Chad S. White on Email Marketing’s Evolution and Customer-Centric Strategies
The Gist
- Email evolution. AI and better-integrated martech stacks will shape email marketing’s future, driving personalization and customer-centric strategies.
- Balancing personalization. Finding the right mix of customer-centric content and brand messaging ensures relevance without losing brand identity.
- Customer journeys. Triggered email campaigns address friction points, improve loyalty, and enhance the digital experience with ongoing optimization.
- Metrics and myths. Customer lifetime value and goal-specific metrics will drive email strategies, while marketers must tackle misconceptions in the field.
Chad S. White, head of research at Oracle Digital Experience Agency and author of five books on email marketing, is passionate about creating great digital experiences.
As one of CMSWire’s 2024 Contributors of the Year, Chad shares insights on email’s role in customer journeys, the challenges of AI personalization and the evolving landscape of email metrics.
This Q&A explores his vision for the future of email marketing and its role in creating meaningful digital experiences.
Editor’s note: Chad is the sixth and final profile in our CMSWire Contributor of the Year series. Stay tuned for more industry-leading insights from the experts shaping digital marketing.
Table of Contents
Future of Email Marketing
CMSWire: With email marketing continuing to evolve, what trends do you foresee shaping its role in digital marketing, and how can brands stay ahead of the curve?
Chad: There’s no question that the future of email marketing will entail more personalization using machine learning and generative AI, more integration between channels and more of a focus on maximizing customer lifetime value.
Unfortunately, standing in the way of that glorious future is a present that’s full of poorly integrated martech stacks and error-ridden and fragmented customer data.
The next couple of years will see an increased focus on vendor rationalization, systems integration and customer data platforms as brands re-architect their martech stacks to position themselves to take full advantage of AI to become truly customer-centric.
Balancing Personalization & Broad Appeal
CMSWire: Over-personalization can alienate some audiences. How do you recommend brands strike the right balance between tailoring messages and maintaining broader appeal?
Chad: First, brands absolutely need to be mindful of what data they are using to personalize content and how they do it. Is this data the customer knows your brand has or will they be surprised by it? Is the personalization presented overtly (e.g., We saw you…) or is it positioned with non-personalized content to seem like a happy coincidence?
But the larger concern currently is that many brands are trying to maximize the amount of email content they automate through AI — with many more aspiring to do so. It’s perhaps being done more in the name of cutting costs than improving relevance. But the overall effect in some cases is that the brand is losing its voice and brand identity. Their emails have simply become a selection of product recommendations based on the customer’s past purchases and browsing.
One of our clients recently found themselves on the farside of the personalization curve and decided to pull back on machine learning-driven content in favor of more brand messaging. It’s great to include customer-centric content in your emails, but it should be balanced with some brand messaging, so your customers all have a shared common experience with your brand.
In 2025, some brands will brag about sending out more than 100,000 variations of an email campaign. In 2026, they’ll realize they overdid it to the detriment of their brand.
Related Article: How to Prioritize Email Personalization’s Perennially Moving Target
Improving Customer Journeys via Email
CMSWire: As customer expectations grow, what role do you see email playing in enhancing the overall digital customer experience, especially for driving loyalty and satisfaction?
Chad: Triggered email campaigns are a fantastic way to address points of friction in your customer experience. For example, welcome emails help set expectations for new subscribers and drive key early calls-to-action.
In our Automated Campaign Ideas checklist (free, no-form download), we identified more than 110 triggers, and those campaigns can be personalized to address key segments, creating even more possibilities.
Of course, SMS and push messages can be used similarly, but email is less interruptive and more appropriate for many interventions. Regardless of the channels you use, recognize that triggered messages are living, breathing campaigns that require ongoing maintenance, updates and optimization to work their best.
Email Metrics and Insights
CMSWire: What email marketing metrics do you believe will become more critical in the coming years, and how should marketers adapt their strategies to focus on these insights?
Chad: As brands get their internal data cleaned up, customer-centric metrics like lifetime value will become much more widely used and change the email strategies brands use. Additionally, more marketers will tighten their scope of metrics around those that are most germane to their business, rather than paying so much attention to opens and clicks. I see there being four major email program types:
- Revenue-driven email programs
- Lead-driven email programs
- Retention-driven email programs
- Engagement-driven email programs
Each of those have their own metrics that align to their business objectives.
Related Article: Why Brands Failed to Deliver on Welcome Emails
Overcoming Common Email Marketing Challenges
CMSWire: What are the most persistent myths or misconceptions about email marketing that you feel still hinder marketers, and how can they overcome them?
Chad: Email marketing is rarely taught in college, so this is a field that’s learned on the job on the fly. Couple very soft education supports and slashed conference budgets with routine changes in the industry, and you have an environment that’s ripe for misunderstandings and out-of-date strategies.
This can also lead to mini-panics, like we’ve seen around the addition of tabs to Apple Mail — despite consumers being very familiar with tabs since every other major inbox provider added them long ago. It’s also led to misunderstandings around the requirements of CAN-SPAM, a law that’s been around for more than two decades and is now almost completely irrelevant.
2024 brought a slew of changes — AI summaries, BIMI updates, Automatic Extraction — and marketers should expect more in 2025.
CMSWire: Tell us something fun about Chad outside of his professional world.
Chad: After writing five nonfiction books, I’ve written the first two books of a sci-fi trilogy and am actively looking for an agent. Wish me luck!
Check out some of Chad’s content from 2024:
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