Chad S. White is Group Vice President of CRM Strategy for Zeta Global. He is also the publisher of EmailMarketingRules.com, a blog and resource hub that serves as a definitive guide for marketers looking to master the complexities of email. Grounded in the frameworks of his critically acclaimed book, Email Marketing Rules, the site guides on email marketing best practices, covering everything from list growth and automated journeys to deliverability and data privacy. Through frequent industry research, deep dives into evolving practices and emerging technologies like A.I., White uses the platform to help organizations move beyond basic tactical execution toward sophisticated, subscriber-centric strategies.
What does this mean? It means that Chad is an email marketing expert. And this email marketing expert was kind enough to make time to answer questions for my goofy little blog.
Al: Chad, thanks so much for taking the time to participate in the Spam Resource Spotlight series! I'd like to kick this off by asking you how you got started in email. You've got a quite solid journalistic background. Tell me about that transition path from writing about marketing to researching marketing to defining and guiding folks on best practices for email marketing.
The email industry has steadily evolved since then, driven by the launch of the iPhone and shift to mobile, by the strengthening of spam filtering, by the growth of omnichannel messaging, by the rise of machine learning and ultimately generative AI, and much more. All that change has meant that marketers and their practices have needed to steadily change as well. It has been great to play a role in guiding that evolution.
You and I worked together at Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously ExactTarget) for a good long stretch, back in the day. I think that's where "Email Marketing Rules" was born, am I right about that?
Slightly before your time at ET/SFMC, I recall a prior marketing effort that Chip House, Jeff Rohrs and Tim Kopp had come up with in 2008: "Subscribers Rule!" The tenets were meant to espouse permission, personalization, and preferences: "Serve the individual, honor their unique preferences, and deliver them timely, relevant content that makes their lives better." I found it a fun and cheeky marketer-focused way to drive home the point that marketers did not "rule" the inbox; subscribers were in charge, and if you didn't respect their preferences, inbox success was far from guaranteed.
What was the initial driving force behind Email Marketing Rules? Is it perhaps somewhat of descendant from those earlier "Subscribers Rule" efforts?
I love the "Subscribers Rule!" ethos, especially that it stressed that marketers didn't own email marketing. Email is typically called owned media, but in my book I argue that it's actually granted media, along with search authority and SMS, because of the role of inbox providers and subscribers in determining sender reputations and access.
That said, "Subscribers Rule!" was not the genesis of Email Marketing Rules. I was actually inspired by Michael Pollan's book, Food Rules. It offers a bunch of punchy rules with brief explanations to back them up. I modeled the first edition of Email Marketing Rules on that, and you can see the influence even today in volume 1 of the fourth edition.
I very much think "granted media" is an appropriate term!
As you mentioned, you're on the fourth edition of the "Email Marketing Rules" book. And you've written more than three thousand posts. You've just started as GVP of CRM Strategy for Zeta Global, after long stints in other research and strategy roles over the years. Juggling the full time job of researching, investigating, and more, sharing expertise and content via multiple channels, beyond just the blog, this all means that you're outputting lots of content in multiple directions at all times. How do you keep up? What's your thought process around time management or focus to guide you on what to cover, to what level, at what cadence, etc.?
Most of my priorities are set by our clients. When they have questions, we need to come up with answers or a point of view. Ideally, we'd like to anticipate their needs. For instance, Google recently announced that they're allowing users to create up to three additional Gmail addresses connected to their Google account. I led the effort to quickly come up with a POV on how that news affects marketers.
Beyond that, there are conversations we'd love to start that align with Zeta's strengths, plus there are best practices to explore and opportunistic passions to chase. On that last point, one of the ways I know I'm still in the right industry is that I'll get ideas or learn something new from colleagues and I'll be like, "We've got to write about that!" That happens all the time and makes the work so much easier and more fun. I've had the good fortune throughout my career of surrounding myself with exceptionally bright people. My work is all the better for it.
I sometimes feel that same urge: You dive into a topic and get that feeling, you just know that clients are going to ask for guidance (and a point of view) on this new industry change or marketing strategy evolution!
