Email Marketing is dead. We keep hearing this, but the truth is: Email Marketing is alive, and it is here to stay!
According to Statista, global email users will amount to 4.3 billion by 2023. In other words, the audience for emails will comprise half of the world’s population.
At Maropost, we understand the essential value of emails and email marketing, as we help hundreds of companies worldwide to manage, deploy and optimize their email marketing campaigns.
For this reason, we asked some of our top partners to share their predictions on the future of email marketing.
This report can provide you with some great insights on the future of email marketing.
Keep scrolling to find out what top companies envision the future of email to be! If you want to dig even deeper, we have prepared a downloadable version of the report, accessible for free here.
Top Email Marketing Trends
- Automation will boost customer engagement by leveraging behavioural data at scale – by Maropost
- Email and Ecommerce platforms will work together to deliver personalized experiences – by Neto
- Interactive emails will become part of the customer experience – by HawkeMedia
- Email Marketing will become more and more effective thanks for email-based retargeting – by GetEmails
- AI will drive a better and more scalable email customization and personalization – by Synchronicity Marketing
- Email Marketers will rely more on first-party data for their email campaigns – by Digioh
- Email notification banners will play a critical role to gain attention – by Zembula
- Email will become even more important to improve customer service experience – by QDM INC
Automation will boost customer engagement by leveraging behavioural data at scale
Email Marketing will see automation becoming smarter and even more focused on customer experience and behaviour.
We already know that this is the main purpose of automation, but today there is still too much manual work involved, and that’s simply not scalable, especially for companies with a very extensive customer base or email list.
The future of email marketing is about simplifying further the whole experience and providing companies with more specific directions about what to do, what to say, how to say it, and when. Recommendations, both from a strategic and tactical perspective, will become more accurate as we’ll be able to better leverage behavioural data at scale.
Automation will be able to inform companies about how specific segments of users are behaving and what it is that they need, want, and care about. And then, strategically, to act on that and provide the best possible experience, which is key to increasing customer engagement and satisfaction.
Ross Andrew Paquette is the founder and CEO of Maropost
Email and Ecommerce platforms will work together to deliver personalized experiences
The ecommerce boom of 2020 has fuelled record competition online. More than ever before retailers and brands are having to compete for the attention of customers through an increasing number of increasingly crowded channels that are driving up the cost to acquire new customers.
In a world where a seamless and personalized omnichannel experience is the difference between winning and losing customers, email marketing continues to have an increasingly important role to play.
Delivering personal experiences through email will become the new normal, achieved through rich integrations between ecommerce platforms and smart email marketing technology.
Dynamically generated email content including product recommendations, and specific offers based on browsing behavior across channels, previous actions, prior purchase history, and other enriched data will drive relationships between consumers and brands.
Ryan Murtagh is the founder and CEO of leading ecommerce platform, Neto.
Interactive emails will become part of the customer experience
Email as a medium has grown even more during the 2020 – consumers are more open to receiving emails and acting upon them. Across all industries, subscriber lists have grown, from March and all the way through Q4. There are some great new advances in email that will arrive in the next few years.
One of the next frontiers in email marketing is to remove another barrier to entry for customers. Emails will become more interactive, with live surveys and potentially in email purchases becoming possible in just the next few years as Google, Microsoft and Apple update their inbox technologies to handle Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP.
It will be exciting to see these functions be implemented, improved upon and part of our customers regular experiences.
Miles Bodie is one of the Associate Directors of the Lifecycle Marketing Department at Hawke Media.
Email Marketing will become more and more effective thanks for email-based retargeting
Email-based retargeting is going to be the big trend in email marketing in the next couple of years. A kind of hybrid between retargeting and remarketing, it’s when you identify anonymous users on your site and instead of retargeting them with display ads — or in addition to showing them display ads — you send them an email.
In other words, it combines the broad scope and behaviour-driven, proactive approach of retargeting, with the cost-effectiveness of remarketing.
