Digital Marketers unflinchingly say that email marketing is the best revenue generator because it is the best form of digital marketing. Especially in e-Commerce and B2B businesses, there is nothing that can beat email marketing in terms of reach, responses, and ROI. But, still many people question the potential of email marketing. Have you ever wondered why? We don’t need more proof to establish that with the progress of time and advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Automation, Email Marketing is here to stay and is ever-evolving. The only thing you need to keep in mind is to stay aware of the changing email marketing trends. Also, you need to adapt your email marketing strategies according to the current email marketing trends.
The Emergence of Email Marketing
Before email marketing, marketers use to send messages to their customers and prospects through post mail. But, that was before 1996, when Hotmail came into the world of the internet.
Most of the internet users signed up for Hotmail to send and receive emails from their connections, friends, colleagues, etc.
And it came as a golden opportunity for email marketers to reach out to their customers and prospects in a more efficient, easy, and economic way instantly.
Post mail marketing was quite challenging for marketers.
Every small change in the mail means starting all over again and printing those flyers which were expensive.
Another problem with the post mail marketing was that marketers were not able to accurately track the responses.
Emails came to the rescue of the marketers. This medium came up as a very cost-effective way besides being the fastest medium of communication and marketing.
Since then, marketers have learned to customize emails based on new trends, products, customer demands for better marketing and to achieve their goals.
Email Marketing Trends are Guidelines to Success
It is important for digital marketers and especially email marketers to be completely in sync with the current email marketing trends.
Being in sync with the happenings in the current market helps marketers improvise their tactics of email marketing.
If the marketers don’t follow the trends and keep innovating their marketing tactics with the changes happening in the current market they might be left behind.
In this post, we are going to discuss the 13 major email marketing trends.
These email marketing trends are important to monitor and adapt your email marketing strategies accordingly.
This will help you to keep achieving your marketing objectives in a more efficient way:
Trend #1- Mobile Responsive Email Design
“53% of emails are opened on mobile devices.” – Campaign Monitor
The statistics above clearly indicates that mobile is the most used device to access emails. Hence, it is absolutely foolish for a digital marketer or email marketer to ignore this.
Marketers need to put more emphasis on the role of mobile-responsive emails for success in email marketing.
Responsive emails are those emails that can be easily accessed, seen, clicked, responded from a mobile device.
So, does it mean that all the emails now should only be mobile responsive?
No, mobile optimization alone should not be the basis of email design.
Email design plays a pivotal role in pushing email marketing forward on webmail as well as desktop platforms.
Because around 47% of people still access emails on desktops.
Hence, the emails which are designed only to be mobile responsive might not be displayed on desktops properly.
The emails which are not beautifully designed, properly formatted with correct spelling, images, links, and call-to-action buttons don’t motivate the user to engage with it and take the desired action.
Hence, the emails used in email marketing should be designed to be responsive to different screen types and platforms. This can increase the chances of goal completions intended by email marketing.
These emails can also help marketers collect customer-specific data viz., open rate, click rate, conversion rate, type of customer, purchase patterns, types of products purchased, etc., which further helps the marketers tailor their communication based on the data gathered from these customers for better conversion.
Trend #2 – Email Interactivity
Primarily emails are a medium of written communication between individuals. You know communication is all about interaction.
Unless and until two individuals can understand each other’s language and respond to each other it is not communication.
Hence, it is important to keep in mind the factor of interactivity when you use emails for marketing.
Your marketing emails should be created in a manner to promote interactions with prospects and customers.
Interactive emails can open a lot of opportunities for marketers to engage and stir a response in the form of increased sales, increase market reach, faster conversions, etc.
Interactivity doesn’t mean that the recipients would write you back an email, but it means that they would take some action.
For instance, they can click on a button to land on a page to fill in their personal details, learn about a new product, get information about some changes on the website or the store, etc.
There are some tools that can help you make your emails interactive.
Let’s see what are those interactivity tools for emails.
Offers & Discounts
People love to buy when there are offers or discounts on the products they intend to buy.
Also, offers capture and hold the reader’s interest.
If the prospects or leads which are in the consideration stage of their buying journey are sent relevant offers, it increases the chances of conversion.
Time-Bound Deals
Adding countdown timer or limited period offer details relevant to promotions can aid in creating a sense of urgency among your prospects and customers and it leads to conversion.
Form Integrations
Integrating forms in your marketing emails can supercharge your email marketing campaigns.
The forms integrated into marketing emails are mostly pre-filled with the user’s basic details like name, email address, phone number, qualification, gender, age, etc. But if you need more information then that field can be left blank and asked the customer to fill in that detail for receiving more specific and relevant email communications from the company.
Polls & Surveys
Email marketing is the best way to gather feedback on anything you want from your customers. Including interactive polls & surveys in your emails could help you acquire specific customer data.
You can use this data for serving your customers better.
Trend #3 – Email Automation
Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages. – Epsilon Email Institute
Email automation is a great tool in helping marketers create more effective email marketing campaigns.
There is a lot of advancement in email automation nowadays and to keep email marketing as the preferred business to business marketing tool automation is necessary.
Many people argue that automation takes away the advantage of the personalization from the emails.
But, that is not true, now the email automation tools are very advanced and the automated emails personalize the emails based on the events they get triggered.
Also, the statistics suggest that automated emails get 70.5% more opens and 152% higher click-through rates than broadcast emails.
Hence, it is pertinent to say that email automation needs to be part of the email marketing campaigns. Having the automation in place would result in the better acquisition of leads and conversions.