Keeping on top of the myriad of email industry changes and evolution of email marketing is a heck of a challenge. I think you've summarized the evolution of mailbox provider handling of email marketing quite well in your recent "Seventh Age of Email Deliverability" article. It makes me wonder if marketers are freaking out at what you describe as a "continued erosion of senders' control over their deliverability." What has client feedback been like?
Especially following in the wake of Mail Privacy Protection, the trends around the various kinds of AI summaries inbox providers are deploying are really alarming. I conclude that "Seventh Age" article by saying:
"For the first time ever, when mailbox providers measure email engagement, they're partially measuring the effectiveness of their own AI features. And when mailbox providers measure spam complaints, they're partially measuring the frustration of their own users with their own AI features and how they impact their email experiences with the brands they care about most."
This is truly a massive shift. Inbox providers have injected themselves in between senders and their subscribers in a way they never have before. This is similar to AI browsers wanting to disintermediate retailers like Amazon, which is suing Anthropic to deny them access to their site.
Email sender best practices have taken some sharp turns of late, with Google and Microsoft quick to block way more email messages than in years past. At first, these seemed mostly codifications of "understood but poorly documented best practices" – meaning, should they really be a surprise to folks? But yeah, I see that so many people are surprised by these updated requirements and seem to be struggling to comply. Have these pivots to enhanced requirements and enhanced enforcement driven any changes in your own guidance?
I work most closely with large enterprises, who haven't struggled with the new DMARC requirements, for instance. Most of the struggle I see is around qualifying subscribers as active, which has been drastically affected by Mail Privacy Protection, as well as bot activity in the email channel. Marketers know they need to take a more holistic view of subscriber activity, but often are hobbled by siloed organizations, poor systems integration, and a lack of centralized customer data. Those three issues also hold brands back from doing omnichannel well, so I expect to see lots of investments in those areas in the years ahead.
OK! Enough about email. On to the important bits. When you're not sharing email marketing expertise, what are you doing for fun?
After writing 5 nonfiction books, I'm now trying my hand at fiction. For several years I've been working on a dystopian sci-fi trilogy. I'm currently working through edits on book 1 with my developmental editor. I've gotten book 2 back from my beta readers. And I'm half-done drafting book 3. As a first-time novelist, I've felt the need to complete the entire series to make sure everything fits together and builds nicely. It's both really hard and fun, and I'm learning a lot.
If you're a sci-fi fan or an aspiring novelist, you can follow my journey at ChadSWhite.com, where I blog weekly about writing and publishing.
Do you have a most despised food or drink item that you'd like to warn the world about? Alison Gootee hates raisins. I'm not much of a fan myself. Annalivia Ford is convinced that mustard is "the devil's work" that "contaminates anything it touches." What makes you run the other way, if it touches your plate?
Pickles. My wife Kate knows that if she eats pickles, which she enjoys (her one character flaw), then there are no kisses until she brushes her teeth. Pickles and pickle kisses are both gross.
Now there's a quote! Love that. Thank you for sharing.
And finally, when we're talking about Email Marketing Rules, it seems natural to talk about … email marketing rules. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. But sometimes not. If you could bend the ear of every email marketer, either to help drive broader adoption of a rule that is too easily and too often ignored – or warn against a bogus rule, a false best practice, that people keep hearing and believing, that you wish would stop coming up in conversation?
I'd encourage marketers to adopt subscriber- and customer-centric performance metrics as KPIs. Channel metrics are still helpful, but they're merely channel health metrics at this point. Especially as brands lean more into omnichannel, metrics like customer lifetime value need to become their north star.
Thanks, Chad! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and insight with me and with my readers. And, dear readers, did you know that this is the twentieth entry in the Spam Resource Spotlight series? If you're curious about who else has been featured here previously, click here to check out the archives.
