Chad S. White
Chad is the Head of Research at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. He's also a Contributor for Author Email Marketing Rules, MarketingProfs, CMS Wire, and Only Influencers. Previously, Chad was the Research Director at Litmus, Lead Research Analyst at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and a Columnist at Mediapost.
Latest posts:
7 Tips for Creating a Functional Email Experience
Our Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs pyramid provides a big picture view of relevance. Learn 7 tips for fulfilling subscribers' need for Functional email experiences.
Identifying ‘Real Opens’ Is Key to Adapting to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection
Concerned about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection for email marketing? Learn how to identify “real opens” and 6 ways to use them now to prepare your program.
13 Email A/B Testing Mistakes that Limit Your Success
It's rather simple to mess up your email A/B testing and either come to the wrong conclusion or undermine your results completely. Here are 13 recommendations to help you ensure that doesn't happen to you...
Email Marketing KPIs: 3 Reasons Brands Are Overly Focused on Engagement
While email engagement is important, especially for maintaining good deliverability, our research points to several reasons why opens and clicks are being heavily emphasized as key performance indicators. Brands should be concerned with each of these reasons.
2018 State of Email Analytics: The Metrics Brands Measure and the Impact of Third-Party Analytics
Brands use analytics to listen to what their subscribers and inbox providers are telling them. Without analytics, brands are deaf to both their cheers of happiness and their shouts of frustration. Based on our State of Email Survey of 3,000 marketers, our first-ever State of Email Analytics report takes a detailed look at the email metrics brands use, the analytics tools they use, and the impact of the two of those on performance.
Interactive Email’s Opportunities and Challenges
Enthusiasm for interactive email is at an all-time high, with marketers declaring interactive emails the biggest email design trend of 2018. Marketers are right to be excited. However, email’s disruptive evolution from static message to mailable microsite presents many challenges.
Industry Spotlight: Email Marketing at Nonprofits
Based on a survey of more than 240 nonprofits, our Industry Spotlight examines the unique characteristics of and issues facing nonprofits. We'll look at list size, send frequency, revenue from automation, campaign planning, email creation workflow & QA, and email deliverability. In addition to sharing research, we'll share advice, including tips from our partner, NextAfter, a nonprofit research consultancy.
Go from Panic to Recovery with This Email Marketing Mistakes Decision Tree [Infographic]
Panic! You’ve just realized that you made a mistake with your latest email marketing campaign. What do you do next? Take a deep breath and refer to this decision tree, which will guide you to a response that minimizes the impact of the error and avoids drawing more attention to it.
6 Ways Nonprofits Can Improve Their Email Creation Process [Infographic]
Nonprofits rely heavily on email marketing, but their email programs often suffer from underinvestment and therefore under-performance. Based on a survey of more than 240 nonprofits, Litmus details the unique challenges faced by the email programs at nonprofits in this infographic and, together with nonprofit research consultancy NextAfter, offers advice for how to build more successful email programs.
Email Pixel Art: The Rarest and Coolest Defensive Design Tactic
Email pixel art is the only defensive design technique that allows marketers to include pictures in their emails when images are blocked. We explain how to create them, as well as the design and strategy issues to consider before using them.
What to Expect When Switching ESPs
More than 28% of brands dropped or switched email service providers during 2017, according to a Litmus poll. If you’re thinking of switching ESPs, go into the process fully understanding what’s involved. Here's what you should expect...
Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag
As a culture, we’ve been trained to instinctively see every mistake and every failure as bad. Yes, mistakes aren’t great, but not making any could be a sign of much bigger structural problems within your email marketing program and within your company. Here's why...
Doing an ESP RFP: Improving Your Vendor Selection Process
Before any brand switches email service providers, they will likely write a request for proposal. But which ESP candidates should you include? How should your ESP RFP process go? What should you include in your RFP? We answer those questions and more to help you improve your ESP vendor selection process.