It can be done by using an identity resolution technology which allows you to identify anonymous traffic on your website. You then re-engage those potential buyers with an email marketing campaign that takes advantage of the behaviour data recorded for each potential buyer.
This is the perfect strategy for our current times when internet traffic has actually increased because so many of us are quarantined at home — now is the time to keep customers engaged and build audiences so that you can come out strong post pandemic.
Adam Robinson, Founder and CEO of GetEmails, is a tech entrepreneur and Amazon best-selling author.
AI will drive a better and more scalable email customization and personalization
Although email marketers have been able to dynamically personalize message content at a 1:1 level for decades, machine-learning and advanced platform integrations will make it easier to do, and much more common.
The ability for data-powered artificial intelligence to drive the process will power this leap forward. In other words, it’ll become easier for the average marketing professional to automate and generate messages reflecting real-time relevancy to individual customers and subscribers.
Where in the past marketers needed to create rules-based workflows to generate distinct email message versions for different audience segments or members, in the future live cross-platform feeds of both subscriber digital marketing response and purchase behavior will be used to predict and inform the best, most relevant content for a specific message – which can be inserted on-the-fly.
The result? “Mind-reading” commercial email that looks truly 1:1, dynamically keeping pace as a customer or email subscriber’s relationship to your brand evolves.
Karen Talavera is the founder and principal of Synchronicity Marketing, a data-driven digital marketing consultancy.
Email Marketers will rely more on first-party data for their email campaigns
With the demise of third-party cookies, marketers will rely on first-party data to learn about their customers and deliver the content they want. For some email marketers, this may mean turning to additional tools like CDPs, but many savvy marketers will try to better use the technology they already have.
More email marketers will be connecting Google Analytics (or whatever analytics tools they use) to their email marketing database. GA provides a wealth of historical data email marketers can use to tailor content, product recommendations, and even the frequency of their emails. Based on site behavior, marketers will opt folks into different email lists to send them more timely, relevant emails. This will increase clicks, opens, and revenue.
Almost every site in the world uses the free version of Google Analytics, and when connected to email, the power of Google Analytics becomes incredible. The modern customer expects personalized experiences, and the opportunity to tap into this first-party data and deliver on customer expectations is too good to pass up.
Rishi Shah, CEO of Digioh. Digioh helps email marketers capture more emails with Pop Ups, Abandon Cart, Landing Pages, and Preference Centers
Email notification banners will play a critical role to gain attention
2021 and beyond will bring the need for a more formalized email notification banner. 2020 has been a year of constant change and, as consumers, that meant not always knowing the most up-to-date information from brands.
As marketers it meant many of us have been struggling to get that same information out. This will have a lasting impact on how we as marketers communicate to our audience.
Notifications exist widely on the web, but few have made the translation over to email. While email is the number one place you communicate with your audience, it hasn’t always been the best place for your audience to find critical information.
Email notifications that already exist are mostly done as one-offs. Incorporating formal email notifications will take template adjustments and consistency to essentially train your audience on where to find critical updates.
Cheyenne Ng is Director Of Marketing at Zembula.
Email will become even more important to improve customer service experience
Providing an excellent customer service experience through email is going to be the number one email marketing trend over the next few years.
In the digital world, consumers are looking for immediate solutions to their problems and if they don’t see the value almost instantly, they are going to continue searching elsewhere.
Brands have two opportunities when it comes to demonstrating value.
The first is great advertising paired with an optimized website that clearly demonstrates the benefits of their products in a matter of seconds so that the user feels confident in their purchasing decision.
The second and more common route is capturing an email address and sending your customer through a series of automated journeys that provide education, value, and ultimately drive conversion.
Brands that understand this and invest heavily in optimizing their email marketing are going to come out on top time and time again.
Riley Burke is Director Of Ecommerce Email Marketing & Business Development at QDM Inc.
Want to know more about these upcoming email marketing trends? Download the full report for free!
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