Chad S. White is Group Vice President of CRM Strategy for Zeta Global. He is also the publisher of EmailMarketingRules.com, a blog and resource hub that serves as a definitive guide for marketers looking to master the complexities of email. Grounded in the frameworks of his critically acclaimed book, Email Marketing Rules, the site guides on email marketing best practices, covering everything from list growth and automated journeys to deliverability and data privacy. Through frequent industry research, deep dives into evolving practices and emerging technologies like A.I., White uses the platform to help organizations move beyond basic tactical execution toward sophisticated, subscriber-centric strategies.
What does this mean? It means that Chad is an email marketing expert. And this email marketing expert was kind enough to make time to answer questions for my goofy little blog.
Al: Chad, thanks so much for taking the time to participate in the Spam Resource Spotlight series! I'd like to kick this off by asking you how you got started in email. You've got a quite solid journalistic background. Tell me about that transition path from writing about marketing to researching marketing to defining and guiding folks on best practices for email marketing.
Chad: Back when I was a journalist at Condé Nast and Dow Jones, I covered retailers and their use of technology, including the build out of their web operations. To get leads for stories, I subscribed to retailers' promotional emails, so I was already following the email marketing space. The thing that tipped me over into email marketing full-time was that I started a blog, The Retail Email Blog, where I wrote daily about what I was seeing in my inbox. I also wrote research reports on retailers' signup practices, welcome emails, and more. That got the attention of the newly created Email Experience Council. Less than a year later, in January of 2007, I became employee #3 at the EEC and the rest is history.
The email industry has steadily evolved since then, driven by the launch of the iPhone and shift to mobile, by the strengthening of spam filtering, by the growth of omnichannel messaging, by the rise of machine learning and ultimately generative AI, and much more. All that change has meant that marketers and their practices have needed to steadily change as well. It has been great to play a role in guiding that evolution.
You and I worked together at Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously ExactTarget) for a good long stretch, back in the day. I think that's where "Email Marketing Rules" was born, am I right about that?
Slightly before your time at ET/SFMC, I recall a prior marketing effort that Chip House, Jeff Rohrs and Tim Kopp had come up with in 2008: "Subscribers Rule!" The tenets were meant to espouse permission, personalization, and preferences: "Serve the individual, honor their unique preferences, and deliver them timely, relevant content that makes their lives better." I found it a fun and cheeky marketer-focused way to drive home the point that marketers did not "rule" the inbox; subscribers were in charge, and if you didn't respect their preferences, inbox success was far from guaranteed.
What was the initial driving force behind Email Marketing Rules? Is it perhaps somewhat of descendant from those earlier "Subscribers Rule" efforts?
I love the "Subscribers Rule!" ethos, especially that it stressed that marketers didn't own email marketing. Email is typically called owned media, but in my book I argue that it's actually granted media, along with search authority and SMS, because of the role of inbox providers and subscribers in determining sender reputations and access.
That said, "Subscribers Rule!" was not the genesis of Email Marketing Rules. I was actually inspired by Michael Pollan's book, Food Rules. It offers a bunch of punchy rules with brief explanations to back them up. I modeled the first edition of Email Marketing Rules on that, and you can see the influence even today in volume 1 of the fourth edition.
I very much think "granted media" is an appropriate term!
As you mentioned, you're on the fourth edition of the "Email Marketing Rules" book. And you've written more than three thousand posts. You've just started as GVP of CRM Strategy for Zeta Global, after long stints in other research and strategy roles over the years. Juggling the full time job of researching, investigating, and more, sharing expertise and content via multiple channels, beyond just the blog, this all means that you're outputting lots of content in multiple directions at all times. How do you keep up? What's your thought process around time management or focus to guide you on what to cover, to what level, at what cadence, etc.?
Most of my priorities are set by our clients. When they have questions, we need to come up with answers or a point of view. Ideally, we'd like to anticipate their needs. For instance, Google recently announced that they're allowing users to create up to three additional Gmail addresses connected to their Google account. I led the effort to quickly come up with a POV on how that news affects marketers.
Beyond that, there are conversations we'd love to start that align with Zeta's strengths, plus there are best practices to explore and opportunistic passions to chase. On that last point, one of the ways I know I'm still in the right industry is that I'll get ideas or learn something new from colleagues and I'll be like, "We've got to write about that!" That happens all the time and makes the work so much easier and more fun. I've had the good fortune throughout my career of surrounding myself with exceptionally bright people. My work is all the better for it.