30+ Must-Subscribe Brands: The Most Inspiring Email Marketing Programs
Which brands have the most inspiring email marketing programs and send the best emails? We asked marketers around the world. Here are the top 30, based on more than 3,500 brand suggestions from nearly 1,400 marketers. You should consider these must-subscribe brands.
The ROI for Email Marketing: The Good News and the Bad News
Email marketing’s return on investment is 38:1 on average, according to a Litmus survey of 372 marketers worldwide. We explain why that’s both good news and bad news.
What is an ESP?
The blurring of lines between different kinds of email-sending tools and the confusion around company and product brands means that ESPs are becoming a state of mind and not so much a discrete business or business unit even. Litmus saw ample evidence of this in the responses to our third annual State of Email Survey.
CCPA: What Marketers Need to Know about the California Consumer Privacy Act
Following on the heels of GDPR and in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will significantly strengthen privacy in the U.S. when it goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. The law affects all large companies that market to Californians or have data about consumers in California.
Faster Isn’t Better, Except When It Comes to Email Review & Approval Processes
Marketers who describe their email programs as successful spend more time on every facet of email production compared to those at less successful programs. The only exception is reviews and approvals, which both groups spend the same amount of time on. Let's look at why the email review and approval process appears to be different from other email workflow stages.
4 Faulty Justifications for Under-Staffing Email Marketing Teams
Insufficient resourcing and staffing on email teams is a major, persistent problem in marketing departments. The failure to address what is clearly a common problem may be because of several misconceptions and blocking issues. Let’s address some frequent ones...
A Snapshot of an Email Team
Email marketing is a team sport. Based on Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey of nearly 3,000 marketing professionals worldwide, this presentation looks at the three email team components—internal team member, external team members, and business stakeholders. It also examines how email team sizes may change during 2018. See how your own email marketing team compares.
Speed Up Your Email Production Process with Task Runners & Static Site Generators
Marketers are using task runners and static site generators more in their email development workflows, according to our 2017 State of Email Workflows report. Lee Monroe of Mailgun by Rackspace explains how these tools can help email marketers.
2018 State of Email Workflows: How Marketers Plan, Build, Approve, & Send Emails
Based on our State of Email Survey of nearly 3,000 marketers, our third annual State of Email Workflows report takes a detailed look at every stage of email creation—from planning and building to quality assurance and sending. The free 47-page report contains over 35 charts providing data-based evidence of current practices and trends in email workflows.
5 Embarrassing Subject Line Mistakes to Avoid
Subject line mistakes that distract and confuse subscribers—and are embarrassing for the brand—are too common. We discuss five such subject line mistakes and share numerous real-world examples, plus tips on how to avoid making these errors.
A Snapshot of the Email Professional [Infographic]
Nearly 3,000 marketers completed Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey, which explores how brands plan, build, approve, send, and measure the performance of their email campaigns. Those results provide a great portrait of today’s email professional, which we detail in this infographic.
Email Marketing Priorities and Budget Changes for 2018
Personalization, automation, and A/B testing top the list of 2018 email marketing priorities for brands, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey of nearly 3,000 marketers. However, when it comes to email marketing spending, the integration of email with other channels is tops.
The Biggest Email Marketing Challenges of 2018
Our industry is struggling against a host of email marketing challenges. We identify the top impediments to success and share advice from experts on ways to overcome them.
6 Manipulative Email Tactics that Disrespect Subscribers—And Hurt Marketers
While brands everywhere are embracing customer-centricity, many relics of brand-centric thinking are still out there. Here are six manipulative email marketing tactics that marketers need to stop using.
2017 State of Email Creative: How Marketers Go from Inspiration to Email Design to Landing Page
Email creative has its own unique constraints and opportunities that marketers must master to make the most of the channel. Based on our survey of more than 3,500 marketers, our second annual State of Email Creative report examines every facet of email creative strategy—from finding email inspiration and creating email brand guidelines to the popularity of various design elements and redesign schedules.
