Litmus Software helps more than 250,000 marketers make email better through its web-based email creation, testing, and analytics platform. Litmus provides instant email previews and quality assurance tools across all major inbox providers, browsers, and devices, and features comprehensive analytics to help users quickly and easily build, test, troubleshoot and optimize every campaign. Chad White is the Research Director at Litmus, a web-based email creation, testing, and analytics platform. He’s also the author of “Email Marketing Rules” and thousands of posts and articles about email marketing. Chad was previously a journalist at Dow Jones & Co. and Condé Nast, and a researcher and analyst at Salesforce, Responsys, and the Direct Marketing Association.

1. Email Marketing in 2020:
20 Predictions from
20 Experts

2. For our Email Marketing in 2020 report,
Litmus surveyed thousands of consumers
and marketers and asked 20 experts
about what email marketing will look like
in the year 2020.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

3. Their thought-provoking predictions
touch on the subscriber experience,
inbox functionality, deliverability, design
and coding, the technology provider
landscape, and much more.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

4. @chadswhite @litmusapp
Chad White @chadswhite
• Research Director at Litmus
• Author of Email Marketing Rules
• Written thousands of posts and
articles on email marketing
• Quoted in over 100 publications,
including The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
and USA Today

5. Over the next 20 minutes, we’re going to
discuss major themes from the report:
1. Channel Stability
2. A Single View of the Customer
3. Hyper-personalization
4. Machine Learning & Automation
@chadswhite @litmusapp

6. Theme #1
Channel Stability
from Email Marketing in 2020

7. Needless to say, all of our email experts
predicted a bright future for the channel.
And the marketers we polled were
generally quite optimistic as well…
@chadswhite @litmusapp

8. Most Marketers Foresee Even Higher
ROI from Email Marketing Efforts, with
46.5% anticipating higher returns and
only 33.6% anticipating lower returns
in 2020
@chadswhite @litmusapp

9. We considered that email marketers might
be a little biased about the future of email,
so we asked 1,200 US consumers, who
told us…
@chadswhite @litmusapp

10. Channels with Staying Power
70.0% of consumers say that email will
still exist in 10 years. Consumers were
less certain about the future’s of
Facebook, Cable TV, and all the other
channels we asked about.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

11. @chadswhite @litmusapp

12. 25-24 Year Olds Are Most
Bullish on Email, with 72.1%
of them saying they think
email will still exist in 10
years
@chadswhite @litmusapp

13. AboveAverage Earners Optimistic about
Email, with 65.2% of consumers in
households making more than $60,000 a
year saying email will still exist in 10 years.
These consumers were less optimistic
about all other marketing channels.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

14. Given that email’s current adoption and usage
rates, email marketing’s stellar return on
investment, and the fact that consumers
prefer email for commercial communications,
continued investments in email marketing are
very safe.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

15. Part of email marketing’s stability
will come from it being integrated
into other channels as organizations
de-silo, leading to…

16. Theme #2
A Single View of
the Customer
from Email Marketing in 2020

17. Fully Integrated: 84% of
marketers agree that email will
be fully integrated with other
marketing channels 5 years in
the future
@chadswhite @litmusapp

18. Today, the Single Customer View is a
myth for most businesses. This will
change as email is integrated with
other marketing channels within
Marketing Cloud services.
Dave Chaffey
Chief Executive Officer
& Co-founder
Smart Insights
@chadswhite @litmusapp

19. With many brands spending the past two
years focusing on data and integrations,
I predict that the next several years will
focus on taking advantage of the
single view of the customer.
Cara Olson
Director of Direct Marketing
and eCRM
DEG
@chadswhite @litmusapp

20. Successful organizations will break
down data silos and share data from
across the enterprise, creating a
consistent subscriber experience
across the entire lifecycle.
Eric Stahl
Senior Vice President of
Product Marketing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
@chadswhite @litmusapp

21. The convergence of marketing technology
with advertising technology is taking email
marketing to another level. Email platforms
will need to be able to integrate with platforms
that handle the anonymous marketing data.
Chris Lynch
Senior Director of
Product Marketing
Oracle Marketing Cloud
@chadswhite @litmusapp

22. In the next 5 years, email will
be seen as not just a high-ROI channel
by itself but rather a platform that
integrates with and makes other channels
more successful.
Loren McDonald
Marketing Evangelist
Silverpop, An IBM Company
@chadswhite @litmusapp

