monday Email marketing addiction report

3 DMA / Pure360 report: Customer Engagement Report: How to Win Trust and Loyalty in 2018

1 TREND ONE: CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT AND LOYALTY
The report also considers email preferences compared to other communications based on
age groups. This debunks the maxim that younger audiences dominantly prefer social media.
However, there is a distinct difference in preference for Millennials, which highlights a trend for
preference for shorter preference formats like text messages and messenger apps compared to
emails.

1 TREND ONE: CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT AND LOYALTY
This research suggests a need for brands to review their use of SMS and Facebook Messenger4
and provide these options if they are continuing to rely on email communications alone.
In the other trends that we will explore in this report we will show how we can use the latest
design, Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Automation techniques to engage consumers given
their preference for email as a direct, personalized channel.
4 Smart Insights: Quick Win to Facebook Messenger

2 TREND TWO:
EMAIL DESIGN
Email design has always been challenging because email readers render emails differently to
web browsers and often don’t adopt common standards. It’s also challenging because there are
generally fewer pixels available to engage the audience in the inbox compared to a web browser.
This has been compounded now that the majority of consumer emails are read on mobile devices,
so designing responsive emails is essential.
To start understanding email design trends, it’s useful to understand the latest trends in device
usage. The compilations from Litmus summarize device and reader usage well. For example, they
show that the number one email client in December 2018 was Apple’s iPhone at 29%, closely
followed by Gmail at 26% (which will include Android-based smartphones and laptop usage). This
data on where emails are opened5 shows the ongoing importance of mobile, but that it is no
longer increasing from month-to-month, so it’s still important to consider webmail and desktop
(including laptop) experiences.
Design trends for 2019 are well summarized according to a Litmus poll of more than 240 marketers
who asked their audience of email marketers and designers about which design trends they see
as important. There is a wide-range of trends featured6 shown in the next chart.
5 Litmus Email Client Market Share Trends for the First Half of 2018
6 Litmus Design trends research

2 TREND TWO: EMAIL DESIGN
The summary of these design trends, from contributor Chad White of Litmus, is that in 2019 we can
expect to see more personalized emails, as well as more interactive emails. For the second year
in a row, those two email design trends stood out above all others. Chad says that the next tier
of email design trends includes using more AI-driven content, more live content, and simplifying
email designs. Animations are also popular. Often simple treatments can be effective at engaging
and highlighting positioning. For example, this email animates the number of new arrivals rapidly
counting through from 0 to 279 to engage the audience with the latest fashions.

Frameworks for responsive design – Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at

Bumped Inc
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. Frameworks like MJML and HEML have emerged
to help automate your email builds. Foundation for Emails (formerly Ink) is another popular
alternative. Using their own markup language, these frameworks help save time, provide less
room for error, and, most importantly, help establish a system to ensure your emails render
consistently across all major clients.

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. Tori Pugh outlines
a Gulp-approach to automating your workflow that gives control over how emails render. This
approach is perfect for email developers who cannot leverage the functionality of a sophisticated
email service provider (ESP) for modules and dynamic content. By storing data in JSON files, she
was able to generate numerous personalized templates without having to create each one by
hand.
Using frameworks for design will make most sense if you have to customize your templates
extensively. This article by Paolo Mino on designing a responsive email framework describes
these three options:
þþ Option 1: Build from scratch
þþ Option 2: Use a boilerplate template
þþ Option 3: Use a framework
He explains that such frameworks will help you most if:
1. You have to produce a lot of email templates with shared components.
2. The job has to be carried out by a team of developers, who might change and/or have a
variable degree of proficiency and experience with email implementation.
3. You have little or no control on the original design.
However, if you are working alone, or on a small team and have a limited number of templates
where you have lots of experience, so you already know most of the quirks of email formatting
because you’ve met them before, then using boilerplates is a more practical option.