Hotspots for Email Marketing Jobs, Plus Hot Skills
Looking for email marketing jobs in the US? Canada? The UK? We tell you where the hotspots are, based on postings on the Litmus Community Job Board over the past year. We also look at how those hotspots have changed since 2015, plus the email marketing skills that are in demand.
The POGLE Media Model: Why Email Marketing Isn’t Owned Media
Email marketing and other digital channels don't fit well into the traditional paid-owned-earned (POE) media model. Moreover, thinking of email as owned media will only cause you to struggle. Here's why the POGLE media model makes more sense and sets you up to succeed...
The Size of the Gender Pay Gap in Email Marketing
Women are a vital part of the email marketing industry, comprising 47.3% of the email marketing workforce, according to Litmus’ State of Email Survey of more than 3,500 marketers. However, they are consistently undervalued. Women earn just 89 cents for every dollar men earn in the email marketing industry ($65,000 for women vs. $73,000 for men). We look into the factors that increase and decrease the gender pay gap.
What CAN-SPAM Requires & How that Low Bar Harms U.S. Businesses
CAN-SPAM sets a low bar for compliance. Subscribers, inbox providers, and other countries have set much, much higher bars for what's acceptable. While on the surface, lax regulations look like an advantage for brands marketing to American consumers, it's really setting them up for failure. Here's what CAN-SPAM requires and how the law could be doing a much better job of setting U.S. businesses up for email marketing success...
The Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs: Are you satisfying all four?
To satisfy the Hierarchy of Subscriber Needs, you need to create respectful, functional, valuable, and at least occasional remarkable email experiences. Meeting these needs is the secret to creating relevance, which boosts brands' email marketing performance, return on investment, and deliverability. We explain each need and how to measure whether you're meeting each one.
8 Embarrassing Preview Text Mistakes + 4 Tips on How to Avoid Making Them
Preview text is the third leg of the inbox stool, and a great many brands are delivering some rickety, off-balance inbox experiences because they’re not paying enough attention to it. We share real-world examples of eight preview text mistakes, as well as a four-point action list to help you always make a great impression in the inbox and deliver a clear, distraction-free message.
5 Tactics for Nurturing Email Marketing Innovation
Finding and retaining great email marketers is essential, but it’s only step one in building a successful email marketing program. The second step? Creating an environment that fosters email marketing innovation, so you can avoid falling behind.
2017 State of Email Deliverability: The Behaviors that Help and Hurt Marketers’ Inbox Placement [eBook]
Marketers can be successful in spite of email deliverability problems, but why take the hard path? After surveying more than 3,500 marketers, we’ve identified the practices that clearly lower email marketers’ risks of being blocked or blacklisted, as well as those that absolutely raise those risks—sometimes dramatically.
The 5 Most Problematic Subscriber Acquisition Sources: Are they redeemable?
We identified the subscriber acquisition sources that are mostly likely to cause deliverability problems. However, some of these list-building tactics are still definitely worth using, if used properly. We tell you how.
Is email marketing a ‘failure-friendly’ channel?
Marketers are incredibly split on whether email marketing is a channel that’s forgiving of mistakes. Litmus spoke with several email experts about the issue and we discuss four ways that marketers can make the email channel more failure-friendly.
The Biggest Email Marketing Myths
Doing email marketing right is challenging in the best of circumstances. But it’s made more difficult by all of the outdated and just plain wrong advice out there that leads marketers astray. To put you on the right course, we’re busting 25 email marketing myths and providing you with the resources to get to the truth.
Why is email rendering so complex?
The marketer's email service provider and the subscriber's operating system, browser, email client, screen size, and whether they've enabled images all affect email rendering. All of these layers of complexity add up to the possibility of more than 10,000 different email renderings for every email you send.
