The Top 4 Email Marketing Trends for 2017
We’re all aware of the power of email marketing, especially for financial advisors. We’ve spoken with countless advisors who have gained new clients and increased their assets under management due to their ongoing email campaigns.
Like any other strategy, email marketing is constantly evolving to reflect SPAM laws and best practices. As we enter a new year, take these new trends into consideration to help you grow your email list, engage with your clients better, and build your client base.
Reframe the Newsletter
We’ve all seen the “Join Our Newsletter” popup or sidebar widget on a website. It was one of the top email marketing trends for several years. But the email newsletter has been losing a lot of its power as marketing shifts towards personalization instead of generalization.
Asking a stranger or website visitor to sign up for your newsletter is a low stakes request, but it can also be perceived by an individual as low value. When it comes to an industry like financial services, you’ll need to offer something more enticing and specific to inspire someone to take action.
Provide something of value to someone when asking for their email address. Some examples include:
- Want to receive a quick monthly recap of the financial markets without jargon? Sign up to receive our Monthly Market Insights video and email newsletter.
- Want to improve your financial knowledge in just three minutes each month? Join our newsletter to receive an entertaining video on an important topic you care about.
- Sign up to download my whitepaper on the top 10 mistakes new investors make.
Each of these options tells a visitor right away what they’ll receive and how they’ll benefit from your offer in exchange for their email address.
Optimize For Mobile
When 53% of emails are opened on a mobile device (and with that number continuing to grow every year), your emails have to be mobile-optimized, and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. In fact, 75% of email subscribers say they are highly likely to delete emails that do not render well on mobile devices.
The easiest way is using an email campaigns platform that automatically makes your email templates and messages mobile-friendly. Even when using a mobile-friendly platform, if you are creating your own messages or designs, test your email and make sure it appears correctly on a mobile device before sending.
Keep it Visual
A Skyword study found that total views of their content increased by 94% when they included at least one image. Why? Visuals make people stop and think. They consume the image and, if it’s a good image, they look at the rest of your message.
Along with images, video is the favored communication method among most Internet users. People are 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than other types of content. Furthermore, using the word “video” in your email subject line can boost open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%.
If you don’t already, try sending a video email newsletter, instead of one that’s strictly text, or add a few images or graphs in between paragraphs of text. Remember to use an email platform that allows you to make videos and images mobile-responsive so they don’t appear stretched out or pixelated on different devices.
Quality Versus Quantity
In our piece on 2017 content marketing trends, we highlighted the importance of quality versus quantity. In the past, long-form content was your best bet for SEO purposes, but in today’s fast-paced world, it’s more important to get across your most salient points in a succinct manner.
The same goes for your email campaigns. Keep your messages short, sweet, and to the point. If you want to provide them a lengthy amount of information, write a blog post and, in your email, share the highlights and direct them to your blog post to read the full story. The same goes for video. Ideally, your videos should be between 45 seconds and 3 minutes. Anything longer and you risk losing a viewer’s attention.
Give these four email marketing trends a try and see if they make a difference in your efforts. As you gain more traction, don’t be afraid to try out new strategies to see what works best for your ideal clientele.