Every year, there are wacky ads, celebrity cameos, and crazy stunts. But there are always a few commercials during the NFL championship broadcast that manage to pull on our heartstrings, and sometimes they even make important points.

The ad for Google Pixel 8, “Javier in Frame“, is one of those memorable commercials. It tells the story of a man with vision impairments, showing key moments of his life through his eyes. Check out the commercial below, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to grab a tissue.

Google Pixel commercial focuses on accessibility

What you see in the commercial is how Javier uses accessibility features on his smartphone to help him capture photos and videos of his life – from getting a dog to falling in love to starting a family. By the way, that’s also Stevie Wonder doing the voiceover in the ad, which was directed by award-winning filmmaker Adam Morse who is blind.

The commercial shines a spotlight on a feature called Guided Frame, which helps people with vision problems frame things up in their cameras. Many people with disabilities use special technology like this to access things and engage with the world.

For example, people with low vision as well as those with mobility issues often use screen readers to interpret the content of websites and emails. But here’s the catch… Those of us who design and develop emails and websites still need to keep that software and the needs of people who use it in mind.

Let’s say you place a graphic in an email with a coupon code that customers can use for a big promotion. Screen reading software may be unable to interpret the contents of the graphic. That’s one reason why we strongly discourage sending image-only emails.

What screen readers can interpret is the alt text for images in emails, which should be written to accurately describe visuals in a helpful way. But alt text for images is only one way way to optimize digital content for accessibility.

Are you sending accessible emails?

Last year, the Email Markup Consortium (EMC) conducted its second annual study on accessibility in email marketing. To say the results were disappointing would be putting it mildly.

The EMC report found that 99.9% of the 290,000+ emails it evaluated had accessibility issues categorized as “serious” or “critical.” The issues included everything from missing attributes that define the correct language to missing image alt text and link text that isn’t descriptive.

Some may find the steps required to make an email more accessible tedious, but they are extremely important. Email engagement rates and accessibility go hand-in-hand. When people can’t read, understand, or click on your email campaigns, they won’t take the actions you expect.

If brands fail to consider digital accessibility, it can also get them into trouble with the law, specifically when they are in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). A study from UsableNet found a year-over-year increase in accessibility lawsuits in 2023. This study examined more than 4,600 cases, including federal lawsuits as well as state lawsuits in New York and California.

Because email is a key part of the customer experience, you need to be sure you are effectively communicating with all kinds of customers. Important information is delivered to email inboxes every day. Think back to the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine not being able to access or understand an important email with health and safety information from a company you do business with.

The truth is, making emails more accessible can improve the experience for every contact on your list, not just those with vision impairments or other disabilities. Beyond that, improving digital accessibility is the right thing to do. It shows your brand cares about every customer and subscriber.

Check out our email accessibility resources

We were excited to see digital accessibility get the attention it deserves. Kudos to Google and the people behind the commercial for using the biggest television event of the year to highlight this important issue in a relatable way. As of this writing, the video already had more than 36-million views on YouTube.

If improving digital accessibility is on your brand’s to-do list, we have some excellent resources to guide you as you make emails more accessible:

• Email Accessibility Guide for Designers and Developers: Get an overview of everything related to accessible emails so you understand why it matters and how to get started.
• How to Code Accessible Emails: Get tips from our own Megan Boshuyzen on how to use things like semantic HTML and ARIA labels in email development.
• How to Write Image Alt Text: Find out how to describe images in your emails in a way that improves the inbox experience for those using screen readers.
• How to Build an Accessible Email Design System: See how making accessible emails part of your brand style guide and processes ensures every subscriber can engage with what you deliver.
• Ebook – Accessibility in the Inbox: Back in 2021, Sinch Mailjet published research on how email senders were handling accessibility. This free download also includes lots of tips and expert advice.

If you’re interested in videos on email accessibility, you can check out Megan Boshuyzen’s presentation at Unspam. Megan also hosted digital accessibility advocate and fellow email geek Najee Bartley on an episode of Notes from the Dev. In the episode, you’ll hear what it sounds like when screen readers encounter email code that is not optimized for accessibility (and it’s not pretty).

Evaluate email accessibility before you hit send

At Sinch Email on Acid, we’ve been big proponents of accessibility for quite some time. We believe it’s so important that we built accessibility checks into our email readiness platform.

Use our tool to make automatic improvements to email code, check color contrast, and validate your email against important accessibility guidelines. You can even view your email design through filters that show you how it looks to people with color blindness.

Accessibility tools from Sinch Email on Acid come along with our industry-leading email previews, which show you how everything renders on more than 100 clients and live devices. With unlimited testing on every paid plan, you can keep working until you have total send-button confidence.

The post Commercial During the Big Game Highlights the Importance of Digital Accessibility appeared first on Email on Acid.

Because we care about email, that’s why. The team at Sinch Email on Acid subscribes to the mission of simplifying email marketing’s many complexities. And from the looks of it, things could get pretty complicated in 2024.

So, what’s our take? We’re glad you asked. Let’s start this rundown of what will happen to email marketing in 2024 exactly where you’d expect…

Artificial intelligence becomes the norm

Will it steal our jobs? Will it make our work faster and easier? Will ChatGPT take over the world? No longer are we asking these questions. It’s not that we know the answers. It’s just that we’re already getting used to living in a world of artificial reality.

Last year, we were all wondering what to make of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Some of us were excited and others were concerned. This year, it’s clear that generative AI is a freight train that can’t be stopped. So, we must decide how and when to use AI in email marketing.

What seems most likely is that AI will be assisting email marketers and developers in 2024. So, our jobs are probably safe… for now.

Marketers often use generative AI for quick brainstorming. It can be helpful when you’re stuck and need ideas for things like subject lines, creative CTA copy, or reworking an email for different segments. Take what you like, ignore what you don’t, and tweak it to make it yours. That seems to be the way it works, and that’s exactly how Sinch Mailjet users are taking advantage of the new AI Copy Generator, for example.

Meanwhile, email developers are finding ways to use AI to clean up their code and complete mundane tasks. In theory, this should free up email teams to get more creative with marketing campaigns designed for the inbox. The less busy work you have, the more you can pursue opportunities like interactive emails.

Yet another way AI could impact email marketing in 2024 involves a different type of artificial intelligence. Predictive AI uses machine learning to examine your data over time. It then makes predictions about things like campaign performance. That’s predictive analytics. But predictive AI can also create segments based on customer activity and generate personalized campaigns based on predicted behaviors.

Dive deeper into email and AI

Last year, we asked the question could ChatGPT be more creative than you? The answer might surprise you, or it could inspire you. We also hosted two AI debates with our email geek friends from ActionRocket.

Check out Email Geeks vs ChatGPT with developers Megan Boshuyzen and Jay Oram. And for the digital marketing crowd, watch Marketers vs Bots with Julia Ritter and Nicole Holden. These on-demand webinars get straight to the heart of the matter.

Authenticity and empathy become more important

The rise of generative AI has a lot of us questioning everything we see online. Did ChatGPT write this? Is that an image from MidJourney or DALL-E? Am I hearing from a real person or what?

In 2024, everyone is going to be wondering if what they experience is “real” or not. At some point, we may start accepting AI-generated content as real. But for now, when we say “real” we mean human.

As generative AI finds its permanent place, it’s likely that we’ll become awash with AI content – in our inboxes and elsewhere. Since nearly everyone has access to these tools, you can expect AI-generated content to become a commodity very quickly.

Once again, email geeks will be faced with the age-old question – How do we stand out in the inbox? We believe authenticity and empathy are the answers.

Authenticity has been a buzz word for quite some time. But now it really means something. Part of what authenticity in email entails is the distribution of original ideas from real people. This bodes well for the use of thought leadership in email marketing.

When AI makes everything easy – emails that come from humans show you care enough to do the work of connecting with subscribers. AI can do more than make email marketing faster and easier. We can also use it as a tool to better understand our audience and craft relevant emails. At the same time, email marketers shouldn’t lose sight of the need for a human touch in certain situations.

Dive deeper into human-focused email strategy

Email marketing works best when we use it to create a one-to-one customer experience. Of course, we also use fancy marketing technology to personalize emails and trigger automations. Sometimes, it takes a human to understand humanity and do the right thing.

That’s the story behind one of the most popular sessions at Email Camp 2023. Find out more about how Kay Peacey taught us the value of radically human email marketing in a world full of AI. You’ll see how a cheese monger could have designed a more human-centric email experience.

Accessibility gets the attention it deserves

One of the most important ways to bring empathy to the inbox is to focus on email accessibility in 2024.

According to research from the Email Markup Consortium, most brands could be doing much better in this area. The EMC’s latest Accessibility Report revealed there is still a lot of work to do. 99.9% of the 35,000+ emails the EMC evaluated in 2023 had accessibility issues it classified as “serious” or “critical.”

In case statistics aren’t really your thing, 99.9% means pretty much everything. The good news is, there are some very simple ways to make your email campaigns more accessible:

1. Use the lang attribute to define the language used in the email’s body.
2. Write descriptive alt text for all images.
3. Use basic semantic HTML (like <h> tags for headings).
4. Set table roles to presentation.

