Kevin George — September 26, 2019 A plethora of digital marketing channels have made many marketers question the very existence of email marketing. Although email marketing is professed to be an obsolete channel quite often, it is certainly not the case. Email marketing has significantly evolved in the past four decades and it is still going strong with persistent advancements in the field.
This metamorphosis reflects the fact that marketers always try to be ready for the future and strive to stay upgraded with the industry trends.
That said, let’s unravel the email marketing trends that you should know to make your business flourish in 2020.
1. Email automation
Email automation has been around since a decade and it has drastically changed in these years, only to get better. With the advent of Marketing Cloud services, data has become much more accessible for marketers. It will continue to become more effective as artificial intelligence will get integrated with email marketing, thereby imparting a smooth customer experience and better email campaign performance.
Increase in the usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning will also enable email marketers to set performance benchmarks more easily. It will also lead to automation of the customer lifecycle stages and increase of these workflows. Automated emails will not only become more relevant for the end user but also have a human touch rather than a mechanically drafted email.
2. Dynamic Segmentation
In the year 2020, marketers will have to be prepared for dynamic customer segmentation to update the segments with real-time data. In the past, you had to manually export the respective segment of the list. Dynamic segmentation will make it possible to instantly update the lists according to the customer’s previous interaction with the website and that too without any human intervention.
3. More accessible emails
Email marketers and designers will focus on building more accessible emails that will work for every user including the specially abled ones. In 2020, email coding will get more powerful to ensure completely accessible emails. Alt-text will be used for every image to help visually impaired subscribers to read emails through screen-readers and understand what the email is all about.
2020 will see considerable improvements in the creation of accessible emails which will ultimately enhance the reach of your email marketing strategy.
4. User-generated content
User-generated content works well for every marketing channel, including emails. It increases the subscriber engagement and builds their confidence to purchase from you. How many times have you purchased a product just because they had some awesome customer reviews to share? Well, to be honest, I have done it quite often. This strategy works great eve in ecommerce industry. According to 3d cart, 82% users find these emails absolutely valuable and 70% customers check reviews or ratings before they make a purchase decision.
Also, email subscribers are three times more likely to share content on social media than leads acquired through any other channel. This means that social media integrated into email marketing gives the maximum user-generated content for future usage.
You can even ask for customer feedback through emails and strive for finer products or services according to what they have got to say.
5. Interactive Designs
With more and more people are accessing their emails on mobile devices rather than desktops or laptops, you ought to design emails optimized for mobile devices. The safest bet is to amalgamate interactivity with responsiveness. While interactivity was merely used as a medium of entertaining the subscribers and drawing their attention, it will be used as a functional element in the coming years.
Just adding a GIF or embedding a video in the email would not suffice. It should add some value to the recipient. Around 66% of mobile users delete emails that are not mobile optimized. Subscribers will get to see animated calls-to-action, interactive hotspots, carousels, menus, accordions, amd embedded surveys more often in their emails, giving immense popularity to mailable microsites.
6. Stricter anti-spam guidelines
As you all must be aware of the fact that GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was launched in May 2018 to make sure that businesses protect the privacy of EU citizens and their personal data. It is expected that the guidelines will get stricter even for the other nations like the USA. They might revise their CAN-SPAM law and bring in amendments to prevent data breaches in the world of email.
7. Voice Assistants
As the screens on which emails are being accessed are getting smaller with each passing day, it is quite possible that voice assistants will be introduced to read your emails. Who knows, cars, wearables and several other Internet of Things devices will read our emails and allow us to reply. There is an intense competition already between Siri from Apple, Alexa by Amazon, and Cortana by Microsoft and it would be exciting to see how this minimalistic approach of voice interfaces will help to overcome the challenges posed by email clients that do not have the feature of tracking opens and clicks.
Wrapping Up
As all these changes will be incorporated into email marketing, it will become one of the most coveted marketing channels despite the mushrooming of so many other platforms. Email is the most preferred medium of communication for most of the companies today and it will certainly continue to be so.
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