Email marketing has always been one of the top ways when it comes to reaching out to a targeted set of audiences for product marketing. One of the best drivers behind email marketing being a major element for product marketing is the fact that for every dollar you spent on email, the ROI is substantial in terms of the conversion drawn from the pursuit.
Email marketing has also always managed to be a great platform for collecting user data and making an effort to understand their behavior better. With this data at hand, marketers have been able to supercharge their email personalization efforts and target the right set of the audience so that the RoI on conversion is highly enhanced.
2019 for email marketing was all about the mobile and interactive approach to marketing, event-based email marketing, personalized email marketing, an automated email marketing system in place along with a lot of other trends. It would be fair to say that these trends just got stronger for the new year and they will definitely be finding their way into the 2020 guides meant for running successful email marketing campaigns.
In this blog post, we will be talking about the email marketing landscape drawn from 2019 and the way ahead for email marketing professionals in the new year, 2020.
1. Email personalization for better conversions
The subscriber that you are basically looking to target is clearly receiving over 50-100 other marketing emails every day. So, what makes you think that your email stands a chance of being clicked upon? Well, that is the power of email personalization. We are just not talking of using the first name of the subscriber because that is so old-school and won’t help you sail the boat.
Personalization can be easily introduced by assessing and working on these factors
- What time of day do your subscribers want to receive emails?
- What segment of your subscribers from a particular list is interested in what type of products?
- Do they enjoy interactive email copy?
We are talking about implementing segmentation and adding tags so that you can really kickstart your entire personalization strategy when it comes to marketing emails. This can be effectively done through creating customized emails by using the purchase and browsing history of these subscribers along with other moves such as setting a customized email frequency for these subscribers. Location-based dynamic content is also a hyper-personalized effort in this direction.
As a business, it is important to have specific and measurable goals in mind before starting an email campaign. To be able to get to a stage where you are able to measure the success of your personalized email campaign, open and click-through rates are a great tool. Here’s how businesses can do it:
- Begin by collecting the right data from readers on sign-up forms. Email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor can be highly effective.
- Next up, test your subject lines thoroughly to assess the strength of personalization juice in them. Tools like Drip can help you split-test subject lines to see how your audience responds.
- Explore triggered emails; tools like Intercom can help. They are very helpful with up-selling and cross-selling, welcome, re-engagement, and more.
2. Mobile marketing FTW
Just in a manner that mobile websites became a mainstream trend and have continued to, mobile marketing is a successful thing. It is true because marketing data has shown significant growth in mobile average order value in 2018 and beyond. People are open and willing to make larger purchases by placing orders through their mobile devices because the user experience on mobile devices is seamless.
So, it is recommended that marketers do their best when it comes to offering details around their product i.e. images, descriptions, or customer reviews so that subscribers get backed by the nudge to take some action on the email. It is going to be imperative for email marketers to choose a fluid design and enable their email for seamless viewing. CTAs will continue to get more pressing yet subtle in the game of mobile email marketing. So, watch out.
The right mobile email strategy in place will always entail how you, as a business, can use the prowess of the smartphone lying in your prospective customer’s pocket. Mobile email marketing for businesses begins with a mobile-friendly website. Your business website actually needs to be best friends with mobile compatibility if you want the optimum success of your email marketing campaigns.
With a mobile-friendly website on the table, mobile-friendly content is a must. A great headline and compact content is the recipe. Just remember that people don’t want to read much but they want to absorb max information without scrolling too much. With Localization and access to geographical data, you can power-up your mobile strategy game.
3. Interactive emails will continue to engage
If you were to put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers, wouldn’t receiving marketing emails with fun content such as games and quizzes be a better way? Yes, absolutely yes! This is why interactive content in your email marketing strategy will continue to dominate the arena and bring better conversions. In 2020, the approach is going to be around pushing functional interactivity in marketing emails. Animated CTAs are fun and functional along with roll-over effects for product browsing while also serving the purpose of boosting sales and conversions. This “fun” clickability pursuit will usher in as the new year rings in.
Here are a few ways to integrate interactive content in your emails
- CSS animated buttons attract the right attention and bring a sense of gamification
- An interactive email template with a multi-question survey for the audience pre and post their buyers’ journey.
- The image rollover effect is also a great way to attract some attention and introduce interactivity to your email strategy.
4. User-generated content
A very important email marketing heads-up for the new year 2020 is the implementation of user-generated content (UGC) for driving real-time engagement. It is something as simple as encouraging your subscribers to submit content through these marketing emails. User-generated reviews have a huge potential and are super valuable when they can help you make other users make an informed purchase. Adding interactivity to your emails can also be an asset in gathering this UGC.
You can easily turn abandoned shopping carts into realized sales with the use of UGC in your email marketing. You can easily convince the user to consider the fact that a real user is a loyal follower of your brand and with their UGC, they vouch for your credibility. For example, a travel planning business can use the photos taken by their previous clients such as photos taken on the customer’s planned itinerary. It will really help build excitement for the prospective customer.
5. Social + Email = Absolute marketing success
This one isn’t new. Bringing together social media marketing and email marketing is quite the success recipe for expert email marketers. When brought together, the platforms become an enabler for each other and in the process, they impart value to your marketing emails.
This process has always been there; prompting your social media followers to sign up for your emails/newsletters and embedding your social media links in the email copy of your marketing emails. In 2019 and 2020, the approach has managed to evolve and now using your social media to send out updates about your emails is a thing.
6. Automated email marketing
We cannot emphasize enough on the fact that email marketing automation is going to be a priority in 2020 as it was in 2019. Having Marketing software has always and will help marketers unlock more data, get the increased workflows kicking, and get the real work done. Considering the AI and machine-learning vertical, the world of automated email marketing systems is only going to get stronger and more performance-focused.
In a nutshell, the landscape for the 2020 email marketing domain is going to be very similar but an edge over from what it was in the fleeting year of 2019. Based on the predictions made by experts in the marketing world, these trends will continue to thrive with chunks of improvements and evolvement every now and then. For the skilled marketer out there, it is imperative that they think the landscape through and develop a rocking email marketing strategy that is infused with all the power-pointers mentioned above and have a blast in 2020 by delivering a successful email marketing approach.
Catherrine is an experienced Web Developer at WPCodingDev and a passionate blogger.