Many of these adjustments help screen reading programs interpret your emails and present them to users in a way that makes sense.

Accessibility and good email engagement are directly connected. If a portion of your list can’t read the content or click/tap on elements of your email, your performance metrics will suffer. However, the real reason to focus on accessibility is that it’s the right thing to do. Accessible emails are more effective and more inclusive.

Thanks to the EMC and others putting the spotlight on email accessibility, we believe senders will make progress toward delivering more accessible email marketing in 2024.

Dive deeper into email accessibility

Sinch Email on Acid is a big proponent of accessibility. In fact, we were one of only a few brands that passed the EMC’s accessibility evaluation. We’re also helping senders do the same with the Email Accessibility testing features in the Email on Acid platform.

Find out more about improving email accessibility with these resources:

• Article: How to Code Accessible Emails – with advice from Megan Boshuyzen.
• Report: Accessibility in the inbox – with results from a survey of email senders from Sinch Mailjet.
• Video: Accessibility in Practice – UNSPAM session with Megan Boshuyzen.
• Video: Notes from the Dev episode – with accessibility advocate, Najee Bartley.
• Article: How to Conduct an Email Accessibility Audit – find out what could make your campaigns more accessible.

Authentication becomes a necessity

New bulk sender requirements from Gmail and Yahoo Mail go into effect in early 2024. This is set to have a big impact on email marketing, but it’s not necessarily a reason to freak out.

Here’s a quick rundown of the new requirements:

• Senders must be using all three email authentication protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
  • DMARC policy can be set to p=none (for now).
• All commercial emails must include a one-click unsubscribe in the body.
• Senders must keep their spam complaint rate beneath a threshold of 0.1%.
  • Spikes in spam complaints should never exceed 0.3%.

The biggest and most crucial item on the list above involves email authentication. Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo use these three protocols to help them verify the identity of bulk email senders. The process is important when deciding whether to accept messages, filter them to spam, or deliver them to the inbox.

Authentication is also the best way to stop email spoofing, which is a form of phishing that is a danger to your subscribers as well as your brand’s reputation. Starting in February of 2024, senders that do not use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for authentication may not reach the inboxes of Gmail and Yahoo Mail users.

For senders who already follow best practices, these new guidelines won’t be a problem. But Sinch Mailgun’s report, The state of email deliverability 2023, found upwards of 10% of senders or more are not using at least one of the required protocols. Many other survey respondents were unsure about email authentication. So, now is a good time to look into how you handle it.

Dive deeper into the new sender guidelines

Find out more about the new guidelines, why they’re required, and how they’ll protect the inbox to make it a better place for consumers and brands alike.

Listen to an eye-opening episode of the Sinch Mailgun podcast, Email’s Not Dead. You’ll hear from Marcel Becker of Yahoo/AOL as he gives us the full story from the perspective of the mailbox providers.

You can also check out how Gmail explains the new sender guidelines and follow along on Yahoo’s Sender Hub to get their deliverability best practices.

Augmented communication strategies, automation, and APIs

Upcoming research from Sinch finds consumers prefer email for promotional and transactional brand communications. (We’ll share more soon.)  However, the brands who see where we’re heading understand that omnichannel communication is the next big thing. We’re not saying email is dying, we’re just saying it’s got company.

2024 is a good time to consider how you can augment and enhance your customer communication strategy with other channels. When it’s truly omnichannel, consumers have a seamless experience in which they can communicate with brands in whatever form works best for them. As customers move from channel to channel, the information that’s needed to assist them travels with them.

So, whether you’re on email or a messaging app, talking to AI or a human representative, the customer experience is consistent, personalized, and helpful.

As brands begin adding more channels to the mix, APIs will help developers integrate them into the customer experience. Marketing automation strategies will allow more flexible and efficient communication strategies across the entire customer journey. To bring it all together, companies will use a Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) solution. The pioneering leaders in the CPaaS space are just starting to emerge.

Dive deeper into omnichannel

If you’re ready to enhance your customer communication strategy, the experts at Sinch have some advice on how and why to add new channels to the mix.

Still need to wrap your head around how omnichannel communications fits into your marketing funnel? Check out an eye-opening guide from Sinch Mailjet that applies an omnichannel customer experience to the hero’s journey. Find out what your customers have in common with Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker.

Deliver your best email marketing in 2024

No matter how complicated things get this year, email marketing in 2024 still requires that we pay attention to the basics. While there will be a new Outlook for desktop in 2024, those old, problematic versions aren’t going away immediately.

That’s just one reason why email marketers need to keep testing every campaign for rendering issues and optimizing emails for every subscriber and every inbox. Sinch Email on Acid offers a suite of tools and a customizable workflow to help you get that done. Unlike the competition, our users enjoy unlimited testing.

Make sure you put your best emails forward in 2024 with help from our collaborative email quality assurance platform. Try us out free for seven days.

The post Email Marketing in 2024: What to Expect in the Inbox and Beyond  appeared first on Email on Acid.

In early October 2023, Gmail and Yahoo announced new requirements for bulk senders looking to deliver mail to those using their services. While the strictest standards mainly impact those who send thousands of emails every day, even those with lower send volumes should consider updating their practices.

The new bulk sender requirements deal with the following areas:

1. Implementing stronger email authentication practices.
2. Providing an easy way to unsubscribe in one click.
3. Monitoring spam complaint rates to keep them under specific thresholds.

Let’s take a closer look at what you’ll need to do to get delivered to Gmail and Yahoo.

Details of new bulk sender requirements

Starting in February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo say they’ll be enforcing these new standards for bulk senders. There is no doubt that Gmail users make up a significant portion of your contact database, and Yahoo Mail has more than 227 million active users. So, if you want to keep reaching these people, it is important to review your current sending practices and make the necessary changes.

While there are some slight differences between Gmail and Yahoo’s guidelines, they are mostly very similar. The table below outlines the strictest standards so you’ll be compliant with both mailbox providers’ requirements.

To implement some of these changes, or to check to see what your existing authentication methods are, email teams may need to work with the IT department, a DNS hosting provider, or their email service provider (ESP) for answers and assistance.

Why are these changes needed?

Most people prefer hearing from brands via emails. The problem is, the inbox can be an overcrowded and even dangerous place. Gmail and Yahoo want to protect their users from bad actors and shady senders.

Stronger authentication tops the list of new bulk sender requirements because that is how mailbox providers are able to stop email spoofing. This occurs when a malicious sender impersonates a recognizable brand in order to deceive a recipient, gaining access to credentials and/or scamming them out of money. Phishing, which was already a huge problem, saw a 1,265% increase since late 2022. That sharp increase is partly because bad actors are making use of generative AI to do their dirty deeds.

Beyond the dangers of malicious phishing emails, there are legitimate senders who may be overstepping their bounds. If someone is emailing contacts without obtaining consent, making it hard for people to opt out, or simply sending too many annoying emails recipients, Gmail and Yahoo want it to stop.

Making it easy to unsubscribe from marketing emails gives Gmail and Yahoo Mail users more control over who has permission to send them messages. Senders still can (and should) use email preference centers where subscribers can select the type and frequency of messages they want to receive.

The transparency around user reported spam complaints encourages senders to pay closer attention to their list building practices, subscriber engagement, and email list hygiene. People who signed up to hear from you and want your emails won’t mark messages as spam.

More about email authentication requirements

Email authentication can be somewhat technical, but it’s extremely important to the inbox experience. Authentication protocols help mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo verify the identity of a sender by connecting the message to a specific sending domain or IP address. Here’s a quick overview:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): A list of sources approved to send mail on behalf of a domain. For example, you may need your ESP listed on your SPF record.
• Domainkeys Identified Mail (DKIM): A pair of keys, one public and one private, which are used to connect a sender to a specific domain through an encrypted digital signature in the email header.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): A specification that checks for SPF and DKIM alignment while providing a policy on how to handle authentication failures.

Until recently, many senders used some but not all three of these authentication protocols, but that won’t be considered acceptable moving forward. Sinch Mailgun’s report, The state of email deliverability 2023, found that there are significant gaps in use, or else senders are unclear about authentication.

• SPF: Not using (12.8%), Unsure (31.8%) 
• DKIM: Not using (11.1%), Unsure (30.4%) 
• DMARC: Not using (18.7%), Unsure (38.8%) 

The future of DMARC requirements

The updated best practices on Yahoo’s Sender Hub indicate DMARC implementation is only required for bulk senders. But all senders must start using both SPF and DKIM authentication in early 2024.

If you qualify as a bulk sender, passing DMARC is also required. However, Gmail and Yahoo are accepting a DMARC policy of p=none. This policy tells receiving mail servers not to do anything with messages that fail SPF or DKIM. There are also policies of p=reject and p=quarantine.

• Reject: Means the policy recommends not accepting or blocking messages that fail authentication.
• Quarantine: Means the policy recommends filtering authentication failures to the spam folder.
• None: Tells mailbox providers not to take any specific action, and authentication failures may reach the inbox.

Here’s where you shouldn’t get confused about the DMARC policy. The requirement is not to use p=none. Consider that the minimum accepted policy. A stronger DMARC policy would be to use p=reject or p=quarantine, which is what mailbox providers really want.