23. While still siloed in many organizations today,
in 2020, email will not only be used in
coordination with other channels, but
behavioral data from email interactions will be
used to power responses in other channels.
Loren McDonald
Marketing Evangelist
Silverpop, An IBM Company
@chadswhite @litmusapp

24. Having that single view of the
customer will allow marketers to
send individually relevant emails
through…

25. Theme #3
Hyper-personalization
from Email Marketing in 2020

26. Completely Personalized: 76%
of marketers agree that all
email communication will be
completely personalized 5
years in the future
@chadswhite @litmusapp

27. By 2020, hyper-personalization in marketing
will reach a significant level, along with
rules-based triggers, assimilation of the
mobile channel, and connecting data from
other channels and platforms.
Jill LeMaire Redo
Vice President of
Digital Strategy and Insights
Epsilon
@chadswhite @litmusapp

28. Email marketers will leverage data to
create greater personalization, with a
single view of the customer, putting email
at the center of the convergence between
the physical and digital worlds.
Eric Stahl
Senior Vice President of
Product Marketing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
@chadswhite @litmusapp

29. Learning to drive loyalty with the use of
contextual data clues—time, geo-location,
weather, events, behavior, etc.—is gold. By
2020, the ability to use these data points to
inform campaigns will become the status quo.
Kristin Naragon
Director of Email Solutions
Adobe
@chadswhite @litmusapp

30. We will see broader and more extensive use of
data…influenced by the Millennials’ concept
that there is no expectation of privacy. Email
has not taken advantage of the data-rich
environment that other digital marketing
channels enjoy.
Ryan Phelan
Vice President of
Marketing Insights
Adestra
@chadswhite @litmusapp

31. We might not be far from achieving some of the
1-to-1 marketing that appeared in Minority
Report, but the impetus for change is going to
going to come as leaders in the younger
generation adapt to and evolve the incumbent
technology.
Ryan Phelan
Vice President of
Marketing Insights
Adestra
@chadswhite @litmusapp

32. That hyper-personalization will be
so complex that marketers will have
to rely on…

33. Theme #4
Machine Learning
& Automation
from Email Marketing in 2020

34. Will machine learning, AI, and predictive
software ever determine the majority of
the content (subject lines, images, copy,
etc.) in marketing emails? 66.1% say
“Yes,” while 33.9% say “No.”
@chadswhite @litmusapp

35. Machine intelligence will manage and
control the messaging to each individual
across channels, creating the truly
integrated experiences that are currently
talked about a lot but rarely delivered.
Tim Watson
Email Marketing Consultant
Zettasphere
@chadswhite @litmusapp

36. In order to deliver a one-to-one experience,
customer data and content must be completely
divorced from one another and algorithms
applied that identify which content should be
delivered to which customer, and when.
Morgan Stewart
Chief Executive Officer
Trendline Interactive
@chadswhite @litmusapp

37. The client-approval step will shift
toward reviewing content modules,
not full creative, and signing off on
targeting models, not customer
segments.
Morgan Stewart
Chief Executive Officer
Trendline Interactive
@chadswhite @litmusapp

38. The content of broadcast email must be
personalised at huge scale. This includes
subject lines, which may involve elements
of AI to write the correct subject line for
each individual in a campaign.
Tim Watson
Email Marketing Consultant
Zettasphere
@chadswhite @litmusapp

39. The result of all these changes
and improvements is that subscriber
expectations are going
to rise to the point that…

40. No longer will email work “just because.”
Only smart, innovative, and highly dynamic
emails will drive interaction, and generic
blasts will get weeded out of the subscribers’
priorities, if not outright emotionally junked.
Simms Jenkins
Chief Executive Officer
BrightWave
@chadswhite @litmusapp

41. Where best practice dictates that
permission, personalization, and relevance
are key to success today, in the future
those tenets will barely be considered a
minimum acceptable standard.
Andrew Bonar
Founder
Deliverability Ltd.
@chadswhite @litmusapp

42. So while email will remain an
incredibly valuable channel for
brands in the years ahead,
marketers will have to…

43. (1) Work harder to build trust and
send relevant emails that work
everywhere that email is read,
and….

44. (2) Stay flexible, curious, and
collaborative because email
marketing will continue to evolve
and become more integrated with
other channels and disciplines.

45. Questions?
To read all of their
predictions, download
Email Marketing in 2020
for free at:
litmus.com/lp/email-marketing-in-2020
@chadswhite @litmusapp