Artificial Intelligence

Join me for this webinar on “Using Generative AI TODAY for Campaign Development (not just copywriting!)”

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn, you may have noticed that I have become rather obsessed with Generative AI these past few months.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini (previously called Bard), Microsoft CoPilot, MidJourney, Perplexity, Galileo and so many other AI tools are saving me so much time every day.

And the more I use them and the more I learn about these tools, the more my mind is being blown away with the endless possibilities they offer!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve felt so passionate about a topic, really! I remember feeling a similar unstoppable drive to read and learn everything I possibly could about email marketing. And that was more than 20 years ago! Wow, how time flies, right? 🙂

I’ve trained thousands of marketers over the years, and you’d think one gets tired of doing that after a while. However, sharing my knowledge through teaching, coaching and mentoring is what I truly enjoy doing most of all. It gives me a sense of fulfillment and it gives me energy.

So when email marketing guru Jeanne Jennings asked if I’d like to join her for a 1-hour webinar on how email marketers can use Generative AI to develop their marketing campaigns, I said yes of course 🙂

We know that a lot of you have been using AI tools this past year already to help with the creation of copy and maybe even images, so we’d like to focus on using AI beyond these more common uses.

Instead, you’ll learn how to use tools like ChatGPT to:

  • Define or refine your target audience, including building personas
  • Role play with your target audience personas, to better understand their needs
  • Understand the features, benefits,and advantages of your offer for your audience
  • Understand common objections they may have – and how to overcome them
  • Outline a multi-effort email marketing campaign for your audience, complete with message map, frequency, cadence, and more
  • Create your own AI marketing assistant who you can train to help you with common tasks
  • And lots more…

When: Tuesday, February 27, 2024 @ 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ((UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)) – so that is 6pm CET for those of you living in Europe.

Sign up here: https://risingmedia.swoogo.com/OI270224

And, by the way, if you have any questions you’d like us to answer in this webinar, let me know!

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Artificial Intelligence, Deliverability, Design & Layout, Email marketing

A round-up of my favorite reads of the past week

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

Updates to Gmail & Yahoo’s Sender Guidelines
Yahoo posted a blog about the upcoming Send Requirements and an FAQ with more information and Google provided more information as well. In this article you’ll find some of the key information and the author promises to update it as more information is shared.

Bonus Webinar: A Crash Course on List Unsubscribe
Deliverability expert Al Iverson posted a short video on his blog in which he explains what the List Unsubscribe header is, how it works and how ESPs need to implement it so that you are compliant with the latest Gmail & Yahoo requirements

#TimTalk – Generative AI – What keeps me awake at night with Chad S. White
In the below video Chad S. White discusses potential impact Generative AI may have on job roles, particularly junior positions, and its use in content creation, raising concerns about authenticity and transparency, as well as how corporations might define low-value work, the future of art and craft in an AI-dominated landscape, data privacy issues, and the effect of AI on social interactions and marketing. I found it very interesting!

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Artificial Intelligence, Deliverability, Design & Layout, Email marketing

A round-up of my favorite reads of the past week

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Deliverability

Google’s New Email Sender Requirements: What You Need to Know.

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

As from February 2024, Google will roll out stricter requirements for marketers that want to have their email campaigns delivered to Gmail inboxes.

These new rules apply to all senders who send email to Gmail accounts:

  • If you haven’t already, authenticate your email domains with SPF, DKIM & DMARC. Note that DMARC is only necessary if you send close to 5,000 or more messages within a 24-hour period.
  • Don’t send unwanted emails: keep your spam rates below 0,10% and make sure to never reach 0,30%. Interesting to know is that spam rate is calculated daily.
  • Make it easy to unsubscribe: your promotional email campaigns need to support one-click unsubscribe and have a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message itself.

As I understand it, these requirements apply to all senders when sending email campaigns to personal Gmail accounts, so apparently Google Workspace accounts are not affected.

If you fail to comply with these new requirements, Google will either reject your email or deliver it to the user’s spam folder.

Google is also urging us to meet their new sender requirements before the deadline because they say it will improve our email delivery.

The plan is to add a compliance status dashboard to Postmaster Tools early next year, so sign up to Google Postmaster Tools to keep track of how you are doing and to monitor the reputation of your sending domain.

