From its humble beginnings as text-only messages, email has come a long way since the 1990s. Now, email has become an interactive, engaging content medium in and of itself.
What will email marketing look like in 2020? Your business can get a jump-start by implementing cutting edge strategies to engage potential customers today.
The top 3 Email Marketing Trends Your Business Needs – Here are three effective email marketing strategies you should start to incorporate into your email campaigns now:
1. Deep Personalization of Email Content
Potential customers respond better when marketing is geared to their tastes and habits. This is common sense. Consider how flat a wheat bread email campaign would fall if it was sent to an email list filled with people who are on a gluten-free diet. Email segmentation and targeting are essential to get the best return on your email investment.
Deep personalization goes beyond just putting your potential customers into demographic groups. Using marketing automation tools, your emails can be sent based on certain triggers. You can use customer milestones to trigger emails to be sent. For example, an internet Gaming brand can use customer transaction history to determine which games each customer has played over the last 90 days to offer VIP customers access to special programs and offers. This information can automatically trigger an email thanking those customers for their loyalty and offering them access to the club. Take advantage of those opportunities to get your customer engaged and make them feel special.
2. Interactive Email Campaigns
For many years, the default “interaction” of an email was simply the links that were embedded within it. Now, with advances in email capabilities (and Gmail now allows CSS!), companies can create a truly interactive experience.
One promising application would be to create a virtual shopping cart within the email, where the user can select an item, along with its color, size, and style, and place an order without even going to a browser.
The challenge of interactive emails, of course, is the technical feasibility of designing feature-rich HTML emails that can work across different platforms. With personalization and real-time email marketing (see below), highly interactive emails can be tested on a particular list segment without investing in reaching the entire list.
While highly complex interactive emails will take some coding skills, simple interactive emails will become more and more commonplace. These simple interactive emails will include animation or some aspect that changes as a person clicks on it or scrolls past it.
3. Real-Time Email Marketing
Real-time emails use information gleaned from the reader’s device, location, and other metrics to deliver targeted content. Customized content can leverage the recipient’s IP address. The time a potential customer reads an email can also be used to affect the email content.
A more common manner of engaging with customers is by sending coupon offers to customers through email. Often, these time-sensitive emails include a static coupon date, which might be opened too late. A real-time email could automatically generate a coupon that would last a specific amount of time from the opening of the email.
Email marketing done on a real-time basis tends to engage customers in more ways than one. To name a few – Live Surveys, Social Media campaigns, and countdowns.
Beyond the Website: Email as a Destination
While websites aren’t going anywhere soon, emails are such an effective way to reach an audience, that they are becoming mini-websites of their own. Unlike a website where the user has to search it out, emails are delivered directly to your inbox. Email is still the preferred way for marketers to send messages to customers and for customers to receive updates and offers from their favorite brands. Use personalization and engaging content to keep customers coming back for your product or service.
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