In fact, email industry experts say it’s very likely that accepting p=none is only a temporary move. First, Gmail and Yahoo want more senders to adopt DMARC. Then, they will probably start requiring senders to enforce policies of reject or quarantine.

Here’s the good news…

While the bulk sender requirements are new, the ideas behind them are not. Responsible email senders have been pursuing effective authentication, ensuring they obtain consent from new contacts, and making it easy to opt-out when desired for years.

Even if you do have to make some changes to your email program to comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s standards, it will benefit you in the long run.

As email marketers, we want our subscribers to trust the messages that land in their inboxes. We don’t want them afraid to open emails from brands. We want subscribers who are anticipating what we send and eager to engage. We don’t want people on our lists who don’t want to be there. These changes push the email industry in the right direction.

As the Gmail announcement explained to its users, we’re all in this together:

If achieving better inbox placement is a top priority, you need to check out the complete deliverability suite from Mailgun Optimize. Take advantage of useful features like Email Validation to keep your list clean and Inbox Placement Testing to see reports on where campaigns are likely to land.

As you update and improve your email authentication methods, you can access helpful features to make sure DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are passing. Plus, use a Google Postmaster Tools integration to monitor Gmail spam complaints and more with Reputation Monitoring.

The post Get Ready for New Bulk Sender Requirements from Gmail and Yahoo appeared first on Email on Acid.

Last year, Microsoft announced it plans to release a new Outlook for Windows. The announcement was mainly geared toward Outlook users, and it invited beta testers to start playing around with the updated version. However, there was a line added to the article that was music to the ears of email geeks:

The key word in that quotation above is “consistency.” So, why is that such a big deal? We’ll explain.

Why Outlook for Windows is a huge headache

If you’ve been in the email marketing world for a while, you’re probably aware of the biggest challenge for those who code campaigns: email clients do not render HTML and CSS consistently.

There are varying levels of support for certain forms of HTML and CSS. That means the way something looks on Gmail may look quite different in Yahoo Mail. To see just how complicated this can get for email developers, check out the website CanIEmail.com and compare support among email clients.

The biggest culprit of all has been the desktop versions of Outlook (for Windows 2003 – 2019). That’s why our tongue-in-cheek article on email client stereotypes labeled Outlook “The Troublemaker.”

The main reason for all that trouble is that Outlook for Windows has been using Microsoft Word as its rendering engine for years. And if you think it seems odd to use a word processor to render email code, you’re not wrong. To learn more about this, check out Rémi Parmentier’s post on the current Outlook rendering engine.

It’s likely that Outlook users make up a much smaller percentage of your list in comparison to mailbox providers like Gmail and Apple Mail. But it’s an important email client for B2B brands and big enough that B2C senders can’t ignore it either.

Outlook coding issues are such a big problem that they majorly influence the way we develop emails. Hussein Al Hammad explained why in a post for the Email Markup Consortium (EMC):

The fact that we’ve often had to code what works for in Outlook rather than what’s best for subscribers has been a bummer – to say the least. But that could change as people and businesses adopt the new Outlook for windows.

What to expect from the new Outlook for Windows

When Microsoft stated that it was going to “bring consistency across our Windows and web codebases,” it signaled that the new desktop version of Outlook would render code in the same way as web-based versions of Outlook.

That means the new Outlook for Windows would use a web-based rendering engine just like most other clients do. So, there will be more support for HTML and CSS, which will solve quite a few problems for email developers. Here are some of the biggest changes to expect:

1. No more using tables to code emails

Once the desktop versions of Outlook are finally laid to rest, the need to use tables to code email layouts will no longer be a necessity. The primary reason email developers have been doing that is because of Outlook and its Word rendering engine.

Tables provided the best way to effectively size and position email elements in Outlook for Windows. But they also created a lot of extra work for email coders who may prefer to use <div>s instead. Unfortunately, since Outlook ignores inline styling, we can’t style <div>s with CSS.

The good news is, with the new Outlook for Windows and its web-based rendering engine, we can expect fewer broken layouts and the ability to use more CSS. It would also mean the end of using ghost tables to fix Outlook alignment issues.

2. Coding margin and padding gets easier

Among the many problems Outlook caused for email coding, issues with spacing were some of the most frustrating.

For starters, with the exception of Outlook 2003, developers are unable to use CSS properties like “margin” or “padding” in code for the other desktop versions. Outlook removes padding in some situations. That can include image padding, which when ignored may cause text to appear flush against an email graphic.

Since the margin and padding CSS properties have better support in Outlook web and mobile applications, it’s safe to assume that we’ll be able to use them for the new Outlook for Windows.

3. Support for CSS background images

Because Outlook.com and Outlook 365 use a web-based rendering engine, CSS background images are no problem at all. But it’s been a different story for the desktop versions. While Outlook does support the background-color property, email developers have been forced to use table background image attributes instead of the CSS property background-image.

The other option has been to use vector markup language (VML) for background images in Outlook emails.

Once the new Outlook for Windows replaces its outdated ancestors, we’ll be able to size and position email backgrounds and use larger images for retina displays.

4. Fewer conditional statements in emails

When email developers want to include code that is only for certain versions of Outlook, or they want to hide content from Outlook subscribers (because it won’t work), conditional statements have done the trick.

As the current desktop versions fade away and make room for a new Outlook for windows, email coding won’t require as many of those <!--if [mso]> statements. In fact, this is something to keep in mind as things progress, because you’ll want to remove those MSO conditional statements to simplify your code and reduce bloat.

What does this mean for the future of email coding and testing?

There are many other rendering issues that may disappear along with adoption of the new Outlook for Windows. But don’t get too excited just yet. First, businesses and email users will need to update their versions of Outlook. And it should come as no surprise that this won’t happen automatically. After all, that’s why we’re still making sure emails look okay in Outlook 2010 right now.

The date to mark on your calendars is October 2026. That’s when Microsoft says it will officially end its support for desktop versions that use the Word rendering engine. Once that happens, those who are slow to adopt will have to start using the new Outlook for Windows.

Since its earliest days, Sinch Email on Acid has taken on the mission of simplifying the complexities of email development. We’ve done that by providing email testing tools including email previews that show you how your campaigns render on dozens of clients and live devices.

Of course, finding and fixing Outlook issues before hitting “send” are among the biggest reasons people use our platform. But the truth is, we’re excited that this change is coming. Just like everyone involved with the EMC, we believe that the email industry needs defined standards, and this is a big step in the right direction.

In the meantime, desktop versions of Outlook will live on, and other email coding and design challenges such as dark mode and accessibility will still need to be addressed. So, if you’re ready to start putting your best email forward, give Email on Acid a try.

The post Will the New Outlook for Windows Change Everything for Email Developers?  appeared first on Email on Acid.

Only humans can truly be creative. No piece of technology can ever replace human ingenuity and originality. Right? After all, programs like ChatGPT can only write subject lines, campaign copy, and code emails based on data and information that already exists.

However, if you’re one of the many people who’s played around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in recent months, you may be starting to wonder how special all of us so-called “creative types” actually are.

Maybe you asked it to come up with subject lines or landing page copy and wondered, “How come I didn’t think of that?” As AI solutions like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other newcomers work out the kinks and continue blowing our minds, it’s worth questioning how these tools can be used and what it means for the future of email marketing.

What is creativity anyway?

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s make sure we’re on the same page concerning the definition of creativity.

One of the most common ways you’ll hear creativity explained may sound something like this:

So, for example, you could take something you learned when you were a kid in Little League, combine it with something you learned at a marketing conference, and use them both to come up with a spring email campaign idea. It’s new and creative because it’s different. But your idea was born from information that already existed.

You’ve probably heard of the phrase, “There is nothing new under the sun.” That comes from the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 1:9), which means it’s some pretty ancient wisdom. The English writer William Ralph Inge once called originality, “undetected plagiarism.”

Even the incredibly creative Mark Twain wrote a letter to Hellen Keller explaining that “… all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources…”

For substantially, all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.

Mark Twain Letter to Helen Keller, 1903

Maybe you see where I’m going here. The way we are creative as humans isn’t much different from how AI technology like ChatGPT works. Our brains are often compared to computers, and maybe they’d be more accurately compared to AI language models. In fact, neuroscientists at MIT say research with AI technology, including GPT 3, is helping them understand how the human brain works.

We learn things and have experiences, store them in our memories, and use them as fuel for creativity. Like a piece of software, we can’t come up with things out of the blue either. It always comes from somewhere, someone, or something else. Who are we to say that AI can’t be creative if it’s basically doing the same thing?

How creative can ChatGPT get?

Just like us, ChatGPT takes the data and information it has access to and uses that to answer questions or respond to prompts. Here’s what happened when I asked ChatGTP about its creative abilities:

It’s sort of funny how ChatGPT acts like a politician, dancing around questions like this. The response didn’t indicate it was not creative, just that it’s incapable of being creative “in the same sense as humans are.”

Instead, OpenAI wants you to view ChatGPT as a digital assistant that’s ready to provide a helping hand when you hit a creative roadblock. So, in what ways can ChatGPT act creatively?

