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The Future of Email Marketing: Trends and Predictions for 2021
2 min read
by John Peterson
Lately, there has been a controversial opinion around email newsletters. As a practice and user experience shows, most people delete emails without even opening them.
For example, how long have you been reading the emails you receive? How often do you open them? We presume that you don't open them very often and mostly when you are waiting for them yourself.
A user usually only needs to look at the headline and the sender to know whether or not to open a newsletter from a particular company. And businesses should work hard to craft a beautiful, informative, unique message that will entice the recipient to read it and draw attention to the brand.
Your goal in this case is to ensure that when a person sees your company's newsletter in their inbox, they won't delete it, but rather read it with pleasure.
How to make email marketing useful and productive in 2021? Let's explore this in this article.
Email marketing - is it an outdated or modern promotion method?
Given the controversy surrounding this marketing tool, this question is more relevant than ever. Email marketing is a mammoth in the digital world. Promoting products and brands through email was born in the late 70s and early 80s when marketing tools such as SEO, SMM, and PPC were unheard of. Incidentally, the first-ever e-mail advertising campaign brought in $13 million for its author. It was 400 invitations to the DEC computer show in Los Angeles.
The digital world is now divided into two camps. Some experts insist that email marketing is outdated and should have been replaced by messenger chats. Others believe that email marketing is too early to be discounted because its potential can be unlocked by modern technology. Thus, emails can take on entirely new formats, opening up a host of opportunities to engage audiences through unconventional personalisation methods.
Name substitution or a timely holiday greeting? Alas, this is no surprise today. For an email newsletter to be effective, you can set it up:
Generate blocks of personalised tips for readers based on their interests;
Dynamically changing content based on the gender of the recipients, for example, based on these parameters you can change the visual design, text content, and products offered in the email.
These are just a couple of simple personalisation options that can help your newsletter stand out from the competition. Next, let's take a look at how to customize your turnkey email marketing with today's realities in mind.
User-Generated Content - a successful strategy
Incorporate user-generated content in your branded newsletters. By doing so, you'll build audience loyalty to your brand and increase sales.
It will be a plus for business both in terms of budget savings, as the content will be generated by your clients, and not by a paid copywriter, and in terms of effectiveness, as UGC has higher ER - engagement and CTR - click-through rates. And these email marketing metrics are known to be among the main ones. Anyway, a successful email campaign always should be backed up with a decent website. Pay attention to the list that could be useful in selecting the best landing page builders for your website. Landing pages are a great way to drive traffic to your website.
User-Generated Content can be used as customer testimonials, photos, and social media posts, complete with branded hashtags.
Modern emailing with a focus on machine learning
AI technology helps ease the work of a specialist and automate routine manipulations, which has a positive impact on the quality of email marketing. Artificial intelligence analyses the content of emails and finds spelling mistakes, typos, spam words, non-working contacts, and other elements that can cause emails to end up in the spam folder.
Also, AI contributes to:
Data segmentation
Improving analytics
Optimize the timing of emails
Finding the time of maximum subscriber activity for each time zone
As a result, the marketer gets a quality email newsletter, ready to launch and promote the brand.
Emphasis on AMP technology
Accelerated mobile pages give email newsletter recipients new, comfortable options, such as buying directly from an email. Now the user does not have to visit the company website to add a product to the shopping cart. Thus, interaction with customers is accelerated, conversion rates increase, and marketers receive relevant information about users, which they will be able to use later for forming e-mail newsletters.
Due to the AMP solution, the e-mails can be enlivened by adding various interactive elements:
Image carousel
A dialog menu
Lists and checkboxes
Sidebars for navigation
Pop-up boxes
Feedback forms, testimonials, and questionnaires
Thanks to the introduction of such components, user interaction with the brand is simplified, and the marketer receives information on customer satisfaction with the service, product, or service.
Having analyzed the data, it is possible to identify dissatisfied consumers and send them to the call-center for calls, and to offer satisfied customers bonuses, discounts, and promo-codes for further orders, which will increase the percentage of repeat business.
By the way, the possibilities of AMP letters are not fully disclosed. In theory, they can be used to implement functionality that allows you to add items of interest to your favorites, to your shopping cart, or even to place an order directly from your email, without having to visit the website.
The problem with accelerated page technology at the moment is the more complex layout and limited support from e-mail providers. In particular, AMP emails are currently accepted by Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.
Still not feeling confident with AMP? Make sure to get on track with this guide.
Combining e-mail newsletters with other advertising channels
Marketers are now increasingly using omnichannel communication with their audiences. Email newsletters are combined with social media postings and instant messenger chats to form a unified customer experience. For example, when subscribing to a social media newsletter, you can offer the user a bonus, a discount, a gift certificate.
To attract an audience from social media, announce the launch of the newsletter there, and emphasize the uniqueness of the content. The main thing is to share truly exclusive information in your future newsletters, information that won't be posted on your corporate accounts.
Your honesty will be appreciated, and they will surely leave positive feedback about you. Similarly, you can attract subscribers to your social networks through email marketing. A clear message will always make your brand stand out if you need more guidance on that.
The bottom line
As you can see, it's still too early to write off e-mail marketing. Thanks to modern technology and innovative solutions, it can become an effective tool for business promotion on the Internet.
E-mail marketing is changing and evolving, focusing on maximum personalization, omnichannel, bright, and creative visualization. So don't be afraid to experiment, compose your emails with our recommendations in mind, and believe in your success.
About the author
John Peterson is a journalist with 4 years experience working in London magazine “Shop&buy”. He is a professional mini-tennis player and he has written a novel “His heart”.