2022 marketing predictions

At the end of last year, I shared 5 marketing trends I thought we'd see in 2022.

Here are those trends I called out and here's what happened:

1. Personalization within email marketing will become more important to leverage yet more difficult to implement.

I'd say the first part of this was absolutely true, and the second part of it wasn't as difficult as I anticipated.

I was worried that iOS 15 would have the same amount of impact on email marketing as iOS 14/14.5 had on paid advertising. Fortunately, that wasn't the case.

I'd say the biggest change here was just having less dependency on open rates and focusing more on other key engagement metrics (active onsite, abandonment metrics, clicked links within an email, purchase behavior, and so on).

2. Creating experiences directly within the inbox will become more of a focus.

I don't think brands did as well as they could've here. From what I saw, there was very little adoption of technology like AMP. I expected to see emails behave more like landing pages where users could answer survey questions, leave a review, and even transact directly from within an email.

3. Every smart brand will be leveraging SMS.

I think there were big strides made here, but we still have a ways to go.

4. The brands that scale the fastest will be those that perfect word-of-mouth/referral marketing.

I think brands need to invest more in content and community in 2023. I think one of the brands that did this the best this year was one called?We're Not Really Strangers. And those brands that took to TikTok on the organic side and crushed it, took advantage of a rare opportunity.?

5. More brands will mix-in plain-text emails.

I don't think we saw nearly enough of this. If anything, I think brands over-indexed on designed emails. We're definitely guilty of this.

Alongside this reflection on 2022, I've been strategically betting on trends for 2023 through the advisory work I'm doing. Here's what I'm betting on:

1. Doubling down on your owned audience is the single most important thing you can do for your business.

A company called Retention.com has built the best platform for growing your email list and sending more abandonment emails. My clients using it are seeing a 3x to 4x ROI on average.?You gotta check out what they're doing.

2. Hiring people full-time will slow down, while freelance and contract hires will pick up.

A company called MarketerHire is the best of the?best for connecting with vetted freelance marketers.?I used to work with companies through their platform and now I hire great freelance marketing talent from them.

3. Brands will cut back on offering coupon codes and will switch to a cashback model.

My clients are collecting 19% more email and phone numbers and driving 30% more revenue by leveraging a cashback model via Fondue .?Fondue has built the best platform for this.

Moving on, I wanted to share the subject lines behind my most opened emails of 2022.

1. Subject Line: Here's your freebie?—?60.28% open rate and 22.22% click rate

2. Subject Line: Your crystal ball for 2022?— 58.38% open rate and 9.11% click rate

3. Subject Line: $1 tickets?— 56.76% open rate and 7.94% click rate

4. Subject Line: The World's Greatest Copywriting Course Is On The Way?— 50.55% open rate and 2.22% click rate

5. Subject Line: Alex Reveal?— 49.73% open rate and 1.70% click rate

Here's an exciting update?to close out this email:

I just acquired 50% of a website called?Lose the Very.?It's a super simple tool to help you remove the word very from your vocabulary. The site gets 100,000 to 400,000 visits per month. I bought it?last Friday and in just under a week, we've already collected over 2,000 emails.

Thanks for reading this!