Download Email 20/20 - Return Path

20 Visionary Ideas to Futureproof Your Email Program
Email in 2020? Think Email 20/20 Instead
It’s easy to make predictions. Search “Email 2020” and you’ll get back loads of results predicting what the digital world
will be like in a few years. Some of them are probably spot on, while others may be wildly inaccurate. Truthfully, there is
no crystal ball that will allow you to predict what the future holds. So how do you position yourself today to ensure future
success, regardless of what the future holds?
By surrounding yourself with great data.
With data, you can gain insights that will help shape the future of your email program. By looking back on past results
and analyzing current trends, you can use that data to prepare your company for what is coming. Rather than focusing
on what email will look like in the year 2020, you need to shift your focus to developing 20/20 vision—or better!—when it
comes to your email program.
In this report, we explore 20 visionary ideas on what the future of email will look like based on our data-backed 20/20 vision.
Email 20/20
2
returnpath.com
Email Marketing in Focus
Email 20/20
3
returnpath.com
Email Marketing in Focus
Email is everywhere. People use it daily in both their work and personal lives to send documents, share updates, register for online accounts, and more.
While not as visible as social media and TV commercials, it quietly but effectively produces the highest ROI of any marketing channel. According to
Venture Beat, mid-sized businesses receive an average of 246 percent ROI from email marketing. So despite what some “thought leaders” may suggest,
email is not dead—nor is it dying any time soon.
In fact, email is more prevalent than ever and is constantly changing, developing, and producing rich data. Email provides a direct connection to
individual people and contains multiple elements that can be fine-tuned to create a unique experience.
In the future, both email marketers and mailbox providers will change how they interact with email. Mailbox providers will develop stricter filtering
policies so you will need to take advantage of your data to develop engaging email experiences that will land in the inbox.
01
With the adoption of IPv6, domain reputation will be a major factor in filtering decisions.
For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with how IP addresses work, most of the world is using what’s called an IPv4
address. However, with the amount of internet enabled devices in use today, we are quickly running out of numbers to go
around. Just as the addition of new area codes allowed for an exponential expansion in phone numbers, IPv6 contains
more numerals in the address, allowing for more addresses to be created. With its new configuration, the amount of IPv6
addresses available will be greater than the amount of stars in the known galaxy.
So what does this mean for email marketers? The adoption of IPv6 will provide a wealth of IP addresses that spammers
can—and will—exploit. Rather than being tied to one IP address, once an IP address begins to experience reputation issues, a
spammer can simply move on to a new IP address. To keep spammers out, mailbox providers will increasingly rely on domainbased reputation to judge incoming mail and marketers will need to maintain a pristine reputation to pass their filters.
02
All mailbox providers will incorporate individual level engagement into their
filtering decisions.
Senders will need to start monitoring and increasing the engagement of individual subscribers in addition to the overall
engagement of their list. Some mailbox providers are already incorporating individual engagement into their filtering
decisions with great success. Going forward, both the number of mailbox providers using individual level engagement and
the weight they place on it will increase. To help boost their engagement, marketers need to use email and consumer data
across various sources to personalize every aspect of an email including send time, campaign cadence, and email content.
Email 20/20
4
returnpath.com
In 2020, there will be more than 3 billion email users worldwide, which
will account for nearly half of the world’s population. (Radicati)
03
04
List hygiene will play a major role in reputation and filtering.
List hygiene is a significant component to a sender’s reputation. As mentioned earlier, mailbox providers are becoming more
strict about the content they allow in the inbox. Having an unclean list—full of spam traps, unknown users, and unengaged
subscribers—is viewed as the trait of a spammer and messages from that sender will likely be filtered to spam.
Designing and executing customer experience/journey will be essential to maintaining
customers long term.
Using historical data, email marketers will be able to identify consumer preferences that they can incorporate into the email
experience. Identifying what subject lines, content, send time, frequency, etc., resonate most with customers will allow
email marketers to create unique experiences that showcase the value of maintaining an email relationship.
05
Marketers will continue to shift budget from traditional marketing and into digital
marketing.
According to recent research by Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers are spending more than two-thirds of their
marketing budget on digital promotions. This budget percentage is predicted to increase particularly for email marketing
with 87 percent of marketers planning on increasing their email marketing budget. Marketers need to begin shifting their
focus more towards digital marketing, allocating budget to the channel that will produce the highest ROI.
06
Email 20/20
Markets will invest heavily in tools and tech to optimize operation.
Part of the increase in digital budget will go toward acquiring new tools and tech that will help marketers optimize their
marketing efforts. The best marketers are already using various tools and tech to support their efforts, but with the creation
of new companies and platforms every year that address new needs, marketers will consistently add and alter the tools in
their existing configuration to create an optimized email program.
5
returnpath.com
Customer loyalty is valuable—increasing customer
retention by 5 percent can lead to a 25 - 95 percent
increase in company profits.
