Please welcome Luke Glasner!
Luke Glasner is an email consultant specializing in analytics, coding, deliverability, and strategy currently running his own firm, Glasner Consulting.
Luke tells it like it is. We love that. When he provided his answers to us, we loved to see how many changes he thinks are possible in our email world, and why he thinks they’re important. He’s got the stuff to back it up. Take a look at his answer to see what we mean; pay special attention to the last question. You’ll probably want to jump right on board the bandwagon.
How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?
I think email marketing will continue to be the main driver of traffic on the web. As such, it will be included in more integrated marketing efforts and customer journeys.
What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025?
I think AI tools will move from new and cool to table stakes by 2025. In the past month, I have seen ESPs (like Dotdigital, Salesforce, and many others) add AI to their platform, as well as email tools like Litmus, Subject Line Pro, and many others.
Just about everyone has been rushing to get some form of AI assistance into their toolset. AI and ML is not new in email. For example well-known tools like Phrasee and Persado have used it for years. But what is different now is the much greater push to adopt and included AI in email tools across the board.
What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025?
I would love to see coding standards adopted by email inbox providers. Email marketers have been dealing with close to a 100 variants of email clients, devices, and screen sizes for years. No other group of coders must deal with this many variations and differing level of support for CSS. CSS is evolving and for web developers, several new features were released this year. But for email marketers, we’re still using CSS3.0 from 1999. Isn’t it time email moved out of the 90s?
Even if we cannot agree on a full set of CSS features and attributes, can we at least agree on a minimum viable set for CSS? There always seems to be one or two clients that don’t support basic stuff, like padding on divs or rounded corners on tables (i.e., border radius). Frankly, it’s stupid that as an industry we cannot get mailbox providers to agree to some minimum support standard. It would be good for providers, good for end users, and good for coders.
The other place I would love to see more standardization is on reporting, especially for clicks. Too often clicks are over stated due to filter checkers and pre-fetching skewing test results and leading marketers in the wrong direction. We need ESPs to help marketers by filtering out these non-human interactions. I see this in a handful of ESPs today, but most do not and as a result, their click numbers are wildly overstated.
