2018’s Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing has never been particularly easy, and that’s not showing any signs of changing. It’s tough to create email marketing that stands out in the sea of everything else taking up your targeted customer's inbox.



Despite the challenges that come with this kind of marketing and the extraordinarily high level of competition, research cited by Smart Insights shows that email receives 30 times return on investment on average. The same research also showed that 95 percent of respondents said email marketing was either important or very important to their organization.

With the incredibly ROI that comes with marketing but also the headwinds, what should you know this year and going forward? What are the trends to be aware of,and what is the state of email marketing in general right now?

Deep Personalization
The idea of personalizing emails isn’t new, but there’s more to it than that now. It’s about deep personnalisation. A recent Gmass blog highlights the fact that personalized promotional emails have a 29 percent higher open rate.

So what is deep personalization? How does it go a step or several steps beyond traditional personalization?
The GMass blog points out the idea of creating unique discount codes for everyone on your list.The concept is combining the personalization with the promotional elements of the email.

As an example, you could create individualized discount codes that include the last name of each of the people you’re sending an email to.

Tightening How Data Is Collected and Used
There are laws being put in place in Europe regarding the collection and use of personal data. While the U.S. might not have yet implemented the same scope of legal guidelines as Europe, that doesn’t mean that respecting people’s personal datas houldn’t be a top priority.
Email marketing should focus on transparency above all else. This isn’t just good from a regulatory standpoint—it’s also good from a marketing perspective. Customers and potential customers appreciate a sense of transparency, rather than the old less-than-transparent email marketing practices.

It’s also a good time to re-evaluate opt-in procedures and ensure you can’t be doing more to make these easily accessible and as clear as possible.

Interaction with Emails
More email marketers are focusing efforts on providing the opportunity for people to interact with their email content within their inbox.
It makes emails standout, and it makes them more compelling.

For example, adding animation or videos can work well in email marketing. However, there is something to be careful with here, which is the fact that if you’re going too heavy on the graphics, it might make emails slower.
Other options include menus within emails, and the ability to search within an email. These strategies can help emails feel more alive as people are going through their inbox.

Some marketers are describing the creation of interactive emails as “micro sites.”

Testing Across Email Clients
Email marketers go through so much effort and spend so much time on making sure what they’re sending out is segmented, the copy is just right, and it’s engaging. However, if the experience isn’t consistent and quality isn’t delivered across email clients, it’s useless.
Even the smallest details such as how images are showing up in an email can make or break the results in terms of engagement.

Lifetime Value and Loyalty
Many marketers have been completely rethinking the old life cycle of the customer. Rather than hoping for conversions, email marketing, and marketing, in general,are about much more now.

It’s about the life time value you can derive from customers who aren’t just converted atone particular point in the process, but those customers who demonstrate loyalty.

Most of the considerations on this list ultimately go back to the customer experience (CX). If there’s one phrase that you can really use to sum it all up, it’s that.

The customer experience encompasses every interaction someone is having with your organization, before and after a sale is made.
When designing email marketing campaigns, it needs to be all about the customer experience. With this in mind, there is a move away from sending more emails. It’s about quality over quantity. Really hone in on creating an outstanding customer experience with each email, but send out fewer messages along the way.

Predictive Marketing
Finally, another buzz word floating around is predictive marketing. This is again, focused on developing long-term customer relationships. Predictive marketing requires you to look at the behaviors and history of your customer and get a better understanding of what they’re like to be engaged with.шаблоны для dle 11.2