Hypothetical situations

An interesting example of ChatGPT’s creative abilities is found right on the OpenAI website. It shows you what happens when you ask the technology to explain something that doesn’t make logical sense.

In the movies, when the hero asks an evil robot or supercomputer to solve a nonsensical problem like this, it starts sparking and short circuiting while proclaiming “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”

But that response is not what happens with ChatGPT. It actually suggests pretending that Columbus came to America in 2015 and then goes on to describe a hypothetical situation. Can AI have an imagination? It sure seems like it can at least be artificially imaginative.

Explaining creative concepts

Have you ever been asked to explain the thinking behind one of your creative ideas? Sometimes, when you ask ChatGPT to come up with suggestions, it will tell you why the idea might work. Here’s an example from when I asked it for business name ideas:

Not all these ideas are winners, that’s for sure. Still, ChatGPT came up with the suggestions in a matter of seconds. No two-hour brainstorming meeting required. But the explanations are what impressed me. They’re just as good as anything I’ve heard in any meeting with a creative agency.

Responding to creative feedback

Here’s an advantage ChatGPT has over human creativity: It doesn’t get defensive about its ideas at all.  If you don’t like them, ask for edits and you’ll get them. No hurt feelings. But you might get an apology.

Following up on the prompt about a social site for seniors, I asked ChatGPT to shorten its suggestions to be snappier, one-word brand names.

I don’t know about all of you, but I’m thinking Mark Zuckerberg may want to rebrand Facebook as ElderLink or ElderFeed. Okay, those two are really horrible. But MemoryLane isn’t bad at all.

If this were a human-only brainstorm, we’d be telling everyone there is no such thing as a bad idea. That’s because we know we’ll usually have to weed through some stinkers to find the right choice. Idea generation with AI is no different.

Made-up words

If you’ve ever invented a new word for something, you probably felt super creative. I wanted to find out if ChatGPT could handle a task like that. So, I asked it to whip up some made-up words.

On its first attempt, ChatGPT basically took real words like glop and squelch and then added an “ie” or something else to the end of them. After I called that out and asked for revisions, it gave me this:

The squiggly red lines from the spellcheck in my word processor confirm these are not real words. However, things didn’t go so well when I asked ChatGPT to localize the made-up words into other languages. The German translations seemed decent. But when it got to Spanish, it started using real Spanish words instead of making them up. It continued doing that even after I asked for corrections.

Role playing

Yet another way ChatGPT can simulate “pretending” is by taking on a specific persona. You could try using the software as a sort of digital therapist or artificial best friend. You could ask it for legal, medical, or financial advice (although you should be very careful about trusting all of it).

I even told it to pretend to be a hostage negotiator while I was a bank robber demanding a helicopter and free pizza (it refused to let me have either one).

ChatGPT can also interact with you as part of a fictional scene or story. Check out this example:

We went on to discuss the giant on the other side of the bridge and how I could go about obtaining some of the wizard’s magical powers in order to defeat the monster. If you ask me, ChatGPT would be a talented member of any improv troupe.

The story of AlphaGo

Maybe you’re not impressed with AI’s ability to be creative. You may still believe that human beings have an edge over technology when it comes to thinking outside the box. If that’s the case, consider what happened with AlphaGo.

Go is an ancient board game that’s somewhat like checkers or chess but exponentially more complicated because there are so many possible moves and combinations. A subsidiary of Google developed the AI program to take on Go champions. In 2017, it beat the top-ranked player in the world in a three-game match. Check out the video from Vice News below for more of the story.

Legendary record producer, Rick Rubin, wrote about AlphaGo in his 2023 book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.” He explained that AlphaGo was able to win because it made a move that was completely unexpected. It went against the game’s thousand-year-old strategies and boggled the minds of human competitors.

Rubin writes about it in a chapter titled “Beginner’s Mind.” He says he got teary eyed watching AlphaGo beat human champions, but not because it meant the end of human creativity. It was because it “spoke to the power of purity in the creative act.”

“What was it that allowed a machine to devise a move no one steeped in the game had ever made in thousands of years of play?

“It wasn’t necessarily its intelligence. It was the fact that the machine learned the game from scratch, with no coach, no human intervention, no lessons based on an expert’s past experience… It didn’t accept the narrative of how to properly play this game. It wasn’t held back by limiting beliefs.”

Rick Rubin “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”

We all have limiting beliefs, preconceived notions, biases, and egos that get in the way of pure creativity. While it can be true that sometimes those same things end up getting programmed into the artificial intelligence we create, AlphaGo shows it’s clear that AI can think differently than you and me.

Can AI give you a creative advantage?

Even though I scoffed a bit at ChatGPT’s explanation of how creative it is, that might be exactly how we should approach using this sort of technology and apply it to email marketing.

ChatGPT and other forms of email AI can be viewed as creative collaborators that help us look at things in a different way and find new opportunities to improve our communication strategies.

Sometimes we get stuck. Other times the ways we’ve been “programmed” prevent us from coming up with decent ideas. Like a champion Go player who sticks to traditional moves and strategies, we follow the same email marketing rules and best practices or imitate what others have done.

Should you feel bad if you ask a piece of software to help you come up with subject line ideas or troubleshoot some problematic HTML code in an email? You probably wouldn’t feel bad if you asked a friend or colleague for help. You’d call it teamwork.

While I’m not suggesting we need to treat AI like a friend or a co-worker, we shouldn’t be afraid of using it as a tool that can make us better at our jobs.

The truth is – you can’t stop technological progress and innovation. Yes, the world might change because of AI, maybe even dramatically. It’s our job to accept the change, adjust to it, and make sure that we use the technology for good and not evil.

One thing AI can never become

I just read about how Ethan Mollick, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania, used ChatGPT to create an entire marketing campaign for a new business/product in just 30 minutes. That included:

• Marketing research and positioning
• Designing a logo and graphics
• Building a website
• Creating social media content
• Scripting and creating a video
• And yes – writing an email campaign

That’s impressive for sure. And for many marketers, it’s a little scary too. But let’s end this on a hopeful note…

There’s one thing artificial intelligence will never fully be able to replicate – and that’s you. I know how corny that sounds, but it’s true.

Sure, AI may learn to follow brand voice guidelines or even mimic your writing style. But it’s the uniqueness of individual humans that brings real creativity to any project.

ChatGPT hasn’t lived your life. It hasn’t experienced your specific childhood, your education, your heartbreak, your adventures, or your career path. AI doesn’t have access to what’s going on inside your mind, heart, or soul. There’s no database for that. And that’s what you can bring to every creative project.

That’s also why things like thought leadership marketing and online influencers are becoming more important to digital strategies. People trust people. People want to connect with other people.

Of course, the discussions around email and AI will continue, and we’re having some of our own.

Sinch Email on Acid partnered with ActionRocket to discuss the ways technology like ChatGPT could impact our industry, our jobs, and more. You can watch a recording of Email on Acid’s Megan Boshuyzen and ActionRocket’s Jay Oram as they face off over the use of AI technology for email development and coding help.

The post Pure Imagination: Could ChatGPT Be More Creative Than You? appeared first on Email on Acid.

That’s kind of how I feel waiting for the return of Email Camp. It’s still months away, but we’re already getting excited for all the fun and mind-blowing email explorations that are sure to occur.

But first, we need passionate experts who love sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community. So, we’re opening up our annual Email Camp call for speakers, and we hope you apply.

What’s Email Camp all about?

Email Camp is a live virtual event from the brands behind Sinch Email.

While networking with people at IRL events is great, a virtual event like Email Camp is accessible to just about anyone anywhere. No going through airport security. No struggling to get the hotel Wi-Fi to work. No tradeshow booths. No cost to you at all. Email Camp is free for all attendees.

Email Camp is typically a two-day event in which we hear from industry thought leaders as well as any email geek with a big idea. Here are the dates and details for Email Camp 2023:

• Day 1: Wednesday, October 4^th
• Day 2: Thursday, October 5^th

Sessions usually run from 9 am through 12 pm Central. But we’ll also provide recordings to all registrants if your time zone or a busy schedule make it tough to attend.

What kinds of speakers are you looking for?

We’re sending out an open invitation to anyone who works with email to apply to be a speaker. If you’ve got a hot take on an industry topic, amazing strategic advice, or some incredible tips to share, we want to hear about it.

Most of our attendees have at least a foundational knowledge of email marketing. So, if you’re pitching a presentation, it should go beyond the basics.

For example, last year I teamed up with Avi Goldman from Parcel to talk about component-driven email design systems. There was also a session that took a deep dive into dark mode emails, a hilarious session on high-converting email copy, and a keynote presentation from Chad S. White on email and omnichannel marketing.

Generally, we’ll have separate themes for each of the days. One tends to be more marketing focused and the other is more about the technical aspects of email.

What’s it like to be an Email Camp speaker?

You’ve probably got a bunch of questions surrounding the experience of being a presenter at Email Camp. Let’s get you some answers…

How long are Email Camp sessions?

Most sessions are 30-minutes long. Speakers should aim for a 20-minute presentation so we can leave time for Q&A with attendees at the end. Our panel discussions tend to be 45 to 60 minutes long.

