Please welcome Nout Boctor-Smith!
Nout Boctor-Smith is an email and growth marketing expert and co-founder the boutique B2B agency, Nine Lives Digital. Nout previously scaled lifecycle marketing at LaunchDarkly and GitLab, and managed the global email marketing processes for Red Hat. A marketing uber-nerd with 13+ years of marketing experience, Nout is always on the cusp of what’s next.
Nout has her eyes on the whole picture. From best practices for the email channel in particular, to how email can (and should) fit into a progressive and successful omnichannel approach, you don’t want to miss her insights and ideas below:
How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?
I think email marketing is currently underrated, underutilized, and suffering from lack of intentionality and investment. With the rise of AI content tools, we’ve seen a dip in email channel quality as brands seek to scale marketing while reducing cost. This lack of quality will continue into the next year or two.
But, I’m hopeful it’s not the end of email marketing. As lead acquisition costs continue to rise, and social channels become noisier, email marketing will remain an important tool for brands.
As brands gather more first-party user data and share that data across all business platforms, relevant and timely marketing messages will be more effective than before, and email marketing will be an important part of these messaging channels.
What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025?
Marketers often deal with disparate data sources, making their messages potentially irrelevant or not timely for their subscribers.
With the intentional and intelligent use of generative AI and access to more first party user and prospect data, email marketing can shine. Email content needs to be hyper-specific. Segmentation and personalization are key. Email can no longer be “batch and blast” or “spray and pray” if marketers want to see success.
What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025?
Marketing leaders need to focus less on vanity metrics (total emails sent and email opens) and more on targeting the right people. It’s ok to send more types of emails to fewer people.
I’ve also seen a disturbing trend of leaders viewing email marketing as unimportant and irrelevant to companies’ growth. I think this is dangerous and short-sighted.
