If you are a marketer, you know email automation is essential. With 4.3 BILLION email addresses in the world, it is career suicide not to target prospects through their inbox. Think email marketing is a dying approach? Think people just delete all those emails? Think again.
Close to 90% of all emails are delivered to a customer’s inbox. Not spam. Their inbox. That means, at the very least, they are seeing your subject line every time they check their email. The ROI for automated email workflow is a staggering 3800% which has prompted more businesses than ever to jump on board in 2017. With the tremendous value and increasing relevance of email marketing to the world, you can anticipate automation to begin replacing fully
staffed marketing departments.
But don’t worry about market saturation or job security – yet. Staying informed of the newest trends in email marketing will keep your messages fresh and engaging. Which in turn will yield higher conversions and make you an indispensable member of your marketing team.
Here are the top 5 must-know email marketing trends of 2017:
1. Mobile
Desktop browsers are on the verge of extinction. With expanding screen sizes, unlimited data plans, and stabilizing purchase prices, most people now prefer to read emails and surf the web on mobile devices. That means, to have an impact, you MUST optimize all messages for mobile.
Emails must be responsive to mobile conditions so they can be viewed in both landscape and portrait orientations. If your emails aren’t responsive expect to be deleted. Make sure your subject line is between 24-71 characters.
That is the maximum characters allowed in mobile subject lines. Because Apple mail now adds an unsubscribe link at the very top of emails (and 75% of gmail users read their emails on their phone) there is now even more pressure for you to draft an engaging subject line within that character limit.
Which brings us to the next trend: Personalization.
2. Personalization
People open emails designed for them. Give the appearance of a personalized message by using names, ages, birthdays, locations, and gender specific pronouns in subject lines and headings. Top marketing professionals know the importance of tracing and analyzing personal data, sales funnel data, and behavior data of customers at each stage of the buying journey for this very purpose. Personalization increases the odds of prospects opening your email. But subject lines are just the first step toward higher conversions.
Effective sales copy should be written with the customer’s location in the funnel in mind. If they were just browsing your site – encourage them to return. If they put items in a shopping cart but didn’t purchase – send them a kind abandoned cart message. Doing so gives your company a personality and people enjoy doing business with likable companies. Another data set to consider is email and website behavior.
It is in your best interest to monitor open, unsubscribe, click, and conversion rates of your list. Use the data you mine to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly for your biggest return on investment.
3. Content
Emails are no longer about text. People don’t want to read paragraphs during their busy day. They need quick bullet points. Too much text in an email is a sure way to drop your rates. The new trend is image. Successful email campaigns are 70% image and 30% text.
They are stylistically minimal. A quality, high-resolution image with only a select few lines of text is the new normal. Your subscribers have come to expect it. Don’t be afraid to step away from the status quo of images either. Videos, GIF’s, and infographics are also hugely successful in email campaigns.
So be sure to spice up your emails with attention grabbing centerpieces if you wish
to remain competitive.
4. Video Content
People love short, funny videos. They are so effective that social media platforms now track video engagement as a metric for paid advertisements. With Apple iOs 10 autoplaying videos embedded in emails, you can’t afford to miss this trend.
An estimated 30% of marketing professionals will have used embedded video content in their emails by the end of 2017. Join the 30% on the cutting edge of automation technology. A punchy video followed by a select few
lines of text is marketing gold. This is not a trend to ignore.
5. Real Time Content
Adding triggers and other dynamic elements to your emails is another outstanding way to see more conversions and people love to interact with technology. If you are sending an abandoned cart or purchase confirmation, embed a live shopping cart.
With the click of a button customers can increase the quantity ordered, or reorder, with ease. Adding a countdown timer in another way to trigger buying behavior. Countdown clocks and stock depletion countdowns push customers to purchase by invoking faux-anxiety.
Another idea is to embed animated scratch coupons into your emails instead of providing boring discount codes. Real time, interactive content is the new normal. To stay on top of the automation craze you need to think creatively. Providing customers a way to interact with your emails not only increases your engagement rate, but also makes your company memorable.
Email marketing is a dynamic, evolving field. As long as it continues provide mind-blowing returns, it is essential to be on the cutting-edge to stay relevant. Position yourself as an expert in your field by integrating these five trends alongside your existing segmentation, churn rate predictions, and lifetime value predictions to see higher ROI and conversion rates. Marketing requires you to think on your feet. So make the executive decision to stay trendy and relevant in the increasingly competitive digital world.
This is a guest post by Tonya, Content Manager at TriggMine, email marketing automation service. She believes that email marketing rules and content is the king.