Will I present alone or will someone else be participating?

You could choose to partner up with someone and share the virtual stage (like I did with Avi). Or you could do it all yourself. If we get a lot of submissions on a certain topic, we may invite you to be part of an expert panel.

Do I have to learn how to use a new platform?

Our team will take care of as much of the technical stuff as possible. We want you to focus on your presentation. If you’ve checked out Email Camp in the past, you’re probably familiar with Thomas, our illustrious host.

Thomas takes care of everything from managing the virtual event platform to fielding questions. He sets it up. You knock ‘em down. (Thomas is also an awesome DJ and Email Camp is almost worth it for the music mix alone.) We’ll also have a dry run with every speaker to iron out technicalities before the event.

Will I need to create presentation slides?

We will provide you with an Email Camp presentation template to work with, and we will check everything looks great once you send it over so you’re ready to present.

Can I pre-record my presentation?

While we prefer to have speakers present live, we’re totally flexible. So, if you have a scheduling conflict, time zone issues, or an irrational fear of webinars, we’re happy to work with you.

Do Email Camp speakers get paid?

Yes! Even though Email Camp is a free event, most presenters will be compensated for their time and effort this year. If your pitch is accepted, we’ll get in touch about how that will work.

Where do I apply to be an Email Camp speaker?

We’ve created an online form to capture all the information we need. It should only take about five to ten minutes to complete.

Apply to be an Email Camp speaker now >>

We will keep the call for speakers open until mid April. But don’t hesitate to apply.

What else is in it for you?

If we weren’t paying Email Camp speakers, this would be the part where we try to convince you of the benefits of exposure. Maybe you’ve heard that one before. But here’s the truth…

Email Camp really is an awesome way to get yourself in front of a niche audience full of passionate and curious people. Last year, we had more than 3,600 people register for Email Camp, and live attendance was excellent.

However, I would say the real reason to apply to speak at Email Camp is that it’s a chance to give back. We have such an amazing and supportive community. If you’re like me, there have been plenty of other email geeks who’ve helped you out, offered ideas, recommendations, and referrals, or provided encouragement when you needed it.

Events like this are an opportunity to pass along what you’ve learned to the wider community. Pay it forward (no email pun intended).

And if you think about it, becoming an Email Camp speaker is a little like becoming one of the cool counselors at your favorite summer camp. So, apply today with your presentation idea.

Sign up to stay informed about Email Camp 2023

Maybe you’re more interested in sitting back and enjoying the show. Of course, that’s fine with us. You can’t have Email Camp without some campers.

Sign up for Email Camp 2023 updates so that we can stay in touch. You’ll be the first to find out about this year’s fun-filled theme, the list of speakers, and much more.

Until then… we’ll see you all on October 4^th and 5^th when Email Camp 2023 is prepared for launch.

The post Email Camp 2023 is Coming: Want to be a Speaker? appeared first on Email on Acid.

Many email marketers are also wondering how ChatGPT and technology like it will impact the way we work. Could artificial intelligence (AI) make life a little easier by helping us do our jobs more efficiently? Will email AI take over and leave us looking for a new line of work? Or is the reality of the situation somewhere in between?

The reason this feels like such a pivotal moment might be because email AI is about to “cross the chasm.” Wondering what that means? It’s all about the way different types of people adopt new technology.

The technology adoption lifecycle

There’s a theory in the tech world that’s been around since at least the 1960s called the diffusion of innovation. It’s also known as Rogers’ bell curve after the communication theorist Everett Rogers who devised the concept. The bell curve reflects the process of how different groups react to new technologies.

The process generally goes like this…

1. First, the Innovators experiment with the new technology while it’s still being refined (think of beta testers).
2. Then, the Early Adopters pick up the new technology and potentially introduce it to their communities or networks.
3. Next, the Early Majority follows the lead of Early Adopters and tries out the innovation.
4. Then, it spreads to the Late Majority. The tech has basically gone mainstream, and the market is saturated.
5. Finally, the Laggards are the last to start using the new technology (right after they pause their Sony Walkmans).

The theory is that every new technology goes through a similar adoption process. But we all know that some don’t make it. So what happens to those products?

The challenge of technology adoption

Roger’s bell curve got a bit of an update in the early ‘90s with the release of the book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers” by Geoffery Moore. The book presents a problem for those trying to sell innovative products to the general public when those products are new and unfamiliar.

Moore’s addition to the theory explains why many innovations die out before they’re able to reach the mainstream. There’s a gap in the cycle between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. That’s where the idea of “crossing the chasm” comes in. Moore says you need a strong marketing strategy if you want to move a high-tech product from Early Adopters to the Early Majority. Otherwise, your big idea falls into a bottomless chasm.

Moore’s theory is that, if you want to cross the chasm, you’ve got to focus on one group of consumers at a time. That means treating them as unique audiences with their own needs, interests, and motivations for adopting an innovation.

Even the biggest tech companies fail to cross the chasm. Just look at Google. How many of us are using Google Glass right now? How’s your Google+ profile looking these days? In fact, there’s an entire Google Graveyard of dead products, many of which failed to get picked up by the mainstream public. Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse could be heading in the same direction. Makers of electric vehicles and virtual reality technology are also facing the challenge of crossing the chasm.

But you’ve got to admit, something seems different with the technology behind ChatGPT.

Did ChatGPT make the jump?

The short answer? It sure seems like ChatGPT has managed to cross the chasm, and it happened really quickly.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. It made a lot of headlines. By the start of 2023, it seemed like everyone was talking about it. Even my 68-year-old mom was aware of ChatGPT and wondering about its implications.

Suddenly, students were using it to write papers, developers were using it to help with coding, dads were using it to feed them horribly corn jokes. And yes, email marketers were using ChatGPT too. It felt more like ChatGPT soared across the chasm rather than making a precarious leap. Why?

Good timing probably has something to do with it, and so does good marketing strategy.

The truth is, the mainstream public was well-prepared to be introduced to technology like ChatGPT. That’s thanks in part to things like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant as well as the many chatbots people use to interact with brands. ChatGPT felt pretty natural to use.

But the real tipping point was in the marketing of the launch. OpenAI asked everyone to test out ChatGPT. It was an open invitation to play around with the technology. That move made all of us feel like the Innovators and Early Adopters in the process.

In reality, OpenAI had plenty of people testing it out before its big release. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, employees who worked on ChatGPT claim they were shocked that the product became a viral sensation.

There are two things to take note of in the quotation above that are key to ChatGPT’s seemingly sudden success:

1. Other chatbots had already paved the way and primed the pump for ChatGPT to succeed.
2. The OpenAI team released something that they knew the general public would find accessible, interesting, and enjoyable.

The gaming company Sega tried to launch a VR headset in 1991 – but the timing wasn’t right, and the technology wasn’t ready. There were mp3 players and tablets before iPods and iPads came out – but Apple nailed the timing and the marketing of its products. Whether ChatGPT’s success was intentionally genius or pure luck is unclear, but it worked.

Where is email AI in the technology adoption curve?

Artificial intelligence for email isn’t new either. Stil, it keeps showing up on those annual lists of emerging email marketing trends to watch. So, does email AI still need to cross the chasm? Maybe… and maybe not.

When Sinch Mailjet surveyed more than 3,000 email senders around the world, it asked respondents to select from a list of potential “advanced tactics” they planned to pursue in 2023. Only 13.7% said they planned to implement AI-powered tools.

That might seem insignificant. But there’s something interesting about that 13.7% statistic… Let’s bring the technology adoption lifecycle graphic back again.

Early adopters make up 13.5% of the public. So, if 13.7% of email senders say they’re implementing AI tools, we could make the conclusion that email AI has made it through the subset of Early adopters. Next, it needs to make the jump across that chasm into the mainstream.

Of course, email AI is a big category. You’re probably already using artificial intelligence in your daily work. If you rely on a tool like Grammarly to improve your writing, that’s AI. Conversion testing and optimization software that automatically chooses the best-performing subject line is AI. Send time optimization is a form of AI as well. And, tools like Phrasee as well as Jasper and others brought AI to email marketing years ago.

It’s fair to say that some forms of email AI have already made it into the mainstream marketing world.

So, the trail has been blazed for email AI to cross the chasm into the mainstream. And the popularity of ChatGPT is making that possibility very likely. Early adopters in the email world are already playing around with ways to use it to their advantage. That might be just the push that email marketing AI needs.

What’s next for email marketers?

Not everyone is excited about the way email AI is accelerating. There are just as many questions and concerns as there are ideas and opportunities.

If the internet age has taught us anything, it’s that digital technology can be used for both good and evil. We can use it to enrich lives, waste lives, or destroy lives. Perhaps you’ve already heard about how scammers and spammers could use ChatGPT for email phishing operations.

Now is the time to start discussing the implications of ChatGPT, email AI, and the future of email marketing. So, that’s exactly what we’re going to do…

Join us as we partner with the team at ActionRocket for two upcoming webinars on email AI. We’ll debate the pros and cons of solutions like ChatGPT, how well they work, and what happens next.

