As consumer expectations for personalization across marketing channels continue to increase, the importance for brands to smartly utilize the customer data they’ve collected grows alongside it. But, even for those marketing teams that are personalizing campaigns across multiple channels — from email to mobile push and SMS — channel silos threaten to damage the overall customer experience they’re trying to create.

While it’s easy to build campaigns in each channel separately — and most multi-channel ESP platforms require you to do so — it’s essential for marketers to think of these various channels as one interconnected way of communicating with customers. Why? Because that’s precisely the way customers think of them. And that’s especially true for Super Senders. All of the communications consumers receive are associated with the brand they receive them from, and they expect these channel to be seamless. If one channel doesn’t appear to know what the other is doing, that hurts trust and that overall experience with the brand.

For years, it’s been clear that syncing data back and forth to their ESP’s cloud has been a drain on enterprise brands, given the massive size of their datasets and the sheer volume of personalized messages they send on a monthly basis. It’s a business relationship that’s only been sustainable because the ESP marketplace doesn’t offer many alternatives that are truly built for the Super Senders rather than the mid-market.

For many enterprise marketers, shipping and syncing customer data with their ESP’s cloud is just considered one of the inevitable — annoying but inevitable — parts of sending personalized campaigns. What else can they do? They have to use their ESP to build campaigns, and the data has to get out to them somehow. For large brands, that means copying the segment of data they need, shipping it out to their ESP’s marketing cloud, and using that copy to personalize their communications.

But all of that takes work. It requires someone’s time to replicate that data and sync it with the cloud. There’s the time spent waiting for the sync to complete, and the time spent dealing with triggered campaigns sending confusing messages based on outdated data. And there’s the fact that you’re paying to store the same data twice — once in your own database, and then again in your ESP’s cloud. Those are just a few of the costly problems with this process.

Email is an effective and low-cost medium to reach users but, at its core, it is a static one-way communication channel with limited capabilities for dynamic content. Adding interactive elements into email is difficult, as is optimizing for different device types. There are so many variables at play that many marketing teams just settle for a simpler, more traditional approach.

What would be possible if email were truly an interactive experience, though? Instead of sending static communications that basically amount to digital postcards, each message could be a conversation — a true, personalized interactive experience?

I’m happy to announce that MessageGears is taking a step in that direction with our newest feature — content support for AMP for Email.

In the early days of email, spam filters were all about the content. Including specific combinations of words and phrases would often make your message more likely to be flagged as spam or blocked outright. As mailbox providers and their spam filters evolved, sender reputation became more important as a factor: instead of a single message, providers evaluate a sender’s “body of work.” Senders whose messages often generate spam complaints or are ignored by recipients are now the most likely to end up in the dreaded spam folder. Message content still factors into many spam filters, but is almost always outweighed by IP or domain reputation.

Even so, many in the industry remain convinced certain words or phrases are the kiss of death for an email. You can find recent articles advising marketers to avoid including words like “free” in the subject line, along with symbols like dollar signs or exclamation points. It’s not hard for senders to get confused with the seemingly conflicting information out there, so we wanted to investigate how it all might tie together.