For instance, an automated email saying FREE SHIPPING to a person who has abandoned a cart with the products he added would result in a quick conversion.
Trend #4 – AI & Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of things, blockchain, etc., have all given more opportunities to the marketers to improve their email marketing and drive better business results from them.
The technologies mentioned above are expensive and many of the marketers can’t yet afford them but as these technologies would be affordable the results would be overwhelming for the email marketers.
Imagine someone searching for a place to spend his vacation on the hills and he gets an email showing the 5 best options for him to choose from and the hotels nearby with availability and price, plus the best ways to reach there and one-click booking of the hotel and tickets for that destination.
Wouldn’t that be fast for the company to convert that customer?
You guessed it right that’s what artificial intelligence and machine learning does – offers the right solutions at the right time.
Trend #5 – Big Data Analysis & Personalization
Big Data seems like a new kid on the block in email marketing.
Big Data combined with Artificial intelligence and machine learning it is now quite easy what seems like the most cumbersome task of data analysis and figuring out actionable insights for the purpose of marketing.
With cloud servers and their amazing storage capacity with speed, Big Data storage and analysis are easier, faster, and better than ever before.
The data analysts find the actionable insights from data collected during various interactions at different stages across the customer’s journey.
Hence, Big data analysis will predominantly help in email marketing campaigns.
With the amount of data and insights, the emails can be personalized for each and every customer.
For instance, if there is a customer who buys clothes from a fashion store on special occasions then the Big Data analysis can analyze his purchase pattern, and based on that the marketers can send him an email showing similar products with good savings which he can buy instantly.
Trend #6 – Visual Content in Marketing Emails
Videos are on high demand and the consumption of the video content is very high as compared to the other types of content.
Most of the marketing professionals agree to the point that the videos are the best medium for boosting ROI. And no one can deny that fact.
Though videos can’t be played in the email applications the link to the videos or thumbnails of videos embedded into the emails increases the click-through rate.
Currently, animated gifs can be seen in emails that help boost engagement.
Having said that the videos have great potential not only to make emails more attractive and engaging but also to nurture, convert, and retain customers in a better way.
Probably in the near future videos could be a part of the email marketing campaigns.
Trend #7 – Integration of Social Media Marketing
According to a study, social media marketing is the second-best form of marketing for retail businesses.
Nothing else can help increase the engagement of the brands with the customers and prospects like social media marketing.
Most of the companies add social media buttons in their marketing emails for customers to follow them on social media.
This also allows sharing the products from the emails on their social media accounts or with friends on social media.
But embedding the social media feeds from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., can help capture the interest of the customers and prospects by providing quick insights into what’s trending in the social media world.
This email marketing tactics of embedding social media feeds not only interconnect the two mediums of marketing (Social Media Marketing & Email Marketing) but also gain twice the benefits.
Trend #8 – AI Will Navigate Email Marketing Progress
“By 2020, AI bots will power 85% of customer service interactions” — Gartner
Now AI Chatbots aid in personalization of emails based on chat sessions. It simplifies automated email interactions such as abandonment of cart emails, subscription confirmation emails, personalized offer alerts, etc.
This email marketing trend is now evident from the emails of big brands in fashion, retail, tourism, etc.
Trend #9 – Lesser Email Content Leading to Better Engagement
With the amount of information and scarcity of time, the time an average user spends on consuming a piece of content now is very short than a decade back.
Hence, now the emails with short, to-the-point content get more click-throughs and engage the customers than the long emails.
This email marketing trend is likely to continue for the next couple of years.
Trend #10 – Eye-tracking Analysis of Emails
Earlier this technique of eye-tracking was only for the websites.
With this marketers can easily identify the places where customers look for a longer or shorter period of time.
This made them place products on the website to grab the attention of the visitors.
Obviously, this helps increase the chances of purchase.
This eye-tracking technology is now also available in the emails and marketers are taking advantage of it.
Trend #11 – Real-time Contextual Emails
Contextual emails are in trend now because they serve their purpose at the right time and at the right place.
Considering variables like gender, age, location, time, inventory, customer’s purchase patterns, machine learning, and AI can predict the next purchase of a customer and can send him suggestions of products based on that.
Similarly, if a customer has booked a holiday destination in place which has very cold weather then contextual email can suggest him the winter gear he should buy and take along to keep himself protected.
This real-time contextual emailing allows for a greater level of personalization for the customers and prospects.
Needless to say that the personalized emails convert more sales and bring in more revenue than the generic marketing emails.
Trend #12 – Predictive Intelligence for Better Lead Scoring
The integration of AI and machine learning for generating lead scores are also in trend nowadays.
This trend is now imperative in email marketing as well.
Predictive intelligence helps design better email campaigns that can target leads based on predictive intelligence to generate lead scores.
Trend #13 – Tone of the Emails is Becoming Conversational
Now brands are designing and sending their email marketing campaigns in a way that is conversational rather than one-way communication.
Since personalization is in high demand so brands have taken it a step further to keep the emails communicative.
For instance, nowadays customers can rate the content of emails, reply to a question asked in the email, etc. This helps brands build long-lasting relationships with prospects and customers.
Conclusion
Every marketer must know these 13 email marketing trends we have seen above.
Based on the trends marketers can make changes to their email marketing campaigns to stay with the trend.
With the rapid shift in the B2B marketing world, Email marketing trends are one of the few ways to keep up with the growing pace of competition and stay well ahead of it.
Email marketing is evolving and it is there to stay for a very long time now.
It needs to keep improving it with the integration of the new technology and personalize it for better results.