Exploiting Gmail Promotion Bundles – Tim Watson – Zettasphere

Gmail quietly added a new way for brand emails to be featured at the top of the Promotions tab.
It’s called ‘Bundles’ and is taken from their ‘Inbox’ email application which was retired in 2018.
Because it’s not difficult for brands to modify their templates to support bundles, it could well
turn out to be the most adopted email design change in 2019.
This is an example of how it looks in the inbox. Note the extra logo, image, offer information, and
expiry date for the top email:
The Email Addiction consumer research report found that 44% of people don’t open a brand
email because the subject line doesn’t excite them. This new format is likely to help get the
all-important open because additional information is readily available.
How Gmail decides on Bundles

The decision for which emails to appear in a bundle is at Gmail’s discretion, based on Gmail’s AI
and algorithms to decide which emails are most appropriate to feature, personalized for each
user.
Factors influencing when an email is shown in a bundle are likely how the user has previously
engaged with the sender, the attractiveness of the offer, and expiry date.

The information that is shown when an email is included in a bundle is directly controlled by the
brand, by adding JSON meta data to the email template. Brands get to pick the logo, image, and
so on.
Gmail has made it easy to implement and backwards compatible, it can be added to current
templates. For me this is unlike the AMP for email standard Gmail announced in February 2018
which hasn’t had much enthusiasm for adoption, in my experience. I personally suspect that’s
because the AMP for email standard required a totally new format. The barrier to adoption was
simply too high, as explained by this Litmus article.
Watch for more to come

Gmail has started with a ‘Top Deals’ bundle and are already talking about other types of bundle.
With different topic card information and format shown in the inbox view, such as for shopping,
entertainment, travel. This is how a travel bundle might look:
Users can turn off bundles on their Gmail account – but the setting is deeply buried. I don’t feel
Gmail wants users to go there.
Google has a big interest in making the Promotions tab a place that users visit, because they
feature Ads in the promotions tab too. More users viewing promotions means more Google Ad
revenue.
Whatever happens, I’m in no doubt this is going to be much talked about and important to all
email marketers. This is the start of a new future for email creatives.
It will be interesting to see which ESP will be first to build support for Gmail bundles directly into
their template editor.
Interactive email design features – Tim Watson – Zettasphere

We can see from the Litmus email design survey results that there is a continued interest in the
use of interactive email features. Examples of interactive features include drop-down menus,
carousels, and hide/reveal content sections. Things that customers can touch to interact with the
email content, without leaving 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 be desirable.

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 when there is
no wish to let the customer explore all web content?
This example shows how interactivity can be used to encourage user engagement. This email
shows how Tom Raffield was looking to tease the release of their attendance at Chelsea Flower
Show 2018 and also the launch of their brand new range of products. In the first of the series of
emails, we played with an interactive ‘scratch off’ technique whereby users had to guess where
the brand was going by hovering or clicking a series of clues.
See other interactive email examples in this gallery from Really Good Emails.

Finally, Tim reminds us that it’s worth remembering the limitations of interactive emails. A clever
interactive feature might impress your boss or win an award, but unless it gets results, it’s an own
goal. Tim notes that there are three barriers to using interactive emails.
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
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. Thus,
never clicking through. Conversion measurement is needed to compare static against
interactive emails.

3
TREND THREE:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND
MACHINE LEARNING
Email applications for AI – Dave Chaffey, Co-founder Smart Insights and

co-author of Digital Marketing Excellence
Beyond the world of email marketing in the wider world of business, the impact of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) on productivity and employment has risen to prominence in the last two plus
years as more affordable systems have become available from vendors. This has naturally
prompted marketers to review the potential marketing applications of AI. To answer this question,
in our guide to marketing applications of AI7, Smart Insights has reviewed the opportunities and
tools for AI across the customer lifecycle.
The applications of email marketing to AI mainly relate to the convert and engage parts of the
lifecycle shown above, where AI can be applied to customer communications.
Focus your learning on Machine Learning

If you’re looking to improve your personal knowledge of AI and how it can be applied to email
marketing, then I recommend narrowing down to focus on Machine Learning.
Machine Learning is the process of applying algorithms to existing interaction data sets so as
to generate insights for future communications via historical data. These insights can then be
applied to future campaigns to improve relevance and response of communications. That’s why,
before the AI hype started, the technique was called ‘predictive analytics’.
7 Smart Insights AI and machine learning for marketing

