Please welcome Drew Price!
Drew Price has spent more than 17 years in email & lifecycle marketing across tech, publishing, and retail. Most notably, he scaled Grammarly’s email channel from 0 to 3 billion emails per year from 2014 to 2020, and now he is a lifecycle marketing advisor at HoneyBook.
While the mechanics of email, like how it’s sent, where it lands, and all the things to make an email work are absolutely critical in success (duh), there are a couple unsung heroes: content and design. Drew has some fresh takes about how creative and strategy can and should work together
How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?
Email will be embraced more as a core product experience rather than functioning strictly as a gateway to somewhere more important. The experts running email will be hybrid marketing/growth/product people who lean hard into all the things (performance, branding, and experimentation at scale).
Will it need to complement and play nice with other channels in the marketing mix? Yes, always. But what makes email valuable now will only become richer and more valuable moving forward for those who can stand out from the crowd.
The age where we ship reasonably good drip flows and campaigns at scale and hope for the best won’t be enough anymore, especially during a recession. Deep impact (pun intended) will need to be proven via smart reporting that goes well beyond engagement metrics, including customer sentiment over time.
Covering all these bases will be hard, but well worth it. The best email auteurs who truly love this stuff will become indispensable and some of the highest-paid and resourced marketers in the land.
What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025?
Individualization at the content block-level rather than the email campaign-level will be a game-changer for those who can execute this at scale without it feeling clunky.
In other words, if marketers and vendors can fully realize the opportunities in contextual (dynamic) content at a more granular level at the point of every impression (open), and can nail the tone of copy plus look and feel, it’s a game-changer.
Many third parties have been providing these types of solutions at a high cost for years. But even with that high cost, the end results oftentimes looks and feels like a Frankenstein. But, there’s no reason why this can’t be done at scale and built directly into most modern platforms. It’s just a matter of building the design and customization systems and creating processes and segmentation strategies to get it all to land.
Easy, right? (ha ha)
What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025?
My biggest hope is rather than fully embracing AI for creative production work, we instead convince more design and copy leads to be dedicated to email, lifecycle, and retention programs and fall in love with the creative opportunity there.
Oftentimes, copy and design talent is underpaid and not given enough ownership around the strategy and impact these programs are driving. It’s a missed opportunity!
In my opinion, the best teams will have a balanced duality of strategic ownership letting the creative forces have a fixed and prominent seat at the table.
Living downstream and constantly reacting to requests is the pits. We can do better.
