Essence of Email Weekly

Salesforce surveyed 7,000 senior marketers worldwide and published the sixth edition of their State of Marketing report.

Here’s what the key email marketing findings tell us:

Take a sneak peek at the full State of Marketing report.

This week marks the second anniversary of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

So far, the EU has only fined two Silicon Valley tech giants. They issued a €51,000 fine to a local subsidiary of Facebook in Germany and a €50,000,000 fine to Google in France due to the lack of transparency in ads personalization. Although these fines seem high, they only account for a portion of daily revenue for these companies.

The European Commission will publish a GDPR progress report in June, but it’s likely to focus on the fact that it has been iterated from the beginning that progress was always going to be slow. Supervision and enforcement of GDPR is a struggle; however, the regulation drove an increase of awareness for privacy and data protection issues in the private and public sector, including COVID-19 challenges. GDPR inspired similar regulations in California, Brazil, and India, and pushed tech companies worldwide to change their privacy and disclosure policies.

At the moment, the Irish Data Protection Commission is looking into multiple issues related to Big Tech companies based in the country, such as Facebook and its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, Twitter, Apple, and Google. The Commission is due to announce its first decision on its Twitter investigation, which is likely to be followed by decisions on the actions of WhatsApp and Facebook.

We’ll be observing to see if the actions will amount to more than just another fine, and whether they will actually enforce changes in behavior.

Check out the full CNET report.

Brands are starting to move away from third-party data collected by Facebook, Google, and other generators, and shift to first-party data to gain direct insights about their users. Just last week, The New York Times announced the phasing out of all 3rd-party advertising data.

The timing couldn’t be better for Bluecore, a marketing technology firm, to announce that it raised $50M in Series D funding, bringing the company’s total financing to over $133 million.

Bluecore will use the funding to build a platform that will tap into aggregated engagement data from brands, which customers can combine with their own first-party data to develop better targeting insights.

Fayez Mohamood, the co-founder and CEO, says that the company manages over 200 million products and SKUs (second only to Amazon and bigger than Walmart) that companies can match with consumer identities (from email and other direct channels). “We can deliver insights on what customers might want even if they have never engaged with a particular product”, says Mohamood.

In 2019, Bluecore launched Email Communicate, an ESP that offers personalization and a performance-based revenue model.

Read the full story.

If you invest in inbound marketing, you’ll probably create a bunch of content for your blog and social media. The question then is, how can you use this content to create selling opportunities for your email campaigns?

Use email design to your advantage and cleverly combine product promotions with other content, like blog posts and featured Instagram photos.

This week, we selected an email template that you can use to show off your content, while featuring your recommended products at the same time. The template was created by Essence of Email’s designers for Privy’s template library, where you can find it alongside 11 additional email templates.

Happy emailing!