3 TREND THREE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING
Through analyzing historic data of responses by different audience segments to different timing,
messaging, and offer types, regression models can be built showing the propensity or likelihood
of response in similar situations. These insights have value to an organization, as because per-
sonalization rules can be manually created or using AI-based learning, rules can be automatically
defined to personalize emails to an individual to maximize the probability of response.
I believe that the AI applications of Machine Learning offer the best potential for businesses to
make their communications more relevant and responsive. It’s impossible for all but the largest
businesses to develop their own AI technology, but using packaged Machine Learning software as
provided by an email marketing vendor is now open to all. Businesses with AI-trained in-house
development resource can potentially use publicly available algorithms. For example, Amazon
recently made their Amazon Personalize service available, as part of Amazon Web Services. It’s
billed as ‘Real-Time Personalization and Recommendation for Everyone’. As part of this initiative,
Amazon has made their internal Machine Learning developer courses available, as have Google.
Their courses cover the fundamentals of Machine Learning and deep learning as well.
AI-based email personalization options

Thinking specifically about improving the relevance of your marketing emails, I recommend email
marketers consider these four options:
1. Personalization of email content and offers: This is the classic ‘Amazon-style’ rules-based
personalization we are all familiar with and has been available using rules-based systems for
many years via ESPs like Pure360, but these now include Machine Learning and automated
rule deployment to improve relevance and response. In this article, Pure360 present 10
options of ‘next-level’ personalization to consider8.
1. Personalized subject line

2. Personalized product recommendations
3. Personalized post-purchase emails
4. Personalized cart abandonment emails
5. Personalized browse and abandonment emails
6. Real-time content
7. Personalized promotions
8. Replenishment and renewal
9. Ratings and review requests
10. Personalized send times
8 Pure360 10 Ways to Deliver Next-Level Email Personalisation

The creative above gives an example of a personal replenishment reminder
2. Automated subject line optimization: Since there are separate tools specifically for
this, as Dela Quist explains in his later section on subject line optimization, this can be
thought of as a separate option. As Kath Pay explains in her contribution on improving
email personalization, there are now several options for using Machine Learning to improve
response including those from Persado, Phrasee, and Touchstone. Here is an example
of how Phrasee evaluates subject lines based on different aspects of the subject line.
Source: Phrasee – How it works

3. Natural Language Generation (NLG) of narratives: This takes subject line optimization to
the next level where content is generated automatically to meet the needs of an organization
and an audience. Automated Insights and Persado are leading developments in this area.
Persado describe their NLG solution Narrative Intelligence as “having the ability to build and
tell stories using genuine, natural language that reflect a given brand’s unique voice, adapt to
each campaign’s context, and account for each audience’s tailored interests. In addition to the
company’s proven predictive language model, which pinpoints the exact words, phrases, visuals
and emotive language that will maximize engagement.”
4. Predictive targeting: This approach identifies the best audience for a campaign with specific
response objectives such as promoting a specific category, product or offer. The audience will
be defined based on propensity to respond. This example from Tinyclues9 shows how the
target audience insight includes both demographic characteristics such as age and gender
and buying behaviour related to RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value).
Nutrition and wellness retailer Holland & Barrett gives an example of applying this
approach. Speaking at the Email Innovation Summit, Richard Lallo, Head of Digital
Marketing, described what are known as strategic promotions and mono-product pushes
in a campaign the business was able to drive campaign revenue and increase re-purchase
rate while sending emails. Campaign revenue increased by 27%, open rates increased
by 19%, while email send volume decreased by 23% which also gives cost savings.
9 Tinyclues example

You can read more about the options for improving personalization in the next section on
Intelligent Personalization where Jordie van Rijn explains that what has changed with the
advent of AI is that personalization becomes algorithm-based rather than based on manual
rules based on demographics or behaviour. Using Machine Learning to improve subject line
effectiveness is explained in the section on email subject line optimization by Dela Quist.