Also, make sure to read through the following posts on the Google blog – as it contains a lot more detail and very useful information:

Another interesting article on this topic is this one: Your 2024 guide to Google & Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders.

Happy reading!

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Email Tactics, Strategy, Studies & Research, Trends

The coolest trends in email marketing

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

Every year Jordie van Rijn collects all of the trends and predictions on email and marketing automation into an EPIC post called “The Future of email marketing”.

Now the outlines of email marketing trends start to take form, here are a few of this year’s favorites.

Email production automation will become the norm

We know email content automation is the email trend that nobody is really talking about yet. A lot of time spent in email creation can be automated using email templates and dynamic code. More and more marketers are making use of dynamic content as a time-saving email strategy. In combination with the right type of email template, it can be a big step forward in personalisation as well.

According to Litmus’s state of Email report, the most time that’s spent on email production is graphics & design (4.1 hours) followed by coding and development (3.8 hours).

That’s almost 45% of the time spent on email tasks (the others include: copywriting, data pulls/logic, testing and troubleshooting, and post-send analytics and analysis). There’s no reason as to why so much time should be spent in email content creative creation. More and more marketers are making use of dynamic content as a time saving email strategy.

‘Mailable ‘Microsites’ are set to continue its winning spree.

Jaymin Bhuptani of emailmonks talks about the mailable microsite, also known as Interactive email. These smart mails allow the user to interact with email within the inbox. Interactivity in email is all set to continue its winning spree in 2018.

An interactive email is an email where a click triggers an action within the same email. Interactive emails can keep the inbox interesting and unique. What type of interactions are there?

* Integrated forms and surveys,
* Social sharing,
* Gifs, videos, and animations,
* Search in email,
* Menu options / navigation bars,
* Rotational banners / carousels and Countdowns.

Now the fresh new part of this story is the news from google AMP for email, which allows to do a lot more in at least Gmail. However this is still a

The Interactive email essentially hands your audience what they need from inside the email, with much effort for them. They do not need to click through from the inbox to view content, interact with video or complete surveys – increasing the chance of engagement.

Even simple effects can make a (lasting) impression. See this example by TOMS, the live email uses interactivity, on interacting with the switch, the images updates and gets switched to the glow in the dark version.

Toms-interactive-glowinthedark

Embrace the contextual email

Jamie Bradley from Emma gives the head up that Contextual Email is, well, quite cool.

More and more brands will use tools that integrate with their ESP to provide contextual email. Think things like a progress bar in a confirmation email that automatically updates the shipping status of something you ordered.

Or maybe a poll or survey where the results update in real time. The way to stand out in the inbox is to be more relevant and useful than your competitors, and contextual email is one (really cool) tactic to do just that.

An interesting development in that area is the announcement of Google AMP for Email, which could be opening more option to interact in the inbox (or at least Gmail). We will have to see just how that will turn out.

Emoji use will skyrocket 🚀

Mike Ragan, Designer at ActionRocket says: Emojis are a fascinating evolution of digital language and – crucially – becoming more and more integrated into our favourite “formal” tone of voice channel: email.

This emoji acceptance can be illustrated by companies such as Monzo, a bank keen to be seen as trustworthy and legitimate. But also real, human and reasonable. Kudos.

Emoji
Emojis are great in email because they distil a lot of information, and convey it quickly. We predict being genuinely emoji literate will continue to be a coveted skill in 2018 and beyond.

A research published on econsultancy by Parry Malm, concluded  that emojis don’t always work, but basically are a result amplifier. They either make a bad subject line worse (40% of cases) or a good subject line better. (60% of cases).

Emoji_prob_chart

I have Data, Automation, AI and personalisation on my mind.

How do brand side marketeers think email marketing will evolve? Econsultancy asked it to their panel of marketers: Out came a word cloud with the topics of Data, Automation, AI and personalisation to be most mentioned / top of mind. Of course there is much more to say, read the complete article with the summary with 100+ email marketing trends 2021 or the newest

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Email marketing

My favorite reads of the past week 03/09/2018 (p.m.)

Posted on by Tamara Gielen

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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