Register for Round 1 – Marketers vs Bots:

• Wednesday, March 29^th at 9am CDT
• Mailjet’s Julia Ritter and ActionRocket’s Nicole Holden will debate the benefits and drawbacks of using AI in email marketing.

Register for Round 2 – Email Geeks vs ChatGPT:

• Wednesday, April 5^th at 9am CDT
• Email on Acid’s Megan Boshuyzen and ActionRocket’s Jay Oram will face off over the use of AI technology for email development and coding help.

If you’re unable to attend either of these live events, you will still receive a link to the recorded webinar. So, sign up for The Great Email AI Debate now!

The post Will the Rise of ChatGPT Help Email AI Cross the Chasm? appeared first on Email on Acid.

If you need some suggestions, we’ve got them.

This list includes marketing newsletters that are written for email geeks and by email geeks. We’ve also included a bunch of recommendations that fall outside the realm of email marketing.

Don’t see your favorite marketing newsletters on this list? We’re super-duper sorry about that. Please feel free to hit us up on social media and tell everyone what we missed.

Newsletters about email marketing

First, let’s check out a bunch of newsletters from brands that know email like the back of their hands. These eight options are primarily focused on email design and strategy. They include marketing newsletters from agencies, publishers, and email technology companies.

1. Really Good Emails newsletter

If you’re not already subscribed to the RGE newsletter, you’re missing out. Really Good Emails is home to a massive collection of campaigns (10,000+) from all sorts of brands. It’s a treasure trove of ideas for email developers, designers, and marketing strategists.

Their newsletter hits inboxes twice a week. It includes some of the most-popular designs and trends in email marketing as well as a collection of curated articles from email brands, tech publications, and more. Plus, every edition starts and ends with a GIF – one to make you laugh and one to show you how to use them in emails.

Subscribe to the Really Good Emails newsletter

2. Email Love newsletter

Email Love is another excellent website for email design and content inspiration. This collection of “beautifully crafted emails” is curated by Andy King, an email geek from New Zealand who’s been designing and coding emails for over 10 years.
The Email Love newsletter comes out every week and includes Andy’s favorite new additions to the site. By the way, you can submit your own designs and nominations for potential curation.

Subscribe to the Email Love newsletter

3. Email Weekly from ActionRocket

ActionRocket is a digital marketing agency based in the UK that specializes in awesome email marketing. Their weekly newsletter is also awesome.

Remember how video rental stores used to have a shelf of staff picks? That’s basically what you get with this email marketing newsletter. ActionRocket team members share interesting articles, industry news, and some of their own original content too.

Subscribe to Email Weekly

4. Holistic Insights newsletter

There must be something in the water over in the UK – because here’s another email marketing agency with a sweet newsletter.  Holistic is technically an email marketing consultancy lead by award-winning business and marketing author, Kath Pay.

Holistic Insights is a “fortnightly email newsletter” (Don’t Google it, Americans. That means every two weeks.) It features important news and industry articles on email marketing from around the web. You can also sign up to hear about Holistic’s webinars, events, and exclusive guides.

Subscribe to Holistic Insights

5. Only Influencers newsletter

This might sound like a newsletter for Instagram pseudo-celebrities, but it’s far from that. Run by Jeanne Jennings, Only Influencers is a members-only group for veterans of the email industry.

The good news is, you don’t have to be a member (or an influencer) to subscribe to this email newsletter. Many of the contributors to Only Influencers’ blog are founders and executives. So, if you like big picture ideas, this is for you.

Subscribe to the Only Influencers newsletter

The Sinch Email newsletters

Here comes the part where we toot our own horns and promote the email marketing newsletters from our brands. (You knew it was coming eventually.) We don’t mean to be overly promotional but… you don’t want to miss this incredible three-for-one deal!

Seriously… we’re really proud of the content produced here at Sinch Email on Acid as well as by our sister brands within Sinch Email – Sinch Mailjet and Sinch Mailgun. Here’s a little bit about what you can expect from each of our newsletters.

6. The Email on Acid newsletter

Email on Acid’s mission is to simplify the complexities of email marketing. And even if you don’t use our email testing platform for quality assurance, you’re still going to get plenty of help from our newsletter.

We share a lot of our original articles on email marketing as well as tips and tutorials for those who code campaigns. That includes the latest episode of our web series, Notes from the Dev: Video Edition.

Subscribe to Email on Acid’s newsletter

7. The Mailjet newsletter

Mailjet is a leading email service provider (ESP) that serves both enterprise organizations and small businesses alike. Mailjet’s marketing newsletters are packed with content that will make you better at your job and help you grow your business.

We also know that people with lots of different marketing roles are involved in email. So Mailjet expands the scope of the newsletter to cover topics like copywriting, lifecycle marketing, design, and omnichannel communications.

You can also get the Mailjet marketing newsletter in French, German, and Spanish. Just pick your preferred language and scroll down to sign up today:

• Subscribe to Mailjet’s newsletter in English
• Subscribe to Mailjet’s newsletter in Español
• Subscribe to Mailjet’s newsletter in Français
• Subscribe to Mailjets newsletter in Deutsche

8. The Mailgun newsletter

Honestly, there’s not a whole lot of marketing in Mailgun’s email newsletters. But maybe that’s exactly what you want. Mailgun is an ESP that’s known for powering automated transactional communication at scale with industry-leading email deliverability.

This newsletter is meant for a different kind of developer. If you (or someone you love) work on the technical side of email, this content is for you. It’s also a great resource for app developers who integrate email sending into their products.

Subscribe to the Mailgun newsletter (scroll to the footer)

Newsletters from bona fide email geeks

For those who are already active in the email geek community, or who’ve attended industry conferences, many of the names and faces in this section will be familiar. These seven newsletters are from folks who eat, breathe, and dream about email. If you’re going to subscribe to any marketing newsletters, they may as well be the ones your friends and peers put together.

9. Email Marketing Rules – Chad S. White

Chad White wrote the book on the rules of email marketing. By that we mean he literally authored the book Email Marketing Rules. Chad is a well-known and respected email marketing thought leader who’s also very generous with his expert insights.

Chad currently works for Oracle Marketing Consulting where he’s Head of Research. He sends out his latest musing on the world of email and delivers bonus content to subscribers as well.

Subscribe to Email Marketing Rules

10. emailmonday – Jordie van Rijn

Here’s another name that will be familiar to many email geeks. Jordie van Rijn is a veteran email marketing consultant based in the Netherlands who runs the website emailmonday. His articles include in-depth explorations of topics like the future of email, stats on mobile email usage, and AMP for email.

Jordie’s marketing newsletter delivers his professional insights, tips and tricks, strategic advice and more.

Subscribe to the emailmonday newsletter

11. …It Depends – Megan Boshuyzen

You know her and love her as the host of Notes from the Dev, but what does Megan Boshuyzen really have to say? Find out when you subscribe to her semi-regular personal newsletter. This is Megan unleashed, uncensored, and unhinged. But she’s still really nice.

Megan’s newsletter is called “…It Depends” partly because when you’re looking for a solution to an email coding problem, the answer tends to be preceded by those two words.

Subscribe to …It Depends from Megan Boshuyzen

12. The Open Rates Newsletter – Val Geisler

What sets a great email campaign apart from the rest of the pack? That’s what email marketer Val Geisler explores in her weekly marketing newsletter.

Val describes herself as “strangely passionate about email.” You may have caught her at one of her speaking gigs. Val’s Open Rates newsletter features an email campaign breakdown in which she looks at what works and what doesn’t. She calls it an “honest dissection of email marketing campaigns, via email.”

Subscribe to the Open Rates Newsletter

13. Emails Done Right – Samar Owais

For more best practices and advice, sign up for this newsletter from strategist Sama Owais. Her specialty is helping marketers create emails that convert – especially for SaaS and ecommerce brands.

Among other things, the Emails Done Right newsletter also features breakdowns of email campaigns. Although according to Samar, her videos tend to focus on emails done wrong. She even says she’s “picking fights” in her weekly newsletter. I don’t know about you, but that’s my kind of email geek.

Subscribe to Emails Done Right

14. The Weekly Email Marketing Newsletter – Chase Dimond

First of all, you know you wish your name was Chase Dimond. It sounds like a superhero alter ego or a James Bond villain. But Chase is actually a self-described “email nerd.” Now, I don’t know if the email geeks and email nerds get along. However, I’m pretty sure they both hate email posers and don’t even get them started on the email jocks.

Chase is the co-founder of an email marketing agency called Boundless Labs. His newsletter hits your inbox every Monday. It includes advice for ecommerce marketing and campaigns that make money, which seems to be Chase’s specialty.

Subscribe to The Weekly Email Marketing Newsletter

15. Type E: – Paul Airy

Paul Airy of Beyond the Envelope is a developer who is a big-time advocate for email accessibility. But he also loves design and typography.

Paul’s newsletter brings email and typography together – which isn’t easy if you know about the challenges of using web fonts in email. The Type E: newsletter is perfect for people who want to geek out over topics including columns, units, font pairing, and accessibility. You’ll also get the occasional “experimental typographic email” from Paul.

