The Future of Email Marketing: Trends and Predictions

Email marketing is an essential digital marketing strategy and is very useful for helping brands, and businesses get the word out about their service or product. It is a very rewarding strategy, but it is quite difficult to crack. The email has a flexible landscape, and this means that marketers have to be very flexible if they want to enjoy the numerous benefits that email marketing offers. Numerous studies show that email marketing has an ROI as high as 4400%. This means that you will be getting $44 in return for every $1 you spend on email marketing. This is a lot more than many of the other marketing channels can offer. 

AI and Email Marketing

Marketers used to brick-and-mortar marketing principles will feel uncomfortable hearing about AI in marketing. However, this helps to find the most relevant content for both future and current customers and ensures that the targets get the audience at the best time. AI studies past behaviours and uses it for predicting future actions. It is now integral to marketing.

With AI, it’s easy to replace campaign management systems that are time-consuming while delivering relevant content to the customers. Email marketing platforms can also support A/B testing and quality multivariate now.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

The number of brands adding some aspects of UGC to their emails is currently on the rise. The most common approaches used to achieve this are asking simple questions, requesting customer feedback, encouraging the audience to submit different content types (including videos and images).

The use of user-generated content in email marketing is a good way for brands to boost their emails’ response rate during their campaigns. This is one of the reasons why this is becoming more popular in brand emails. Some approaches to user-generated content can also focus on increasing engagement on landing pages. If this is the case, all of the emails’ elements have to be optimized so that you don’t end ticking off your audience.

For example, you could encourage your audience to send feedback by asking them to click on an icon without redirecting them to another landing page. Most of the time, when this happens, they don’t go to the page. Be more upfront with it if your goal is for them to open the page. They are more likely to do it that way.

Interactive Email Elements

One way to improve user engagement on your emails is with interactive email elements, which is very much on the rise. There are more brands now using interactivity beyond just the average base level. They have gone past entertaining readers inside the email and encouraging clicks and some of the other types of engagement. Common examples of interactive elements in emails, according to AustralianWritings, are polls and surveys, product slides, or interactive images that the consumers can control, CTAs, and animated buttons, using rollover effect for highlighting product offerings, etc.

Mobile-First Approach

There are already plenty of research data supporting the fact that users spend more time and consume more content with their mobile devices than other devices such as desktops. This trend is something that is further confirmed by other researches into the open rates of emails. Your email recipient is more likely to read your emails from their mobile than from a desktop. This is why email marketers are adopting a mobile-first approach and emphasizing targeting mobile devices in designing their email content.

Unfortunately, as AssignmentHolic states, it isn’t always straightforward to optimize for mobile devices. The HTML code that you use for your email would determine whether you can fold the email into a format that mobile devices can view. However, you can carry out mobile optimization through other means such as embedded images, tweaking the layout, copy, and overall design.

While you need to add everything you need to encourage click-through and engagement in your emails, you also have to isolate some elements you can strip out to create an excellent mobile experience and still not negatively impact your results.

The goal of a most marketing email is to encourage clicks towards your landing pages, blogs, product pages, etc. but you don’t have to divulge all your information simultaneously, right? You can create more mobile-friendly campaigns by simply reserving some content for your next email.

Quality before Quantity

At this age, you must use your marketing messages to hit the right spots while using very few words. This is what email marketing is all about now. As marketers continue to intensify their efforts focusing on mobile-friendliness and accessibility, creating a concise copy with clear designs in your email content is more important now than ever.

There are now more brands reflecting this new trend by increasing their design and copywriting budgets. However, if you’re short on the required funding, you can focus on creating straightforward content first to boost your chances of enjoying the full benefits that email marketing offers.

Social Media Integration

As there are several different social media platforms, you can be sure that most of your audience is on most of these platforms. According to one research, about 42% of the world’s population are already on social media, and this number will continue to grow as the years go by. With this, different brands can connect to their target audience and still not appear to be too focused on sales.

On average, many users rely on social media to find products and get other people’s opinions about different brands and products. Some businesses take advantage of this already by combining email marketing and social media. For instance, the email marketing campaign of a fashion brand might include images from Instagram and profiles of some of the people that wear their products.

This social media integration with email marketing can highlight a business’ popularity and prove the credibility of the business. Brands can then tweak their email content to encourage the consumer to participate, which can bring about more exposure for the brand and an increase in sales.

By interacting with their social media audience, businesses can generate between 20%-40% more revenues. Social media integration into email marketing campaigns can help brands promote their services and products with ease, earn their customers’ trust, and make more money. The line between email and social media is getting blurrier as more brands take advantage of social media integration in email marketing.

Conclusion

There have been some positive effects on email marketing as technology continues to improve in the last few years, which will only get better. Rather than pushing off email marketing and making it obsolete as some experts feared initially, modern technology has improved the use of emails, making it more effective. This further shows that emails and email marketing are not going anywhere anytime soon.

As technology innovations continue to develop, marketers have to learn to be active in embracing changes and tweaking their campaign strategies so that it reflects new realities. There are already changes in the way people consume email. You must make sure that these changes are reflected in the way you interact with your email audience. Otherwise, you might be left behind by your competitors.

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