Today in Digital Marketing - How Marketers Are Being Caught in the Email Crossfire

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, March 4th. Today, caught in the crossfire, how good marketers are being penalized for the actions of bad actors. Also, Threads finally gets an API, Performance Max rolls out to more Microsoft advertisers, are PR people aiming at the wrong target, and some very welcome updates to Instagram messaging. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Your email marketing program is about to get more complicated.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Actually, it already may be. A great piece this morning in martech.org discusses the big changes that marketers are having to make to their email marketing setups thanks to new rules from Google and Yahoo governing how emails are sent. In short, the new rules focus on authentication, limiting spam rates, and providing an unsubscribe method. Martech says the changes, quote, will lead to an arms race pitting email providers against spammers. Conscientious emailers caught in the crossfire will be collateral damage. While Martech acknowledged the new measures should improve deliverability and open metrics, quote, there's a more sinister interpretation. By mediating the relationship between mail senders and recipients,

Starting point is 00:01:37 the platforms will render email marketing much less effective. The new email delivery rules won't deter bad actors. They'll find ways around them. For example, they'll use email distribution services that sell rotating email addresses and the tools to warm up hundreds, if not thousands, of email domains, unquote. The whole piece goes into detail on why costs are likely to increase, to what extent legitimate marketers will be collateral damage, and a great recap on how we got to this point. If you are responsible for email marketing in your organization, this piece is definitely worth a read. You'll find it at martech.org.

Starting point is 00:02:12 Look for the piece called New Email Sender Rules. Legitimate mailers will be collateral damage. Meta has upped the ante in its attempt to take over the void left by Twitter. Late last week, the company began testing a publishing API for threads. APIs, of course, are the back doors into a social platform that let third-party tools do things. Right now, a handful of such large tools have access to those, including Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr. This could be a significant shift in marketers jumping onto threads. Until now, many brands went there to stake out their username,

Starting point is 00:02:50 maybe post one or two things, but because there had been no API, all that work needed to be done in-app or on threads' more scaled-back website. Many brands prefer to use the third-party tools instead, to make it simpler to publish the same content to multiple sites at once, and to consolidate reporting. Also, in our testing of this, it didn't appear as if topic tagging was implemented for now, at least not on Sprout Social's end, which is the tool that we use for clients of our agency. And it should be noted, this is a publishing API only,

Starting point is 00:03:21 meaning while you'll be able to use it to send posts out, it doesn't include any engagement functionality. Seeing comments, replying to them, hiding comments, liking them, and all that are presumably coming in another API down the road. This reason I expect most brands and agencies will still keep a relatively low profile. As I mentioned, this is a sort of live test with a small number of meta partners. The company says the full release should be out by the end of June.

Starting point is 00:03:51 Performance Max campaigns will be available globally starting tomorrow. And if you're thinking, wait, I thought Google's PMAX campaigns were already available globally. You're right. They are because we're actually talking about Microsoft's version of this AI-heavy campaign type, which it also calls Performance Max. You can import your Performance Max campaigns on Google's side from Google Ads or set up your own new Microsoft campaign. One important note, if you've imported a Performance Max campaign from Google Ads that originally came over as a smart shopping campaign or dynamic search ads campaign,

Starting point is 00:04:26 Microsoft will upgrade it to a Performance Max campaign in phased approaches over the next few weeks. If you're currently using a third-party platform that doesn't yet support Performance Max, those will continue to be imported as Smart Shopping or DSA. A new study from CoverageBook finds that only a third of public relations professionals align their activity with commercial goals. Quoting Martech News, "...fewer than half of PR professionals currently consider new biz and sales when measuring the impact of their work. Just 41% of UK respondents and 34% of US respondents

Starting point is 00:05:07 take the new business sales pipeline into account. These numbers drop significantly when asked about investment generation, 14% of UK respondents and 13% of US respondents. So what are PR companies measuring? Well, unsurprisingly, the focus is on output and audience, with 66% citing high volumes of coverage as their priority, unquote. It is definitely a sobering result and something to keep in mind when you're talking to a PR agency. Are they asking questions about measurement that are tied to your actual business goals?

Starting point is 00:05:41 Or will they consider it a success if they get you a million reach, even if that results in no new leads? What's to blame? Inertia, for one. The idea that this has always been the way it's been. Plus, budget cuts. A third of agencies said they cut back last year. The survey polled more than 350 senior PR and marketing professionals.

Starting point is 00:06:25 Do you have business insurance? senior PR and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Instagram announced a suite of updates today aimed at improving the direct messaging experience on its platform. Users will now have the ability to edit direct messages they already have sent within a 15-minute window if you want to fix any typos or errors. A new pinning feature also allows users to prioritize specific chats by pinning them to the top of their inbox. Third, users will have the ability to disable read receipts entirely or on a chat-by-chat basis. Fourth, users can now save their most used stickers for easier access during future conversations. This is in-app only, of course. The update also expands reply options to include stickers, GIFs, photos, videos, and voice messages.

Starting point is 00:07:14 And finally, the update introduces a variety of new chat themes, letting users customize the visual aesthetic of their conversations. This includes a theme inspired by the popular animated series Avatar The Last Airbender. These updates expected to be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks. Google Ads Editor, the standalone app, is getting a new update today. Version 2.6 now adds Performance Max migration, so users can migrate display campaigns to the performance max campaign type within the editor application. This migration can be accompanied by experiments to assess the performance of performance max campaigns against other campaign types. Also,

Starting point is 00:07:57 the ad responsive display ad recommendation now includes suggested fields, pre-populating text and images within newly created ads. Also, Editor now supports reserve CPMs, a bidding strategy similar to Target CPM. It allows for one-time upgrades from Target CPM for the most compatible campaigns. And video campaigns can now leverage multi-asset ads, enabling the addition of up to five videos, headlines, descriptions, and calls to action within a single ad, and some other updates like granular pause filtering and improved third-party measurement settings. A little under the weather today for some reason.

Starting point is 00:08:37 It actually started yesterday, headachy, all that. So I don't know, maybe it's my usual March cold coming a little earlier than usual. I actually, my throat is quite sore. I actually gave consideration to having AI read out today's show. I do have my voice cloned with 11 labs, but it doesn't really sound like me. Although we did it when Steph was here. Steph is our associate producer who's on mat leave right now. Honestly, it nailed Steph Steph like completely accurately. Even

Starting point is 00:09:06 Steph's husband was like, no, that's you. I could not tell the difference. But for me, for some reason, it just maybe I didn't give it enough training data. I don't know. So you're getting the real me for better or for worse. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - How Marketers Are Being Caught in the Email Crossfire

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