4 TREND FOUR:
INTELLIGENT PERSONALIZATION
Email personalization has been possible for a long time, but hasn’t been utilized as much as
would be expected. Intelligent personalization has moved much further on than simply saying
“Hi <first name>”.
Jordie van Rijn, Email Influencer and Founder of Email Vendor Selection
Notifications to maximize engagement through email

For apps and social networks, engagement is an important measure of success. They try to become
stickier, keep you active, and keep you going back on their platform. These are also useful goals
for other types of business. Staying top-of-mind and promoting email marketing engagement
with your 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.
LinkedIn, for instance, has the notification dot in 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.
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 complete
in a registration process.
Humans have the instinct baked-in to pay attention to the new, act on the urgent and to want
things completed. 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 engagement
elements in email in the period to come.

4 TREND FOUR: INTELLIGENT PERSONALIZATION
Predictive content personalization

One personalization technique that has been the bedrock of successful email is product recom-
mendations. If your email program includes products, offers or content, a first eye-opener is a
product recommendation. They are effective even if manually picked or segmented by hand
rather than AI-generated.
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 other data sources to make a
prediction which products and content are most likely to be interesting for this user.
Here is an example of a sophisticated implementation of AI, where we can use data points and
assign them a predicted impact that a subscriber will be interested in an offer. Some of these data
points might not even be on a marketers’ radar.
Souce: Tinyclues
Implementing product recommendations and predictions has had several practical problems in
the past (for instance, to have the product data available in a parseable 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. For capturing site behaviour to base the recommendations on, these are now covered by
Customer Data Platforms (or behaviour tracking is built-in in the recommendation engine). Making
this an automation for email marketing content.

Many prediction engines might not, strictly speaking, be deep/self-learning, but rather rule based,
in the form of ‘people that liked X also like Y’. Even if it is ‘just’ rule based, a recommendation
engine will win over gut feeling or the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) every time.
The next wave of A.I. is likely to give this another push in the coming year.

How to use personalization sensitively – Jenna Tiffany, Founder and

Strategy Director - Let’sTalk Strategy
84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning
their business. Personalization provides us, as marketers, with the ability to make a customer feel
special. However, that doesn’t mean it is easy to get right and I’ve spoken at many marketing events
across Europe this year about how to not overstep the line and be ‘creepy’ in your personalized
email marketing, for me this involves:
1. Being sensitive to strangers: If you met someone for the first time and they knew
everything about you, before you had shared the information, you’d find that very creepy.
That’s no different to the inbox. Be sensitive to the information you may have about a
customer.
2. Plan for the scenarios where there isn’t any or incorrect data: This example below
didn’t do that and although there was a good intention of wishing their customers a happy
birthday, in this example, the brand called the customer ‘Fname’!

3. Ensure that when personalization is used in an automated journey that it is relevant

to the context: Consider what the expectations and needs of the customer are at that
moment that the journey is activated and reflect on what would happen in real-life. For
example, there will be situations where the automated journey should include empathy and
compassion to the customer based on their circumstances. The customer would receive
that if the scenario was to happen on a human to human level, the same is expected in the
digital world.
4. Be clear to customers on how you are using data: Of course, GDPR does come into play
here but this is about making sure the customer understands when you’re personalizing
the offers being sent to them. You should also provide an option for a customer to tell you if
you’ve got it wrong or they would like to include another choice/option.
5. Don’t just set it and forget: This applies to bother automation and personalization. You
should review and test your email journeys as if you are a customer. Experience it in the
same way and put yourself in their shoes.

5
TREND FIVE:
EMAIL EXPERIENCE AND
COPYWRITING
We have seen from the surveys in the first section that marketing emails are a key consumer
touchpoint with brands as perceived by the subscriber. It follows that we should think about the
experience that email delivers. The design and personalization of the email is a key part of this,
but equally the style and tone-of-voice of the copy should be enticing and consistent with brand
expectations and context.
Kath Pay, CEO, Holistic Email Marketing on copywriting for email

As marketers, we have historically used email to ‘push’ our message out about how awesome we
are, how wonderful our products and services are, with 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 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 throughout the customer
journey and lifecycle.
Customer experience
Customer experience marketing is the new trend, and I can’t see it going away any time soon. The
people have spoken loudly with their opens, clicks, and conversions – ignoring brands who are still
writing from a brand-centric approach instead of a customer-centric approach. 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.
If we were to identify the three pillars that make up customer experience email marketing, we
would recognize them as being: helpfulness, personalization, and customer focus. In 2018,
Holistic Email reviewed multiple emails from 80 brands and found that 67% of the brands who
had emails containing one or more of the three pillars, had higher read rates, which means higher
engagement.
Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow states:
“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.”
In other words, we need to make it easy for the customer and deliver the benefits rather than
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.

