Essence of Email Weekly - Nothing is constant, except change. And email.

Millions and millions of US dollars have been paid in fees by some of the biggest companies for compromising consumer privacy, after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. Meanwhile, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) just went into effect and a few other states are drafting consumer privacy bills of their own, including New York, Nevada, and Washington DC. Things are getting serious!

Company mergers and acquisitions, together with billion-dollar investments, marked 2019. Many players in the email marketing industry became one during this year. Campaign Monitor acquired LiveClicker and Sailthru. Twilio bought SendGrid for $3 billion and Mailgun purchased Mailjet. Let's see what the new decade will bring for them!

For its 15th birthday, Google released their redesigned Gmail mobile app and later on rolled out the dark theme support for Gmail's Android and iOS apps and implemented TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning framework, which resulted in the blocking of about 100 million more spam messages each day. Thanks Google for taking such care!



STATE OF EMAIL REPORT


Growth in email engagement rates according to Campaign Monitor's newest report for 2019



After analyzing 30 billion emails sent from their platform in 2019, the email marketing software company released its annual global benchmark report.

Some of the key takeaways are:

1. Government, Nonprofits, and Education had the highest open rates with 30.5%, 25.2%, and 23.4% respectively.

2. Global retail open rates slightly dropped this year by 1%. Considering that retail has the highest competition of all industries, the numbers are not surprising. The click-to-open rates remained higher than the average 14.3% – which is good news. This means that people who open the emails are also visiting the website.

3. A fun insight is that marketers can stop chasing the "best send day", as Tuesday, the day with the highest open rate, has at the same time the highest number of unsubscribes. Simply focusing on providing a real value to see better metrics is the way to go in 2020. And forever.

4. Email marketing will continue to be one of the top channels for engaging customers. This just proves that regardless of how good your email marketing numbers are, there is always room to improve. A lot!

Take a sneak peek into the full report.



STATE OF EMAIL REPORT


Annual report by Mailchimp



Another report is out. After 4 years, Mailchimp released their first annual report, highlighting numerous key milestones for their email-and-all-in-one marketing platform.


In it, Mailchimp says they have 60% email industry share.



Upon releasing its annual report, Mailchimp stated that email marketing is on the rise and evolving. Despite numerous properties offered by the platform, email has proven to be its strongest feature. Mailchimp says that over 340 billion emails have been sent, resulting in more than $300,000,000 revenue for their customers. According to this, Mailchimp claims 60% share of the email industry, while their nearest competitor claims only 9.5%.

Although the company publicly stated their 2019 revenue of $700 million, this is not mentioned in their report. What is more, the report doesn't mention any of the issues the platform has, nor the number of happy vs. unhappy customers.

Take a look at the full report.



PRIVACY | EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION


The browser cookie is starting to crumble… is it time to dunk the cookie?



With the rise of mobile apps usage and privacy acts, the browser cookies are becoming less important. At least the third-party browser cookies.

Last Tuesday, Google announced their plan to end support for third-party cookies (the ones that track you all over the internet and fuel much of the digital advertising ecosystem) in the Chrome browser within 2 years.

So, is this going to give digital marketers a hard time?

Yes and no.

Studies have shown that customized promotional emails produce six times more revenue than those that aren't personalized. Therefore, the focus should be on acquiring first-party data via customer relationship management systems, transactional systems, subscriptions, and newsletter sign-ups, where "identity-based" tracking can be employed.



EMAIL DESIGN


Email design inspo of the week



Restricting the use of colors when it comes to design might help you come up with something new. So instead of wondering what you can do to make your emails stand out, consider this old adage: less is more.



EMAIL COPYWRITING


Email copy inspo of the week



Showcasing your company values in your Welcome emails is always a way to go. Make sure you start building a relationship with your customers by stating what's important to your company, why your company exists, and the long-term goals you want to achieve.



EMAIL NEWS. AS IT HAPPENS.