I sometimes feel that same urge: You dive into a topic and get that feeling, you just know that clients are going to ask for guidance (and a point of view) on this new industry change or marketing strategy evolution!
Keeping on top of the myriad of email industry changes and evolution of email marketing is a heck of a challenge. I think you've summarized the evolution of mailbox provider handling of email marketing quite well in your recent "Seventh Age of Email Deliverability" article. It makes me wonder if marketers are freaking out at what you describe as a "continued erosion of senders' control over their deliverability." What has client feedback been like?
Especially following in the wake of Mail Privacy Protection, the trends around the various kinds of AI summaries inbox providers are deploying are really alarming. I conclude that "Seventh Age" article by saying:
"For the first time ever, when mailbox providers measure email engagement, they're partially measuring the effectiveness of their own AI features. And when mailbox providers measure spam complaints, they're partially measuring the frustration of their own users with their own AI features and how they impact their email experiences with the brands they care about most."
This is truly a massive shift. Inbox providers have injected themselves in between senders and their subscribers in a way they never have before. This is similar to AI browsers wanting to disintermediate retailers like Amazon, which is suing Anthropic to deny them access to their site.
Email sender best practices have taken some sharp turns of late, with Google and Microsoft quick to block way more email messages than in years past. At first, these seemed mostly codifications of "understood but poorly documented best practices" – meaning, should they really be a surprise to folks? But yeah, I see that so many people are surprised by these updated requirements and seem to be struggling to comply. Have these pivots to enhanced requirements and enhanced enforcement driven any changes in your own guidance?
I work most closely with large enterprises, who haven't struggled with the new DMARC requirements, for instance. Most of the struggle I see is around qualifying subscribers as active, which has been drastically affected by Mail Privacy Protection, as well as bot activity in the email channel. Marketers know they need to take a more holistic view of subscriber activity, but often are hobbled by siloed organizations, poor systems integration, and a lack of centralized customer data. Those three issues also hold brands back from doing omnichannel well, so I expect to see lots of investments in those areas in the years ahead.
OK! Enough about email. On to the important bits. When you're not sharing email marketing expertise, what are you doing for fun?
After writing 5 nonfiction books, I'm now trying my hand at fiction. For several years I've been working on a dystopian sci-fi trilogy. I'm currently working through edits on book 1 with my developmental editor. I've gotten book 2 back from my beta readers. And I'm half-done drafting book 3. As a first-time novelist, I've felt the need to complete the entire series to make sure everything fits together and builds nicely. It's both really hard and fun, and I'm learning a lot.
If you're a sci-fi fan or an aspiring novelist, you can follow my journey at ChadSWhite.com, where I blog weekly about writing and publishing.
Do you have a most despised food or drink item that you'd like to warn the world about? Alison Gootee hates raisins. I'm not much of a fan myself. Annalivia Ford is convinced that mustard is "the devil's work" that "contaminates anything it touches." What makes you run the other way, if it touches your plate?
Pickles. My wife Kate knows that if she eats pickles, which she enjoys (her one character flaw), then there are no kisses until she brushes her teeth. Pickles and pickle kisses are both gross.
And finally, when we're talking about Email Marketing Rules, it seems natural to talk about … email marketing rules. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. But sometimes not. If you could bend the ear of every email marketer, either to help drive broader adoption of a rule that is too easily and too often ignored – or warn against a bogus rule, a false best practice, that people keep hearing and believing, that you wish would stop coming up in conversation?
I'd encourage marketers to adopt subscriber- and customer-centric performance metrics as KPIs. Channel metrics are still helpful, but they're merely channel health metrics at this point. Especially as brands lean more into omnichannel, metrics like customer lifetime value need to become their north star.
Thanks, Chad! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and insight with me and with my readers. And, dear readers, did you know that this is the twentieth entry in the Spam Resource Spotlight series? If you're curious about who else has been featured here previously, click here to check out the archives.
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