The Future of Email Marketing
Email marketing is here to stay. Read about its future in the following post.
We’ve all witnessed email marketing being pushed aside with the rise of social media. However, according to the Email Marketing in 2020 report by Litmus - email is the channel with the biggest staying power. It is more likely to be around in the next ten years, in comparison to social media, cable TV, print media, and other channels of communication. It is still the optimal way of reaching potential consumers and clients as it covers the widest demographic groups. So, email marketing hides huge potential, it is reliable and effective, but the question is: what lies ahead?
Bettering Email Automation With Big Data
Today’s consumers are demanding and marketers need to keep up. They expect a unique and specifically tailored experience each time they interact with one brand. In years to come, we will see innovations in email automation and it will become one of the greatest tools for crafting personal messages based on the gathered big data regarding consumers’ behavior. There will be more integration with products and apps and the cross-channel data will help marketers target desired groups and capture customer intent. We’re already half-way there with tools such as Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match.
Responsive Design is Mandatory
Reading emails is the top activity on smartphones. This is why marketers need to make the design visually appealing and responsive. But there’s more than that: mobile experience demands an adaptation of content. This includes concise text with a clear message it’s easy to immediately act upon. In order to build brand loyalty, marketers should aim to grab users’ attention and not waste too much of their time. Emails will stay the number one way of interacting with brands and responsive design will help increase conversions like never before.
The Rise of the Drag-and-Drop Technology
When it comes to email marketing, HTML coding is definitely the thing of the past. With the drag-and-drop technology, marketers can create powerful visual campaigns and make a bolder step away from the boring plain text emails. Everyone can become a designer as there’s no need for extensive Photoshop skills or coding: it’s simple, easy, and it provides a personalized experience for the reader. The future will bring creative twists as marketers recognize the true potential hidden behind the eye-catching visual presentations. Multimedia content in emails is already an everyday thing but of course - we cannot expect video format to become effective without further improvement regarding HTML.
Kinetic Emails as the Key of Standing out
Being a part of the competitive market, one must find the way to stand out from the crowd. If you take in mind the way attention span of the average digital consumer has shrunk, it makes it even more challenging. This is why interactive emails are the key: it started out with baby steps, such as simple animations or mouse hover actions, then it slowly worked its way to GIFs and great animations. Kinetic emails proved to be a great way of engaging with customers and displaying authenticity on the market.
Increased Functionality of the Inbox
We can expect to see more style support and perfected mobile responsive designs from email services. The first big steps have already been made (e.g. Google Priority Inbox), but the interaction is about to become even more dynamic with effective use of behavioral data and provide the user with relevant information. The content of the email (e.g. images) may change depending on the time of when the mail is opened as the machine intelligence takes into consideration thousands of different factors based on the collected data.
These trends are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future landscape of email marketing. One thing’s for sure: one-to-one marketing via email has never been closer and with the evolution of ESPs – the future of email marketing is looking bright.