8 Email Marketing Trends to Expect 2019
Email marketing has gone way beyond a means to communicate with people. Rather, it has creatively morphed into a more effective online business communication tool for this era. And many more brands building their online presence would have to rely on email marketing in addition to other marketing channels to meet their overall marketing and sales goals. These are some of the email marketing trends to expect this year.
1. More quality content
Content has been a significant aspect of email marketing. If more brands want to get more people interested in what they have to say, they must be ready to invest more effort in the overall quality of their email content; starting from with the subject line of the emails, to the pre-header and finally to the main content.
Brands also have to be creative with content shared and should be prepared to work with multiple content types (images, GIFs etc). Content must be utilized in such a way that it can steal the needed attention of both a current or a potential customer. Remember the ultimate goal is for them to click on the email and thoroughly read through it. To reach this goal, brands also need to be a little more creative with how call-to-actions are displayed in emails and texts used to prompt such actions. This can easily be achieved with a little guidance or with the help of a digital marketing agency.
2. More personalized content
Brands will focus more on personalizing content shared through emails. Emails that are well tailored to an individual rather than a group usually have the most impact. So a business should go beyond just getting and using subscribers’ names in emails to putting a lot of effort into tracking the behavioral pattern of their subscribers online, especially on social media. There are tools and software available for this that can help your business understand what the current interests of a potential customer are, along with the words they search for tailoring email content to suit their current interests and activities
3. More brands rewarding loyalty
Businesses need to be aware that the cost of securing new clients is far more than that of maintaining the existing ones. And existing ones can easily be converted to loyal customers of the brand who keep making recurring purchases. Customers who show great brand loyalty should also be rewarded with gifts and coupons. This simple action allows customers to become foot soldiers that would willingly carry the banner of the brand and spread the good deeds, which in turn, could win over the doubting one-off customers or new ones.
4. Securing accurate data to improve user experience
With the emergence of the internet and all that it has brought with it, including social media, data has become more relevant to understand how internet users behave. Brands now have the opportunity to take advantage of such data to best position themselves online to drive their overall marketing and sales goals. More businesses will want to explore key data like browsing history, purchasing history as well as email preferences indicated by subscribers. They will also have to leverage and invest in new technologies that will help them get up-to-date data about their subscribers to improve the overall experience of their target audience.
5. Create and push out more interactive emails
Businesses will be required to put more effort into creating interactive emails by using new technologies or software that offers such services to help boost their email marketing campaigns. Emails that are more interactive automatically grabs attention and builds interest, and such emails are also likely to increase engagement; which can lead to more conversions and sales.
According to Jeff Bullas, interactive email marketing is the future of inbox communication. The idea behind interactive email is to get subscribers to interact with the content either by tapping, swiping, or watching a series of test moves (usually GIFs). For brands that have high email open rates but poor interaction or click-through rates, they are likely to focus more on interactive emails which could make it a more popular trend this year.
6. Emails will be more optimised for mobile devices
As there would be an increase in online purchase through mobile devices, the number of mobile users is not likely to decrease; in fact, there is going to be an increase in over-dependence on mobile devices to run most of our day-to-day internet needs. From just swiping down the notification bar on their device, people can instantly decide whether or not they want to read the email. And for those that open it, content has to be well optimized. This implies that images used have to be clean and straightforward, the text must be broken into smaller digestible paragraphs and well-spaced for readers to skim through, and email templates have to be responsive. All these improvements are essential to increase a brand’s chance of getting conversions or sales.
7. Segmented and well-cleaned email lists
Segmenting emails has always been a smart email marketing strategy, and more brands will improve segmentation especially by interests. Combining people with the same interests and similar activities makes it easier to monitor and track the overall performance of the email marketing campaigns.
8. Increase in the use of AIs (Artificial Intelligence)
Artificial Intelligence is key to pushing automation boundaries and exploring opportunities that automated emails can bring. As there would be an increase in the use of automated and intelligent emails to keep up with the race to grab the short attention span of Internet users, more frequent intelligent automated emails will become a trend. Brands can automate emails that could be harvesting good sales for them while they are busy focusing on other aspects of the brand.
It is also important to note that while using artificial intelligence is great or acquiring data to improve automated emails, brands will also have to deal with data privacy issues surrounding the use of such technologies and software. With Facebook under fire in 2018 for allegedly misusing collected data, brands, while understanding how acquiring such data could do to improve their email marketing campaigns, will also have to tread carefully to protect the interest of their subscribers and the brand name.