Despite the infusion of several Team and Project management, social media customer interactions, email marketing will remain the ubiquitous and overriding medium that marketers will continue to rely on for their outreach. From being used as a promotional tool to becoming the force that drives content marketing, email marketing has become a topic that salespeople and marketers around the world treat as significant. With the proliferation of the smartphone, email marketing has become one of the most effective digital channels for sourcing customer data by being able to reach customers directly on their phones.
2016 saw the evolution of innovative email marketing. There were brands who made it big by investing time for planning and implementing innovative technologies for making their marketing more engaging for customers. For this year, the brands will need to focus on evaluating email hygiene and behaviors such as cart abandonment, transactional emails, and welcome journeys. Reports suggest that customers react well to businesses who have their basics worked out. For example, Amazon had made its email marketing effective by nailing some of the basic elements like sending mails based on customer and transactional behavior.
Here are some trends that email marketers need to be aware of in 2017:
Personalization for better engagement
With easy access to customer data, marketers need to make the most of personalization, which has emerged as a powerful tool for effective campaign. Marketers need to understand that customers are individuals, and though there may be commonalities, no two customers will behave in the same way.
Speaking about behavioral data, Andrea Wildt, Chief Marketing Officer at Campaign Monitor, gives her understanding of how 2017 will be for email marketing: “Marketers will need new tools to make sense of customer data: Marketers need to integrate behavioral data into their marketing strategies in the coming year. Even as more consumers welcome smart devices into their homes and lives, marketers are now privy to consumer usage data like sites visited, apps downloaded, or games played. Behavioral data is uniquely valuable to marketers, because it provides information above and beyond what static data can provide. It enables marketers to segment their audiences by preferences, allowing them to use tactics like personalization and relevant content to deliver the right message at precisely the right time – on multiple devices. By integrating these tactics into their marketing strategies, marketers are positioned to increase engagement and drive KPIs throughout the funnel.”
Maintaining a personal touch while treating customers like addressing them by their first names and sending friendly emails, goes a long way into turning even a skeptic into a brand evangelist. Personalized emails that are relevant to customers help in engaging them. Sending the right email to the potential customer simply skyrockets a brands engagement metrics. Therefore, ensuring personalized, context-driven, conversational and relevant must become the key checkpoints this year for email marketers.
Automated or trigger emails
Real-time automation will be another important aspect of email marketing in 2017. Brands who want to engage their customers through content, will need to rely more on real-time automation. For instance, eBay generates its content for email instantly based on the search and purchase history of a customer. In contrast to the earlier email blast tactics, daily newsletter barging, email marketers are increasingly shifting towards real-time and tailored engagement with prospective and current customers.
Artificial intelligence and optimization
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role when it comes to email optimization, particularly the subject lines. AI enables marketers to understand the sentiments and emotions that lead to click, open, and conversion.
With the increasing use of AI, marketers are relying less on individual mail format and subject line testing. With the help of machine learning, A/B split testing becomes more effective, and several tools now offer cost effective A/B testing to even the smallest of businesses. This optimizes the content and leads to better engagement.
The digital marketing field is in the throes of a shift in focus to being mobile-responsive and optimized rather than just mobile-friendly. Reports suggest that 65% of the digital media time is represented by smartphones, while desktops have increasingly become a secondary touchpoint. There are several mobile applications that make it convenient to manage mails through software that are cloud-based. Marketers should make use of innovative platforms for sending out emails.
Marketers also need to get rid of the perception that customers use a desktop or a tablet when opening mails. In this regard, this year, marketers will need to make their emails more effective for viewing on mobile phones.
Bringing user-generated content to your email campaigns
A study performed recently shows that in comparison to 15% of consumers who rely on brand recommendations, 84% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their peers. The onslaught of social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram enable marketers to have a clear insight regarding the product experiences of their consumers. For email marketersOpens a new window aiming to make it big in 2017, integrating user-generated content into their email marketing activities will help them to grab the attention of their consumers effectively.
Another important trend for businesses this year is the combining email marketing and social media. Social media is an ideal medium for list creation as email content only gets richer by the incorporation of social media into it. According to reports, when an email has a social sharing button, the click-through rates increase by 150%.
In addition to this, the use of live social media feeds in emails is yet another way of merging the two platforms. Channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are leveraging on this and are successfully reaching out to broader audience.
While marketers aim at more engagement, the content for email will need to go beyond that of a newsletter. This is only possible with the incorporation of interactive content. Reports state that adding videos to your email content can boost click rates up to 300%, while interactive email content increases the rate of click-to-open by 73%. Some of the best ways to incorporate this is by adding animation for highlighting some of the key points. Using GIFs in emails can also better open rates. Marketers also include sliders, accordions, and collapsible menus for making their mails look interactive to customers, who want to dig deep.
Therefore, innovative email technologiesOpens a new window like personalization, integration of social media, user-generated content, and increased level of interactivity will go a long way in making your email marketing superior in 2017. Marketers who wish to create their brand identity in their customer’s inbox will need to simply think out of the box this year.
At MTA, she fashions all content on the website to cover trending news and insights from the key game-changers across the MarTech landscape. Besides tapping into guest authors known for their lucidity and depth, she also looks at strategizing MTA’s brand extension through various social media initiatives in sync with the Marketing team. Her penchant for writing has seen her dabble in film and newspaper journalism for over a decade, making her hands-on with content accuracy and clarity in the written word. A keen student of moviemaking, she loves dissecting various genres and storylines so much that her friends and family have nicked her ‘Spoiler Alert’ and avoid watching films with her, especially the don’t-reveal-the-end kinda suspense thrillers.
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