5 TREND FIVE: EMAIL EXPERIENCE AND COPYWRITING
Hilton Hhonors has a great example below of customer-centric copy – focusing nicely on the
customer and using lots of lovely, persuasive trigger words.
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 next email from tails.com is a lovely
example of customer-centric copy with 6:2 ratio of being customer-centric, or in other words, it’s
75% customer-centric.


Use stylized 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 have
emails with minimal live text within them. These stylized alt text attributes can be persuasive and
informative and even act as a call to action (CTA). 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
stylizing it with different fonts, sizes, and colours (as seen below), we are helping our customers
which, in turn, helps us.
Images on Images off

Increasing use of Rule of Three

This is one of my favourite tactics I’ve been applying, writing, and teaching about this for many,
many years. The number three resonates with we humans. We learn from patterns and three is
the first pattern you can create. Comedians, photographers, script writers, and authors all live
by the rule of three. If we want something to be easily consumed, remembered or actioned, then
package it up in threes, as seen in both these lovely examples from Boden.

It’s as easy as 1,2,3… Visually pleasing – a group of 3 items

AI-devised subject lines

AI has made its way into subject lines with providers such as Phrasee, Persado, and Touchstone
offering Machine Learning services to write your winning subject lines for you.
You should note that whilst they do the hard work of writing the subject line for you, these still
need to 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 or eDatasource’s Subject Line Predict, which
is powered by Persado, which will allow you to virtually test up to 10 subject lines at once.
Creative CTAs
Think out of the box when it comes to CTAs. In emails, they have one job – to incentivize the reader
(through colour/shape/copy) to click through the email onto the landing page/website. However,
all too many CTAs are dry and boring, with very little thought going into these important and
necessary ‘fixtures’ and simply using the traditional ‘Read more’ and ’Shop now’. This is another
opportunity to provide value to the reader and to provide either attention-grabbing or persuasive,
relevant CTAs, as seen here in the Holistic Insights newsletter.


6 TREND SIX:
SUBJECT LINE OPTIMIZATION
Dela Quist, Founder & CEO - Touchstone Intelligent Marketing | CEO -

Alchemy Worx
When it comes to email marketing, many would agree that the subject is one of most important
part of an email, if not THE most important part . Here’s why. Average open rates are between
15% and 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 Radicati
Group, there are an astounding 3.8 billion email users worldwide and this number is forecast to
increase to 4.2 billion by the end of 2022. This year, 294 billion emails will be sent to – and by –
those people. Globally, each address gets an average of 77.3 emails every day. That’s a LOT of
subject lines! No wonder “How do I improve my subject lines?” is a perennially popular question.
In this section, I will help answer this question. It’s deceptively simple: TEST!
Why you need to test

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 (SLs). What we found is surprising because it
suggests that testing effectively with A/B testing alone is not sufficient.
Performance curve – No test
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.

4 TREND SIX:
6 FOUR:SUBJECT
INTELLIGENT
LINE OPTIMIZATION
PERSONALIZATION
Let’s start with how many SLs you should test to ensure you get a significant lift. The term A/B test
would imply that two is okay, but the data would suggest otherwise. The data shows us that any
given SL has roughly one chance out of three 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 three SLs 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 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 SLs you test the greater the chance that at least one of them will be one of those great
SLs to the right of this chart and reduce the chances that you'll send one of the less effective SLs
on the left.
As you will see from the next two charts, every incremental SL you test improves your chances of
getting a lift.
Predicted performance from two subject line (A/B) test

