As more businesses have begun to harness the power of email marketing, there are certain trends to keep in mind moving forward in 2021. From more automated processes to optimized personalization and targeting, email marketing continues to evolve as one of the best channels for marketers to use.
If you’re not implementing email marketing as part of a complete marketing solution, you’re missing out on one of the most lucrative opportunities out there. With email, you can connect with prospects, leads, and customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey, and ensure that customers stay loyal and engaged long after their first purchase.
To make sure you get the most from your email campaigns, consider the following email marketing trends as you start planning.
1. Increased automation
Gone are the days when businesses had to invest a lot of time and effort in their email marketing campaigns beyond content creation. While email still requires a degree of manual work, there are many ways to automate various processes to keep your campaigns efficient.
With the help of automated processes, you can spend more time on other important aspects of running your business and attracting new leads. At the same time, you can send automated emails that are tailored to each customer’s journey to nurture your leads and bring them to their first purchase. You can also use automation to perform a variety of other email tasks, such as sending product recommendations to customers based on order history, abandoned cart emails that remind people to complete their purchases, and promotions or discounts for products based on recipients’ interests.
Through automation, you’ll be able to make sure your email campaigns are never neglected without the need to constantly check on them and manually send personalized emails.
2. Hyper-targeted emails
One of the aspects that automation can help with is hyper-targeting your emails, improving personalization. People expect emails from businesses to add a personal touch that speaks directly to them, or they’ll perceive you as just another business trying to make money from them.
With hyper-targeted and personalized emails that connect with your audiences, you can significantly increase open rates and click-through rates, subsequently leading to more sales. In the end, with hyper-personalized and well-targeted campaigns, you’ll be able to boost return on investment (ROI) and make the most of your email budget.
Using certain techniques and software, you can segment your email lists and develop campaigns that speak to specific demographics or user behaviors. For example, you might have one campaign that features messaging that connects with people who interact with you via your website, while another can nurture leads from your social media campaigns who may have seen different types of content. As a result, your campaigns will feel less generic and establish a much stronger connection with recipients.
3. Integration with other platforms
You can’t rely on email alone to convert people. Instead, you need to develop a comprehensive marketing campaign that uses multiple touchpoints to guide people down the sales funnel. Multi-channel marketing can make use of a variety of platforms that connect with your email campaigns in a number of ways.
You can develop email campaigns that integrate with social media campaigns, retargeting ads, podcasts, YouTube videos, product or service reviews, online stores and product pages, other sales outreach such as cold calls, over-the-top (OTT) ads on streaming services, and much more.
Some examples of email campaigns that work with others may include:
- Welcome emails sent to people who subscribe to a newsletter on your website
- Transactional emails that confirm orders after people purchase a product on your e-commerce platform
- Follow-up emails that correspond with leads after phone calls or other sales outreach
- Video recommendations and updates for people who subscribed to your YouTube channel
- Emails that update people about new posts on your blog
4. Interactive content that engages users
In addition to the convenience of mobile devices to check emails, people want to interact with email content without the need to leave the email. Through the use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), you can cater to users with highly interactive content that avoids landing pages altogether.
While you might worry that interactive content within your emails could reduce click-through rates for your website and reduce visitors, you can actually increase sales if you implement interactive content the right way. You can include a mini e-commerce experience in your emails by including carousels or small marketplaces that recommend products based on users’ interests, for example.
You can also include videos and other content such as surveys and quizzes that encourage engagement with your emails, all while providing you with invaluable insights that you can use to further optimize your campaigns. With interactive emails integrated into your campaigns, you’ll be able to ensure that people are consistently enticed by your emails and give them a convenient user experience. You can also cut out the middlemen of landing pages and shopping carts to move people to a sale more immediately.
5. More funding for email campaigns
As more businesses see the inherent value of well-developed email marketing campaigns, they’re investing more of their marketing dollars in this channel. According to Litmus, the potential ROI of email is as high as $42 for every $1 spent, making it one of the best ways to maximize the value of your marketing efforts.
If you’re not sure where to invest specifically, consider investing in automation solutions that allow you to automatically send a wide range of emails with hyper-personalization. You can also invest in re-engagement to keep past customers coming back to you for additional purchases, maximizing their customer lifetime value (CLV).
With sufficient investment, you can benefit from complete and efficient email campaigns that are ultimately cost-effective.
As you approach your marketing plans in the near future, consider all of these trends and what they mean for your campaigns. As your customers continue to prefer personalized, interactive, engaging emails that stand apart from the rest of their inbox, you can optimize your campaigns to appeal to everyone from prospects to your most loyal customers.