(Harvard Business Review)
86.7 percent of companies plan to spend more money
on email marketing in 2016.
(Email on Acid)
More than 90 percent of delivered messages come
from reputable senders.
(Return Path)
The volume of emails sent in a day is expected to reach
to 257.7 billion by 2020.
(Radicati)
Email 20/20
6
returnpath.com
20/20 is Not Good Enough
Email 20/20
7
returnpath.com
20/20 Is Not Good Enough
Email as a channel is under attack. As highlighted in Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, email has become the weapon of choice for
cybercriminals, with phishing trending up and leading to more data breaches than ever before.
Email fraud impacts companies of all sizes and across all sectors. It erodes consumer trust in your brand, negatively impacts your email program, and
exposes your organization to unprecedented risks.
To avoid making headlines and position your company for the future, you will need to use data to look beyond what is readily visible in order to
anticipate and defend against attacks to your business, brand, and bottom line.
07
08
All unauthenticated emails will be blocked from the inbox.
The future will see only legitimate emails make it to consumer and enterprise inboxes, thereby removing the guesswork for
users. Organizations that have not implemented the strongest level of email authentication will see their legitimate email
programs affected by this change. Brand awareness and ROI will be negatively impacted.
Customer security will become a top priority for organizations across all industries.
Customers are increasingly aware of cyber threats and are now making buying decisions based on how securely companies
protect their data. In the age of the customer, companies with a known history of security breaches will lose out to their
competitors, making email fraud protection a necessity.
30 percent of phishing messages were opened by the target across all
campaigns, up 30 percent from 2015. 12 percent of users went on to click
the malicious attachment or link, up 9 percent since 2015.
(Verizon)
Email 20/20
8
returnpath.com
09
Securing the email channel will become a joint charter for CISOs and CMOs.
A fraudulent email attack can destroy a brand’s reputation in seconds—and the road to recovery is a long one. The future
will see security professionals partner with brand champions—marketing leadership—to protect customers and to
maintain customer trust. CISOs and CMOs will work together to advocate for strong email security.
10
We will see complete convergence between enterprise and consumer email filtering
technologies.
Rather than relying on people as the first and last line of defense, mailbox providers and businesses will implement strong
authentication protocols to power filtering decisions across consumer mailboxes and enterprise security gateways.
11
Companies will need to have preventative measures in place to avoid skyrocketing cyber
insurance premiums.
Not only do customers view security breaches unfavorably, insurance companies are penalizing businesses that do not take
security seriously. To protect their business from high premiums, security professionals need to secure the email channel
with strong authentication, locking down one of the most vulnerable threat vectors.
12
CBO
Email 20/20
Every enterprise company will add a Chief Brand Officer (CBO) to their c-suite.
A CBO is essentially the customer experience advocate. Their chief concern is to ensure the company is providing a valuable
customer journey and to address anything that might negatively impact the brand experience. While most companies strive
to create a worthwhile offering, customer experience is often secondary to quarterly goals and budget concerns. Giving the
responsibility of the overall brand image to a c-level executive will allow businesses to place a higher priority on promoting
and defending the brand image and experience. With a CBO advocating for the image—and having the authority to be heard—
businesses will become more efficient in adopting new practices and policies that will protect their brand.
9
returnpath.com
More than half of internet users get at least
one phishing email per day.
(Phishing.org)
97 percent of people globally can’t correctly identify a
sophisticated phishing email.
(Intel)
Customers are 42 percent less likely to do business with
you if you are being targeted by a phishing attack, regardless
of whether or not they are actually getting tricked into
giving up their information.
(Cloudmark)
Email 20/20
10
returnpath.com
Foresight is 20/20
Email 20/20
11
returnpath.com
Foresight is 20/20
In the future, marketers will be able to predict customer purchase behavior with stunning accuracy. To accomplish this, marketers will need access to more data—
and the right data—as well as the ability to analyze it and extract meaningful insights in real time.
Today, most companies struggle to make the most of the limited data to which they already have access. A 2014 report by KPMG found that 96 percent of
business executives acknowledge they could do more with big data. The same report found that 86 percent of companies identified one of their greatest
challenges as implementing the right solutions to accurately interpret data. Confirming that notion, Forrester research estimates companies are only analyzing
about 12 percent of the data they have.
Simply collecting data isn’t enough. Business leaders are shifting their focus toward more data-driven insights to unlock the value of the untouched 88 percent.
Companies are investing in data science as well as new technologies capable of distilling actionable intelligence from raw measurements.
To prepare for the future, you will need to streamline the ways you ingest, visualize, analyze, and ultimately operationalize data. As data becomes more manageable, you
will gain confidence that strategies are aligned with and responsive to an ever-changing business landscape. Ultimately, bottom-line results will speak for themselves.
13
Companies will discover new value in email data.