4 Signs Your Email Approval Process Is Hurting Performance
Successful email programs are 32% more likely than less successful programs to say they have an appropriately rigorous email approval process rather than a burdensome or lax one, according to Litmus’ State of Email Survey. We've identified four factors that can tip the balance of an email approval process toward being too cumbersome or too lax—both of which hurt the success of a program.
Email Attention Spans Increasing [Infographic]
While technology has been blamed for shrinking attention spans, email is not to blame. That's because the average time spent reading an email increased by nearly 7% to 11.1 seconds between 2011 and 2016, according to an analysis of billions of emails using Litmus Email Analytics. This infographic shares all the details about email attention spans.
The Biggest Email Marketing Trends in 2017 Will Be…
We asked more than 1,200 email marketers (plus a few experts!) what their predictions were for the biggest email marketing trends of 2017.
6 Shocking Myths About Subject Lines
Subject lines are the most written about email marketing element—and they’re the most misunderstood as well. Here are six myths about subject lines that have been repeated so many times that you may believe they are true...
State of Email Marketing Mistakes [Infographic]
Half of marketers haven't sent an apology or correction email in the past 12 months. But that doesn't mean they're not making email marketing mistakes. It means they're not aware of those mistakes. In this infographic, we explore this issue and offer seven tips on how you can improve your visibility of email marketing mistakes.
Why Measuring Subject Line Success by Opens Is All Wrong
This is the biggest, most widely supported email marketing myth. We explain why this myth has persisted and how marketers should actually measure the success of a subject line.
Responsive-Aware and Mobile-Aware Design See Gains as Marketers Focus on Production Cost
The adoption of mobile-aware and responsive-aware design was responsible for most of the increase in mobile-friendly emails over the past year. That's because these design approaches make it much easier to produce emails compared to hybrid and fully responsive design.
2016 Mobile-Friendly Email & Landing Page Trends [Infographic]
B2C marketers have made great progress in creating mobile-friendly emails and websites over the past year, but serious risks remain, according to joint research between Litmus, Salesforce, and Fluent.
How the Verizon-Yahoo Deal Could Shake Up the Email Landscape
A little over a year after Verizon acquired AOL for $4.4 billion, the mobile communications giant has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion, driving further consolidation in the webmail space and setting themselves up to push harder into mobile email.
What Is an Email Conversion?
The definition of a conversion has become more than a little hazy. We turn to five experts to bring some clarity to the issue and to help you avoid conversion inflation.
Who Owns the Email Inbox: Subscribers, Inbox Providers, or Senders?
The email inbox is shared space. And while the format of an email address—Subscriber@InboxProvider.com—tells you who’s in charge, it’s undeniable that all three parties—subscribers, inbox providers, and senders—have an important role to play in the inbox and that each have their own kind of control.
4 Reasons Email Marketing’s ROI Doesn’t Matter
Despite our collective rah-rah around the ROI opportunity, companies still significantly underinvest in email marketing. As much as we’d like email marketing's ROI to matter to more brands, it simply doesn’t. Here are some reasons why that’s the case...
The Pros and Cons of Video in Email [Video]
Implementing video in email is tricky and involves the liberal use of fallbacks. However, as much as marketers are lukewarm on the reality of embedded video in email, they really like the promise and potential of video in email. We talk with three email marketing experts about the challenges and opportunities.
20 Predictions from 20 Experts about Email Marketing in 2020 [SlideShare]
We asked 20 experts for their predictions about email marketing in 2020. In this SlideShare, we’ve selected our favorite prediction from each of our 20 contributors, and made it easy for you to tweet the ones you find intriguing or agree with. Enjoy this peek at the future of email marketing!
Email Marketing in 2020: 20 Experts Share Their Vision of Email’s Future [eBook]
In our "Email Marketing in 2020" report, we take a look at what email marketing will be like in the year 2020. To provide the full picture, we surveyed thousands of marketers and consumers about the channel, and then asked 20 experts to share their vision of email’s future.
