Chad S White 800x800
Chad S. White
is the Head of Research at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. He’s also the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and nearly 4,000 articles and posts about digital and email marketing. Chad was named the Email Experience Council’s 2018 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year. Find him on LinkedInTwitter, and Mastodon.

Why Email Marketers Shouldn’t Bother Fighting the Power

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As an email marketer, it can feel like bad things are always happening to us. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection making it much more difficult to adhere to inbox providers own rules around emailing only engaged subscribers Apple’s Link Tracking Protection making conversion tracking harder for some senders Gmail’s policy of Automatic...

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What Email Marketers Should Be Upset About

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There’s no shortage of things in email marketing to be irritated about. The lack of email coding standards, the inconsistent email rendering, the partial support for CSS-based interactivity, the partial support of AMP for email, inconsistent implementations of dark mode, how expensive BIMI VMCs are,… Marketers have also been perpetually frustrated...

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Email Marketing Sustainability: Everyone Can Play a Part

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Given that every email takes electricity to send and store, how can email marketers lower their carbon footprint? That was the central question behind “Green Your Emails,” the keynote presentation by Zillow’s Alice Li at Litmus Live last fall. Despite the increasing number of headlines about climate change and extreme weather,...

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Accessibility vs. Inclusive Design: 2 Approaches with Similar Goals

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In my nearly two decades in the email marketing industry, I’ve never seen a topic get people more twisted up than accessibility and inclusive design. Because these issues involve people with a range of permanent challenges, it raises all kinds of social, moral, legal, and personal sensitivities. I’ll confess that I...

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Accepting that You Can’t Change People… or Subscribers or Inbox Providers

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You can’t change people. You can only change how you react to them. That is something we say a lot in our household. It’s a hard-won pearl of wisdom from years of working with therapists so my wife and I can be better parents to our autistic son, be better spouses...

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The Fifth Age of Email Deliverability

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The feedback mechanisms, controls, and algorithms that inbox providers use to decide whether to block, junk, or deliver email messages to their users continues to evolve. Since the 1990s, there have been five ages of email deliverability, each of which was ushered in by the arrival of a major change: In...

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What I Got Right and Wrong about the Future of Email Marketing

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With an updated and greatly expanded 4th edition of my book, Email Marketing Rules, out this month, I wanted to look back at the predictions I made about the future of email marketing in the 3rd edition nearly six years ago. I predicted 11 changes would occur in the next 10...

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Imagining an Amazon Email Client: Prime Mail

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Gmail is getting old. What’s the next hot email app? That was the gist of a tweet I saw early this year. At the time, the question made me reflect on the different features and capabilities of all of the major inbox providers, and what those differences said about inbox providers’...

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Digital Marketers Are Afraid to Make Mistakes: 4 Negative Repercussions

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Basketball hall of famer and greatest of all time Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And...

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What's Wrong with Email Marketing?

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As powerful and unique as email marketing is, it’s far from perfect. If you want to grasp some of its imperfections, just look at what the inbox and mailbox providers have been doing. The features they’re pushing will give you a sense of what they feel is wrong with the channel....

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Should Emails Expire? Yes and No

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Most commercial email that’s sent is never deleted by recipients. Moreover, most commercial email content is only relevant for a fairly short period of time—say, weeks tops for the vast majority of it. As a consequence, mailbox providers currently store and maintain access to a tremendous amount of old and completely...

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Apple’s MPP May Drive Email Design Changes that Actually Hurt Customer Engagement

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Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will have a broad range of effects on email marketers, impacting email analytics, design, deliverability, personalization, and optimization efforts. Sadly, subscribers who enable MPP will receive less relevant emails and more emails than they would have otherwise gotten if marketers could better measure their engagement through opens....

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The 2 Social Contracts Being Broken by Apple’s New Privacy Protections

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Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will have broad implications for how brands operate their email marketing program. These changes are most disturbing because they disrupt norms that have been in place for more than a decade—norms that have served consumers well and kept marketers honest. I would go so far as to...

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Managing the Risks and Opportunities of Pandemic Email Audience Changes

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List building has been challenging over the past 18 months, which has now made managing subscribers a challenge. Before talking about the issues that are pressing now, let’s look at how we got here… When coronavirus lockdowns started in March last year, consumer behaviors started to rapidly evolve. Many stores were...

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