2024 taught me 4 big lessons

As Q4 and the holiday madness swings into high gear, I want to look back at everything I've learned in the last 12 months, at how that shaped our business and my conversations with marketers and executives, and how it will affect our communal outlook and planning for 2025 and beyond.

In the U.S., we face uncertainty with the general elections. Although the economy is doing well, uncertainty hangs in the air there, too. Technology continues to change and innovate. Consumers, too, are innovating in the ways they consume digital media.

Although we marketers don't have to turn on a dime to keep up with these changes as we did during the COVID-19 pandemic, our companies and consumers still expect us to evolve with them.

So here's what I have learned in this unexpectedly challenging but ultimately rewarding year.

1. Plans are great until they fall apart. Call on your team to create a new plan.

I have always advocated coming up with strategy before executing with tactics. It has become one of the central themes of my 25-year career – having a strategic plan that will guide marketers and agencies alike to execute on goals and support the company's goals over the next 12 months.

I had a solid plan for 2024, coming off a great year in 2023. And then it turned into a repeat of 2020, where we went into the year with solid playbooks and then had to throw them in the trash.

After a terrific Q1, we faced an unexpected slowdown in spending. We weren't the only ones facing this sudden pullback. Every sector across the digital landscape has been affected. Nor was this the first time I had to retool a strategy I had spent months building.

But when your plan goes to hell, it's time to stop and step back. Not to plow all your energy into frantic tactical changes but to retool your strategy to accommodate the change.

If you've done it well, the retooling is easier because you've got the muscle memory from knowing what you have to do. But too often the plan goes to hell, and we're unable to act because we don't know where to turn, and we try to do it all on our own.

When the market changed early in 2024, I didn't try to formulate a new strategy right away. Instead, I relied on my executive team and consulted friends and fellow executives here in the email space and beyond for confirmation, affirmation, and different points of view.

I even talked to a billionaire businessman recently who confirmed what many in the digital space are seeing.  As a side note, there’s something cool when a billionaire agrees with you.

I knew I didn't have all the answers. None of us do when we find ourselves having to change strategies. But you don't have to go it alone. Have a humble spirit that allows you to reach out to your community and say, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Or "How can we come up through partnership to find a solution?"

And so the lesson here is when the plan falls apart, rely on your team and your extended support system to help you rebuild that strategy. You're not alone in this journey of orchestrating your goals into reality! 

2. We must continue to advocate for email.

Earlier in 2024, Gartner’s 2024 global CMO survey revealed that the average marketing budget has shrunk from a high of 11% of overall company revenue in 2020 to 7.7%. What’s more troubling is what companies are spending their money on.

Paid media investment in search, social media and digital display advertising is soaring, along with offline spending on event and influencer marketing and TV at the expense of marketing technology, human resources, and agencies.

This tells me the lessons we learned from the pandemic about the importance of email and its nearly three decades of high ROI have been forgotten. Or at least, overlooked. Again.

Email still doesn't get the funding level that is commensurate with its ROI. The old saying that we can send bad email and still make money is the yardstick by which our companies value our email contributions. 

We email marketers still need to champion email for its ROI and its direct connection to our customers in the intimacy of the inbox. It can't stand on its own. We need to keep telling the story of success, complexity, and the upside of email.

It's not enough just to keep pushing the "send" button. We need to educate the marketing groups and the broader audience about the power we harness because we can reach into those inboxes and talk directly with our customers.

We must continually talk about email's success and power. We must remind our teammates and executives that email is the bright and shiny object they have been looking for. We must explain why every other channel is just a copy of what email does, but they cost more and deliver less.

You can do this in a lunch-and-learn session, through internal blogs, newsletter articles, Slack posts, in your budget proposals and requests for extra funding throughout the year.

But you have to do it. If your execs don't see the upside of email – if you don't communicate the vision for them of what their investments will earn – why would they invest?

3. Your team is everything. 

Email is valued only if our champions shout about it from the mountaintops about how great we are and why. Your team is essential here.

Your team holds everything together. Even if you're an email team of one, you're always working with tech groups or website partners. You're always part of a greater team. When you have low points, your team gets you moving forward, and when you have high points, your team celebrates with you.

When you have to shift your strategy, as I did earlier this year, you can rely on your team to inform and guide you. But day to day, your team should be a source of renewal, hope and energy that you can call on to accomplish what you need to do.

I learned this year something I had always suspected but had confirmed: My entire team is amazing, not just at doing their jobs but in offering support, suggestions, ideas, and a willingness to step up.

Every person in my company has contributed substantially this year, not just by doing client work but also by investing in the company to make it better.

No CEO or leader worth their salt are doing it all by themselves. So, as smart as you are or as talented as you are, always realize that your team is what gets you going.

4. Email still has room to grow into greatness.

I recently spent time at Zeta Global's user conference, which was more than a demonstration of the ESP's abilities and what their technology can enable. It also was advised by some of the smartest people in the world.

They talked about AI, of course, but also about marketing at its core, and how it is supposed to move and inspire and create intent for conversion and to have a longer relationship through loyalty with our customers.

All of these people were gathered around the central idea that email marketing is amazing and powerful. Picture it - billionaires on stage talking about email. That's shocking to me to imagine. But it also emphasizes that email marketing still has room to grow and evolve and to have us evolve with it.

So many times in our history, people have diminished the channel. And yet we have a resilience that keeps us on top.

There's no end in sight for the power and effectiveness of this channel, no matter the competition. I have learned that email is still a resilient part of marketing. But we need to talk about it more, to focus on our bright future and what we can do to drive innovation and to make consumption of the channel by our consumers and end users.

Wrapping up

Many of my comments today are about what I learned, but I want to close by reaffirming email as a community. I also attended the annual Email Excellence Council conference, where I reconnected with friends I've not seen for years – people I think of as my brothers and sisters in email, whose lives I have shared for 20 years or more.

This community is the binding force in keeping us focused on the central goals of email innovation and email excellence.

Only Influencers is a central part of that community, as are other industry groups. It helps me understand the nuances. It reinforces my learning over this year that the people around us are what keep us moving, that we should not get cocky and believe that we can do it all by ourselves.

They say it takes a village to accomplish anything. But every village has its idiots, and in the email village, the idiots are the ones who think they can do it by themselves.

My hope for 2025 is that our email community gets louder about what we can do for email. Let's use evolving technology like artificial intelligence to drive us to a closer relationship with the customer. But that all begins with us as we make that message real.

So, as the holiday email crush gets closer, don't hesitate to call on your teams and your email community to help you get through it. Good luck in Q4, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side.

Photo by David Rodrigues on Unsplash