4 TREND SIX:
6 FOUR:SUBJECT
INTELLIGENT
LINE OPTIMIZATION
PERSONALIZATION
Predicted performance from three subject line test
What to optimize
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 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. Conversely, write a bad
subject line – fewer people open the email – get fewer clicks get fewer conversions.
Armed with this simplistic view, they then set about trying to optimize their subject lines.
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’:
þþ If Yes – Click
þþ If NO - Delete/mark spam
þþ Click Yes or No? If Yes – Convert
þþ If No – delete

4 TREND SIX:
6 FOUR:SUBJECT
INTELLIGENT
LINE OPTIMIZATION
PERSONALIZATION
If you think that is complicated, you need to remember that every one of those actions is influenced
by the emails and SLs you have already sent and will influence those you are yet to send.
Example: someone gets an email from GAP saying “Great deals on leggings in store and online”.
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 leggings and work out the best size as they don’t have enough time to 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.
Attribution and time to achieve an impact

If you truly want to optimize your SLs, 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.
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’ and ‘buy later’ raise the question: how late is ‘later’? The
chart below is taken from an attribution audit conducted by Alchemy Worx for a large retailer. We
analyzed every campaign sent over a three-month period, with no cut-off for email attribution
and compared it with a seven-day cut-off the existing attribution model being used.
We found that after seven days the existing cut-off for email attribution was 95% of the final total
for Opens and 96% of total for Clicks had occurred. But crucially 49% of revenue generated by
those emails failed to make the cut.

4 TREND SIX:
6 FOUR:SUBJECT
INTELLIGENT
LINE OPTIMIZATION
PERSONALIZATION
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 click. The
difference is startling. While 20.76% of sales happen within a day of the email being deployed,
45.48% of sales happen within a day of the last click. This attribution gap 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.
Optimizing your SLs

In order to truly optimize your SLs, you need to measure and understand its impact even when
there was no open or click – what we call the halo effect.
My initial advice is to run an analysis of revenue from all channels as a starting point. Then deduct
the email specific revenue as you currently attribute it (opens and clicks, first or last 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 impact on every other channel search, both natural and paid, affiliate programs, and
even social.

4 TREND SIX:
6 FOUR:SUBJECT
INTELLIGENT
LINE OPTIMIZATION
PERSONALIZATION
So what does this all mean? Essentially, our main conclusion was that email SLs 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 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 SLs are driving sales in other
channels on and offline, then marketers need to consider that fact and look for a model that
takes this into account. If marketers are able to look beyond simple click-based attribution and
make sure they are tracking and analyzing 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.
What to test: The golden rule and top 10 tips

The golden rule is to plan ahead
In my view, every SL should be tested. It will ideally be an ABCD (or more) test and never less than
ABC. The only way to do that is to have a good sense what you want to test and plan ahead. More
variables = Better results. A plan that lays out 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.
To learn ideas to test, see this article covering 10 tips to improve your subject line10.
10 Alchemy Worx: How to keep your subject lines refreshed: The golden rule and top 10 tips

7
TREND SEVEN:
CONTINUING PRIVACY REGULATION
UPDATES
In the 2018 edition of this report, released at the start of the year, we led our coverage of trends
related to data protection and privacy. This was the number one trend because of the May 2018
deadline for enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which marketers were
preparing for. Now that the launch of GDPR has passed, we’re covering it as the final trend of the
report to highlight that it remains important to pay attention to getting privacy right in the future.
Many businesses are still working on improving GDPR compliance with a survey suggesting11 that
just 78% of companies expected to be compliant by the end of 2018 with 93% compliant by the
end of 2019. There were many initial GDPR complaints across Europe and these can be expected
to continue.
Steve Henderson, Head of Deliverability at Emarsys, Deputy Chair of the

DMA Email Council and Chair of the Legal Hub for the Email Council
Does the enactment of GDPR mean that there won’t be changes to privacy legislation in 2019? Far
from it. I’ve been surprised at the low levels of awareness amongst marketers of the new ePrivacy
initiative from the European Union amongst marketers. In the UK this will update the 2003 Privacy
and Electronic Communications and later amendments. These regulations sit alongside the Data
Protection Act and the GDPR. They give people specific privacy rights in relation to electronic
communications with specific rules on:
þþ marketing calls, emails, texts and faxes
þþ cookies (and similar technologies)
þþ keeping communications services secure, and
þþ customer privacy as regards traffic and location data, itemised billing, line identification,
and directory listings.
11 TrustArc GDPR compliance survey