Subscribe to the Type E: newsletter

Marketing newsletters to expand your knowledge

We know you might already be an email marketing expert yourself. So why not stretch yourself and get informed on other areas of digital marketing? There are tons of great marketing newsletters out there. Here are ten options to consider inviting into your inbox.

16. Work the Funnel – Chantelle Marcelle

Email plays a pivotal role in the process of moving prospects through a marketing funnel. Chantelle Marcelle will show you how to work it.

Chantelle is an independent marketing strategist who got started as a journalist and public relations professional. Her newsletter features case studies about effective campaigns, news on marketing trends, and plenty of examples of effective marketing.

Subscribe to Work the Funnel

17. Brianne Fleming’s marketing newsletter

Get marketing advice and a splash of pop culture when you sign up for this email newsletter. Brianne Flemming delivers weekly tips for marketers with a lighthearted twist. She uses entertainment and media as a hook for learning about effective strategies.

With this newsletter, you’ll stay on top of marketing trends and the cultural zeitgeist. Brianne even hosts a podcast called Making the Brand, which also centers around pop culture moments. Everyone loves a little celebrity news and gossip. Here’s a way to expand your knowledge while enjoying a guilty pleasure.

Subscribe to Brianne Flemmings newsletter

18. Total Annarchy – Ann Handley

Speaking of things everyone loves… the always amiable Ann Handley is pretty hard to hate. (But I guess I’ll keep trying.) She’s the founder of the popular website MarketingProfs, which also has a newsletter that includes advice for B2B email geeks.

But here, we’re recommending Ann’s personal newsletter. According to Ann, this is more of an actual letter than a newsletter. Every two weeks, she’ll let you know about what’s on her mind, what she finds interesting, and what kind of “high-spirited shenanigans” she’s up to.  Those kinds of shenanigans are far better than the low-spirited variety.

Subscribe to Total Annarchy

19. This Week in Content Marketing

Email and content marketing go together like chocolate and peanut butter (email gets to be the chocolate). In fact, Mailjet’s Inbox Insightst 2023 report found that Content distribution is the most important business objective for email.

Annual research and benchmarks from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) backs that up for both B2B content strategy and B2C content marketing efforts. So, to stay on top of this tangential marketing practice, you can sign up for one of CMI’s marketing newsletters.

Subscribe to This Week in Content Marketing

20. The Daily Carnage

Keeping track of everything that happens in the world of marketing can feel overwhelming.  A well-curated marketing newsletter is just what you need. And The Daily Carnage from digital agency, Carney, is one of the most popular options.

This marketing newsletter includes a daily selection of handpicked marketing content delivered with a dose of fun. It’ll help you look even smarter when you share something on Slack or in the morning meeting.

Subscribe to The Daily Carnage

21. Marketing Examples – Harry’s Newsletter

While the design of MarketingExamples.com might remind you of your old Myspace page, there’s gold in there. Marketer Harry Dry publishes tons of quick hits covering everything from rebranding vegetables and viral chocolate to writing CTAs and landing pages that convert.

Harry’s weekly newsletter includes three marketing examples, two copywriting tips, and one of his favorite tweets. It’ll show up for you every Monday. More than 130,000 other marketers have already signed up.

Subscribe to Harry’s Newsletter

22. Convince and Convert newsletter

Convincing and converting subscribers into customers is one of email’s top jobs. To expand your marketing knowledge, try signing up for the bi-weekly newsletter from the consultants at Convince and Convert. Marketing guru Jay Baer is the founder of this company.

The marketing newsletter covers the gamut of tactics and strategies – from social media and influencers to research and analytics. Understanding these other practices helps you diversify your skills and become a more valuable T-shaped email marketer.

Subscribe to Convince and Convert’s newsletter

23. Please Advise

Most marketers are pressed for time, and most of our inboxes are already packed with things to read (and/or ignore). The people behind the marketing newsletter Please Advise understand that. It’s why their daily delivery can be read in just one swipe.

Every newsletter contains an eye-catching visual design, a quick marketing tip, and a recommended app or software. The somewhat irreverent branding and marketing agency Top Hat is behind this newsletter.

Subscribe to Please Advise

24. Ariyh

Maybe you’re the serious type and you prefer hard numbers and scientific research to joking around. Or maybe you just like focusing on marketing that is proven to work. In that case, check out Ariyh. This email newsletter provides advice based on evidence-based marketing results.

Ariyh delivers actionable insights based on an academic research paper. So, if you believe marketing is as much a science as it is an art, this newsletter brings the brains. It comes from a former Google product marketer named Thomas McKinlay who reads and distills all that research so you don’t have to.

Subscribe to the Ariyh newsletter

25. Kyle Akerman’s Measurment Newsletter

Of course, the hard numbers most marketers really care about are their own. But it’s not always easy to assess the true impact of email. Mailjet’s Inbox Insights 2023 report found that 44% of senders feel they are only somewhat able to accurately measure email’s impact and another 11.5% admit they can’t do it at all.

Enter Kyle Akerman and his Measurement newsletter for marketers. Kyle is a Google Analytics expert and he specializes in helping marketers develop better attribution models. A big part of understanding email’s effect is gaining visibility into what happens after subscribers open and click. This weekly newsletter tells you what metrics matter and which ones you can ignore.

Subscribe to Kyle Akerman’s Measurement newsletter

How’s your email newsletter looking?

After finishing your morning routine by perusing your latest subscriptions to marketing newsletters, it’s time to get to work. That probably means making your own email newsletters and promotional campaigns.

How confident are you that your emails will look and function as expected once they reach your subscribers’ inboxes? If you feel a sense of dread and anxiety every time you prepare to hit the send button – we can help.

Sinch Email on Acid is a pre-deployment platform designed to automate and streamline the process of email marketing quality assurance. Our email previews let you see how your campaigns will render on more than 100 different clients and devices. Plus, you can also take advantage of checks for deliverability, accessibility, and more. Best of all? You’ll never hit a ceiling. Every paid plan gets unlimited testing.

Before you send your next newsletter, give Email on Acid a try.

The post 25 of the Best Marketing Newsletters for Email Geeks appeared first on Email on Acid.

In many ways, email communication is just as important to our daily lives as the telegraph and telephone were once upon a time. But if you try to find an answer to the question “Who invented email?” you’ll find yourself entering a rabbit hole filled with controversy and intense debates. Trust us. We’ve been there.

We first entered that rabbit hole when Email on Acid looked to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of email (or at least what many believe it to be). We wanted to explore email history. As we dug into it, however, we realized that the invention of email is harder to pin down than you might think.

There’s not one, not two, but at least three different stories about who invented email. Let’s start at what could be the very beginning.

Story One: Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck

Errol Morris is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker known for documentaries like The Fog of War. He’s also published an opinion blog on the New York Times website. One day, a comment from a reader tipped him off to the possibility that his older brother invented email.

The comment was from Tom Van Vleck, someone Errol remembered as a friend and colleague of his late brother, Noel Morris. Both Tom and Noel were MIT graduates who worked together and shared a computer back in the 1960s. Remember, back then computers were the size of rooms and multiple users had to split their time using them.

Using his investigative filmmaking skills, Errol dug deep into his brother’s connections to what could very well be the beginnings of electronic communication. He published a personal five-part series on his NYT blog that covers everything he learned about his brother and the earliest days of what would become the email we know today.

But we’ll try to cut to the chase (as a filmmaker might say).

In 1965, Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck noticed a memo that mentioned the idea of creating a mail command. The two looked into it and found no one had taken on the job yet. Apparently, people thought it would be a waste of time. But Noel and Tom saw the potential.

At the time, the program the two men built was implemented into MIT systems as a way to leave messages between those sharing computers. For example, you could let a colleague know their files had been backed up.

Because their command didn’t send messages between computers, there are those who discount this story of the invention of email. But Van Vleck has a different point of view. In an interview with Errol Morris, Van Vleck said that while he doesn’t think he and Noel were the only inventors of email – they played an influential role.

Hear even more of the story when you check out an episode of the podcast Reply All: “Did Errol Morris’ Brother Invent Email?”

Story Two: Ray Tomlinson

Perhaps the most widely accepted story about who really invented email centers around another MIT graduate named Ray Tomlinson. He created an electronic messaging system for ARPANET (or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was a precursor to the internet.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was working as an engineer for a defense contractor that was helping the U.S. government develop ARPANET. Tomlinson wanted an interesting project to tackle. In a 2012 interview with Verge, he said, “ARPANET was very young and looking for problems it could solve.” So, Tomlinson set out to solve problems regarding how people were using computers to communicate.   

According to Tomlinson, things were pretty archaic at the time. Messages were sent to numbered mailboxes where they were printed out and paper was delivered to physical inboxes. Plus, you could only send messages to people using the same computer.

Tomlinson saw the opportunity to use ARPANET’s network connections to send messages between different, linked computers. Perhaps Tomlinson’s most recognizable contribution to email was the use of the “@” symbol to separate a person from the name of the computer.

Tomlinson says it took him more than two decades to grasp the impact of the innovation.

Of course, Tomlinson admitted that folks at ARPANET weren’t calling his program “email” yet. That term wouldn’t be coined for several years. Get more of his story on the invention of email in the video below.

Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 and passed away in 2016. The obituaries that were written about his life all credit him with inventing email as we know it.

Story Three: Shiva Ayyadurai

The next chapter in our trio of tales about the invention of email involves a bright young student whose family immigrated to the U.S. from India. Shiva Ayyadurai was a teen tech prodigy who most likely gave email its name. Whether he’s the real inventor of email or not is the subject of a lot of controversy.

Ayyadurai is a colorful character who’s led an interesting life. Like the other potential inventors of email, he’s also an MIT graduate. In fact, he holds four degrees from MIT and also taught there for a time. Beyond that Ayyadurai founded the technology company Millennium Cybernetics in the 1990s, authored books on the email industry, and twice ran for U.S. Senate.

Ayyadurai was once romantically linked to actress Fran Drescher (yes, The Nanny). He’s also become known for having controversial views on topics like election fraud and vaccinations. Most recently, he asked Elon Musk to make him the next CEO of Twitter.

But let’s put all that aside and get back to the invention of email…

Ayyadurai’s story stems from a summer program through NYU where he was studying computer programming in 1978. That same year, he volunteered at a dental school in New Jersey where his mother worked. At just 14 years old, Ayyadurai developed a computerized interoffice mail system for the school. He called it “EMAIL.” He would copyright the software in 1982.

Clashes over the Tomlinson and Ayyadurai stories erupted 30 years later when major publications started releasing articles that gave Ayyadurai the credit for inventing email. Time magazine published a Techland interview in 2011, which was followed by a 2012 article in the Washington Post. The Smithsonian seemed to validate Ayyadurai’s claims after the museum received documentation of his “EMAIL” program and entered them into a permanent exhibit.

Today Ayyadurai owns the website InventorOfEmail.com and vehemently defends the title. According to him, there were some significant differences between his program and the versions that Tomlinson, Van Vleck, and Noel Morris created. Here’s what he told Doug Aamoth of Time:

Ayyadurai’s point is that the system he developed as a teenager more closely resembles what we use today. It was created to digitize and replace interoffice communications with inboxes, outboxes, address books, and attachments. Get more of Shiva Ayyadurai’s story in the video below.

More controversy over the invention of email

The fight over the title of inventor of email got quite heated over the years. Some people from the tech industry, including many connected to ARPANET, disputed the idea that Ayyadurai’s EMAIL program was really the beginning of the communication channel. This led to corrections and clarifications from both The Post and the Smithsonian.

While it was initially stated that Ayyadurai’s EMAIL program was the first to use the bcc, cc, to, and from fields, ARPANET members argued against that too. Tomlinson told Gizmodo that his 1971 solution included the fields as well. Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle wrote:

In 2017, Ayyadurai sued Gizmodo’s parent company, Gawker Media, and won a $750,000 settlement. Incidentally, he hired the same attorney who represented Hulk Hogan in the lawsuit against Gawker, which billionaire investor Peter Thiel reportedly bankrolled.

While Tomlinson’s invention story was accepted by many in the tech world, Ayyadurai has some high-profile supporters as well. Although MIT distanced itself from Ayyadurai after the controversy, renowned former MIT professor Noam Chomsky made statements backing the 1978 date, which Ayyadurai released to the press in 2012:

Over the years, Ayyadurai expressed a belief that denial of his claim to be the inventor of email is racially motivated. After Ray Tomlinson’s death in 2016, Ayyadurai posted a blog entry on his website entitled “Correction the Inventor of Email is Still Alive”, in which he stated:

One day after Tomlinson died; Ayyadurai also took to Twitter to again stake his claim to the title.

Who is the real inventor of email?

While the mystery surrounding the invention of email is intriguing, in the end, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Maybe we should just accept that all four of these people (and many others) played a role in pioneering a key form of communication technology.

The digital transformation that has taken place over the last 50 years is truly incredible. Email has become a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, and despite braggadocious claims from companies like Slack, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Email isn’t the only innovation with unclear origins. There are also disputes over who really invented the electric lightbulb, the telephone, and even Michael Jackson’s moonwalk.

They say that “necessity is the mother of invention.” The truth is, as computers went mainstream, the world needed this kind of communication solution. If these pioneers hadn’t been the first ones to step up and solve the problem, someone else would have done it eventually.

The future of email has yet to be written. It’s the innovative software engineers, designers, and developers who hold the key to ensuring that email stays relevant and useful for decades to come. Here at Sinch Email on Acid, we’re just glad to be along for the ride.

The post Who Really Invented Email? Three Origin Stories of the Inbox appeared first on Email on Acid.

Honestly, we’d probably say that no matter what. This time, however, we’ve also got some research to back us up.

Sinch Mailjet recently released a report that includes survey responses from email senders around the world. You can find all of the results when you download “Email in an evolving economy”. Here’s a look at some key takeaways showing the importance of email and how it’s being used to its fullest in the face of economic uncertainty.

Email delivers high ROI during a recession

One of the most eye-opening results of the survey involved the many communication channels brands and marketers have to work with. When asked to choose the three channels that would deliver the best return on investment (ROI) during a recession, Email marketing came out on top.

Among all survey respondents, nearly 42% chose Email marketing as a channel that provides a good return when the economy struggles. When examining only responses from people who work in marketing, nearly 60% selected email.

It pays to use email for a lot of reasons:

• Email is a channel that lets you communicate with customers and prospects directly.
• You’re marketing to subscribers who are already familiar with your brand.
• You don’t have to pay to reach email subscribers because you own your list.
• Email drives web traffic, lead nurturing strategies, sales, and revenue.

Digital advertising (41%) was less than a percentage point behind Email marketing on the list of channels for the best ROI. However, digital ads typically target new business, which may be harder to come by during a recession. Plus, studies show it’s much easier to convert customers, and email is the perfect channel for doing just that.

When asked which channels could be cut if we experience a recession in 2023, Digital advertising (26%) landed at number two on that list as well. It was only surpassed by Traditional advertising (41.5%)

A recession does not mean email marketing cuts

In Mailjet’s survey, Event marketing (23%) joined traditional and digital ads to round out the three channels most likely to see cuts during a global recession in 2023. Email landed much further down the list. Less than 13% of respondents think it’s possible there will be cuts to email marketing in the next year.

In fact, when survey participants were asked about plans for investing in email during the next 12 months, a combined 90% said they planned to either invest more in email or maintain their current investment in the channel.

Less than 10% of respondents indicated they had plans to cut back on email in 2023. That’s probably because email is such an irreplaceable part of most brands’ marketing strategies. Not to mention, many companies use email to communicate with customers every day.

The “Email in an evolving economy” report states that about 30% of senders plan to increase their email volume (number of messages) and cadence (frequency of sends) in the next year while another 60% don’t expect any changes. Plus, the survey found that those with the least successful digital communication strategies were the most likely to expect cuts to email in the next year.

Top three email practices during a recession

So, email is a powerful communication tool, even when the economy is struggling. But what is it that makes email marketing work so well?

Mailjet asked survey respondents to pick up to three email practices that would contribute to success in the coming year. Here are their top choices:

1. Personalization (39.1%)
2. List building (37.3%)
3. List cleaning (29.1%)

Newsletters/content distribution (29%) gets an honorable mention after falling just behind List building in the third spot.

Personalization is one of the best ways for marketers to improve a subscriber’s inbox experience and an organization’s email strategy. As you send more personal, relevant campaigns to subscribers they’ll get more value from your emails and become more engaged. As engagement increases, so will conversion rates and average order values (AOVs).

Personalization also supports improved customer loyalty. And the survey found that Improving customer loyalty (41%) is one of the top opportunities for email marketing during a recession.

List cleaning is one of the most important tasks connected to email deliverability. Good list hygiene makes your email program more efficient while protecting your reputation with mailbox providers, which keeps you out of spam.

You can get help keeping your list clean with Email Validation from Mailgun Optimize. With this feature, you can verify email addresses in bulk or validate them in real-time – at the point of signup.

Are you investing in email?

If you’re still not convinced that email can help your organization survive and thrive in an economic downturn, you’ve got to download the full report. See all the details for yourself. Head over to Mailjet to get your free copy of “Email in an evolving economy”.

If email is already a major part of your marketing and communication strategy, then you need to protect that investment.

One way to do that is to optimize every campaign through quality assurance (QA) checks that are built into the email production process. It is Email on Acid’s mission to help you put your best email forward. We do that with a unique QA workflow that includes unlimited email previews on 90+ clients on devices.

Of course, even when emails render perfectly on every client, you still need to make sure your campaign reaches the inbox. That’s where Mailgun Optimize comes in. It’s a complete suite for managing, monitoring, and improving email deliverability.

Make sure you have the email marketing tools and partners you need to help you survive a recession.

If you’re interested in hearing more about why you can’t kill email, be sure to check out the podcast Email’s not Dead from our friends at Sinch Mailgun. Mailgun has also published a special edition of this report, “Email in an evolving economy: The tech perspective”, which focuses on responses from the IT and Engineering communities.

Get Your Copy

The post Why Email Marketing Wins in a Struggling Global Economy appeared first on Email on Acid.