Email is a rich data source with value beyond marketing. From online and offline receipts to travel itineraries and brand
preferences, the inbox is becoming a go-to source for business intelligence. By analyzing email data, strategic executives will
predict trends, improve targeting, and discover competitive intelligence that will impact the business beyond the email channel.
14
In the short run, purchase and transactional data will supplement other Voice of
Customer (VOC) initiatives (e.g., surveys and focus groups).
Surveys and focus groups can only measure what the customer might do, or what they think they do. Purchase and
transactional data shows what customers actually did. By supplementing survey results with actual purchase information,
such as receipts and shipping confirmation, marketers will be able to more accurately predict future consumer behaviors.
15
Email 20/20
In the long run, real-world data will supplant traditional VOC methods.
As businesses collect data and build robust customer profiles, surveys will no longer be a valid measurement of customer
intent. Rather, with the wealth of second and third party data available, businesses will create profiles based on past
purchase decisions to model accurate predictions of what customers will buy at their store.
12
returnpath.com
An estimated 40,000 exabytes of data will be collected by 2020 compared
to the collection of 2,700 exabytes in 2012. (IDC)
B
A
C
D
16
Contextual marketing will force greater collaboration between companies that gather
customer journey information.
Companies will work together and share data in order to expand their reach. When companies share and compare customer
data profiles they have individually developed, they learn more about customers and are able to make more meaningful
connections. Contextual marketing will empower companies to reach customers like never before. Having the right data is
the critical first step.
17
Businesses will use second party data to develop more accurate customer profiles.
Data cooperatives will provide businesses with access to large networks of second party data collected from various
sources. The addition of second party data will allow companies to build more accurate and scalable customer profiles than
those they can create with their own proprietary data.
18
Companies will continue to invest in in-house data analysis/science teams.
While outsourcing data analysis has been effective in the short-term, going forward, businesses will need to have their own
in-house teams capable of ingesting and analyzing massive data sets. In-house data scientists will both speed up the process
and help focus the output of data analysis. Internal teams of experts will also be able to guide executives so they can make datadriven decisions in a timely manner.
19
Inventory management schemes like “just-in-time” will become more precise and will
factor in competitor inventory levels.
Access to more data and faster processing times will increase the accuracy of inventory predictions. Knowing where, when,
and what customers are buying—not just at their store but at neighboring stores as well—will allow businesses to create a
more strategic operations plan that increases sales and limits excess undesirable inventory.
Email 20/20
13
returnpath.com
The average increase in profits from big data investments
is an initial six percent followed by nine percent for investments
spanning five years.
(McKinsey)
Big data investments amounted to 0.6 percent of corporate
revenues and returned a multiple of 1.4 times that level of
investment, increasing to 2.0 times over five years.
(McKinsey)
The data volume in the enterprise is going to grow
50x year-over-year between now and 2020.
Email 20/20
(Hadoop Summit)
14
returnpath.com
Avoiding a Data-Blind Future
The future is unknowable, which brings us to our final prediction...
20 The future will be very different than anyone expects
A prediction can only be so accurate. Fundamentally it is still an assumption of
what might be—not what will be. With so many unknown variables in play—some of
which don’t even exist yet—some of our predictions will likely turn out to be wrong.
(Hopefully, just this one.)
As this last prediction is the most accurate of them all,
what is the real takeaway from all this?
Now is the time for marketers and organizations to
determine how they will use data and analytic power to
promote and protect their brand. Although some are
trying, this opportunity hasn’t been fully captured yet
because doing it properly requires organizations to think
differently about their investments.
Email 20/20
15
returnpath.com
A Clear Vision for the Future
Rather than predicting the future—or worse, passively waiting for it to come—businesses need to constantly
look forward at what’s coming and use their knowledge of the past and the present to prepare.
Below we share some examples of how data visionaries are meeting this challenge:
To provide an exceptional email
experience and prepare for the future,
one online home improvement retailer
used predictive intelligence to get
their email marketing in focus. With
our Send Time Optimization tool,
they uncovered the best time to send
a campaign based on the personal
preferences and past email activity of
their subscribers. By identifying the
optimal time to connect with their
customers, the home improvement
retailer achieved a 32 percent lift in
opens and a 33 percent lift in clicks.
Email 20/20
Swedish online marketplace Blocket
sought to go beyond 20/20 vision by
implementing a DMARC reject policy
to identify and protect against unseen
threats. After implementation, Blocket
saw a dramatic reduction in suspicious
messages, from 2.7 million in December
2014 down to just 13,700 three months
later—a 99 percent reduction. In
addition, customer service tickets
relating to email phishing dropped by
70 percent.
16
In order to enrich existing data sets
and provide a clearer picture of
consumer preferences and market
trends, market research firms are
incorporating Return Path’s item-level
receipt data. This unique and detailed
data allows research companies to
provide clients with unprecedented
levels of analysis to better understand
customers, competitors, and markets.
returnpath.com