4 TREND SEVEN:
7 FOUR: INTELLIGENT
CONTINUINGPERSONALIZATION
PRIVACY REGULATION UPDATES
ePrivacy is highly relevant to email marketers because it specifically seeks to regulate email
communications. It will still be relevant regardless of Brexit decisions since a law will need to be
enacted before the UK leaves the EU, if that comes to pass.
In the interim, I recommend you track the Information Commissioners’ What’s New’12 updates for
the latest on ePrivacy.
Based on the draft and what the ICO is advising, we can expect developments in these areas:
Soft opt-in
The ePrivacy draft allows digital marketing with consent or to those individuals where you have an
existing customer relationship since purchase has occurred. The ‘existing customer relationship’
provision is in effect simply a clarification of existing soft-opt rules. You still need to give customers
the ability to opt-out at the point of sign-up and in every marketing message.
But what about prospects? There’s now no concept of ‘soft-opt-in’ before someone is a customer
(so basket abandonment processes will need to become more transparent) and an ‘existing
customer relationship’ clearly requires some sort of ongoing relationship, rather than just a
one-off purchase.
Cookies
In terms of cookies and other online tracking devices which aren’t explicitly covered by GDPR,
the draft suggests a change in focus from website cookie banners to users’ browser settings and
seeks to address issues around ad-blocking and Wi-Fi location tracking. So this may shift the onus
falls on browser providers like Apple, Microsoft and Google and we could see the end of ‘cookie
banners’ on sites – Hurrah!
Global applicability
Like the GDPR, ePrivacy applies to organizations based anywhere in the world if they provide
services to people in the EU and the EEA.
12 Information Commissioners’ What’s New’


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Reference

Email marketing trends 2019

Editor: Dr. Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights

Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit

Trend One: Consumer engagement and loyalty��������������������������������������7

Trend Two: Email design��������������������������������������������������������������������� 10

Trend Three: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning��������������������� 18

Trend Four: Intelligent personalization������������������������������������������������ 23

Trend Five: Email experience and copywriting ������������������������������������� 28

Trend Six: Subject line optimization���������������������������������������������������� 36

Trend Seven: Continuing privacy regulation updates���������������������������� 42

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

FOREWORD - FROM PURE360

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

We offer a powerful, data-driven marketing automation suite and an industry-leading email

The Pure360 team is focused on delivering what really matters: results.

Pure360. Improving results together. Be part of the journey.

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director, Pure360

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

How is this guide structured?

1 Smart Insights: Managing Digital Marketing in 2019 report

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Jordie van Rijn

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

2 Zettasphere / Email Monday Email marketing addiction report

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

4 Smart Insights: Quick Win to Facebook Messenger

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Frameworks for responsive design – Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Exploiting Gmail Promotion Bundles – Tim Watson – Zettasphere

How Gmail decides on Bundles

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Watch for more to come

Interactive email design features – Tim Watson – Zettasphere

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email applications for AI – Dave Chaffey, Co-founder Smart Insights and

Focus your learning on Machine Learning

7 Smart Insights AI and machine learning for marketing

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

AI-based email personalization options

1. Personalized subject line

8 Pure360 10 Ways to Deliver Next-Level Email Personalisation

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

The creative above gives an example of a personal replenishment reminder

Source: Phrasee – How it works

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Notifications to maximize engagement through email

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Predictive content personalization

But automation of product recommendations is the real trend. A product recommendation

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

How to use personalization sensitively – Jenna Tiffany, Founder and

Email marketing trends 2019 - Published January 2019

Trend One: Consumer engagement and loyalty��7

Trend Two: Email design�� 10

Trend Three: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning�� 18

Trend Four: Intelligent personalization�� 23

Trend Five: Email experience and copywriting �� 28

Trend Six: Subject line optimization�� 36

Trend Seven: Continuing privacy regulation updates�� 42