Gaining Email Marketing Insights from Big Data [Video]
Matt Laudato, Senior Manager of Big Data Analytics at Constant Contact, talks about what he and his team have learned using Big Data and how marketers can uncover insights in their own data.
The Pitfalls of Email Marketing Metrics & A/B Testing [Video]
In our data-flooded industry, there are lots of opportunities to go astray with "success metrics." Phoenix Direct Email Marketing Manager Holly Wright, who has seen some of their clients struggle with metrics, offers advice on gauging success of your overall email marketing program and of your A/B tests.
How to Recover from Email Marketing Mistakes: Webinar Recording
“I’ve made an email marketing mistake. Now what?” We recently hosted a webinar where we shared a decision framework for how to recover as gracefully as possible from email marketing mistakes, and then put that framework into action, applying it to 10 real-life case studies of email marketing errors made in recent years. Check out the slides and recording, as well as the Q&A.
Will We Ever Have Email Coding Standards? [Video]
We asked this question of five of our speakers from The Email Design Conference, in addition to asking it of nearly 4,000 marketers. Here's what they said...
Email Marketing in the Age of Data Breaches & Tightening Regulations [Video]
In addition to explaining how email marketers can help minimize the damage from data breaches and why they should care about CASL, James Koons, dotmailer’s chief privacy officer, makes compelling arguments for why CAN-SPAM may be overhauled in the years ahead.
3 Emails to Send Now to Improve Your Holiday Campaign Results
The email marketing holiday season will kick into overdrive during the week of Thanksgiving. But before we get to that point, here are three emails that B2C brands should be sending now to get their databases in good shape for a successful holiday season...
Creating Memorable, Shareworthy Email Experiences [Infographic]
Joint research between Litmus and Fluent reveals that consumers don't find brands' emails to be as memorable as marketers think they are. This shares the full results of our consumer survey and identifies specific tactics that marketers can use to create more memorable, shareworthy emails.
Gmail’s ‘Block’ Option: Pros and Cons for Marketers
Gmail rolled out new “block” functionality to all Gmail webmail users yesterday, giving consumers yet another option to rid their inboxes of email they don’t want. On the surface, that might not sound like a great thing for marketers, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. In this post, we'll cover the pros and cons of Gmail's latest update.
6 Steps to Creating a Successful Welcome Email Experience
You’ve honed your email signup appeal language to entice people to subscribe. You’ve created a signup form that minimizes friction. You’ve placed that form on your website, in your mobile app, on your Facebook page, and in other places where your customers and potential customers will see them. And—success—people are subscribing. Now what? Sending a welcome email is that next crucial step.
5 Reasons External Email Benchmarks Make Poor Success Metrics
External email benchmarks can provide false comfort and false alarms. Here are 5 reasons benchmarks are not very useful, and 4 ways to extract helpful information from them.
Getting Subscribers to Forward Your Emails: 5 Secrets
In my first monthly column for Marketing Land, I reveal two additional keys to increasing forwards that weren't included in The Viral Email report.
The Viral Email Report: Benchmarks, Tactics, and Topics of the Most Forwarded Emails [eBook]
To better understand the quiet, often invisible influence of email forwards, we used Litmus’ Email Analytics to analyze the forwards generated by more than 400,000 email sends and then examined the most viral emails to uncover the tactics and topics that spur forwards.
How to Make a Cart Abandonment Email ‘Sandwich’
More and more brands are expanding their shopping cart abandonment emails into series, but they are often just sending the same hard-sell message over and over. Consider including a little soft-sell messaging in the middle of your 3-email cart abandonment series to create what I call a cart abandonment email “sandwich.”
How to Avoid the Perils of Overly Salesy Emails
While email marketing excels at driving sales for retailers, there are very real dangers to being overly promotional with your email messaging mix. Here's why that danger is rising, plus five soft-sell tactics to help you avoid subscribers tuning you out...
