Email is one of the oldest tools in the digital marketing toolbox. Regardless of that fact, it is still one of the most effective.
According to a 2017 email tracking study from the Direct Marketing Association, email offers up to 30 times return on investment (ROI) on average.
How does this old-school tool continue to stay relevant?
Email marketing is always evolving. Marketers continue to develop new techniques and apply different technologies to help them to deploy the most effective campaigns.
If a company wants continue getting good returns from email marketing, they need to stay up to date with what’s new.
This post will outline a few of the latest email marketing trends that we expect to have a major impact moving forward.
Four Big Email Marketing Tricks to Help You Stand Out
Focus on Visual Email
Email “appearance” is a huge place place we will see changes in the coming months and years.
Text has been and will always be an important part of email communications. But email marketing design is focused on visual elements. This will only grow into the future.
This trend is about more than simply adding pictures to emails.
All attachments will need to have visual previews. Users will be able to view the content without having to download it first.
Any links in the email body will also need to have preview images. This will serve to provide readers with an idea of the content they will see on any pages the email links to.
With more email services supporting HTML5 video, we will also see more and more marketing emails that use video content.
Big Data for Better Personalization
The era of the generic email is pretty much over. If you want to connect with your customers, you have to personalize the email to the recipient.
As marketers continue to push towards more personalized content, they are going to start turning to Big Data for insights.
This is going to mean breaking down massive volumes of information from multiple sources.
Once these insights are uncovered, they will allow marketers to develop emails that seem like they are coming from a person that really knows the recipient.
Interactive Email
Interactive content offers one of the best ways for email marketers to increase engagement.
Some of these features will be relatively simple. But that said, there is the potential to offer a number of innovations that can be really beneficial to the recipient.
You could have product carousels that allow the user to flip through different products, interactive menus that provide ordering services, search bars that offer the ability to look products up directly from the email, and more.
Along with increasing engagement, interactive email can also be a great way to remove barriers that would have otherwise prevented some customers from moving on to the next stage of the consumer journey.
Smarter Automation
Email automation has been one of the biggest trends in email marketing for the last few years.
Most of the current automation systems operate on event-based triggers: a customer performs an action, and that action triggers an email.
In the future, marketers are going to use artificial intelligence to run smarter automation campaigns.
With so much consumer data, AI systems will be able to match the right content to the right customer, and they will also know the best time to send it out.
These systems will also be able to use machine learning to identify event triggers that you would have never seen on your own.
You may also use email verification services like DeBounce to remove invalid email addresses from your email list and make your automation smarter. This will also increase list engagement and will increase your ROI.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from Pexels.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Rae Steinbach
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- Email Marketing Tricks for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond - March 27, 2018
