The role of email marketing is controversial – and even heavily debated in recent years. We have all heard dramatic claims such as “email marketing is dead”.
Increasingly fierce competition, evolving user behaviour, and legal restrictions on data collection pose major challenges when communicating with prospects and customers is an increasingly important aspect of brand strategy.
Yet by 2018, the number of email users worldwide has reached 3.8 billion. This figure is expected to reach 4.2 billion by the end of 2022. The latest findings from Salesforce also reveal that email is a preferred communication channel when it comes to generating engagement and ROI across the entire user experience.
If Email Marketing is (very) far from being in decline, it evolves not less deeply. Tighter data protection regulations, rapid technological advances, and increased consumer expectations are driving the pace of change faster than ever before.
Companies that want to succeed must keep up – and even take the lead to stay in the running. Consumers will have more control.
Respect for personal data continues to be the number one challenge in the digital world, where trust customers is a key success factor. Last year, 4 small letters made businesses around the globe tremble. Years of collected data suddenly came into question, and the databases melted like ice in the sun.
This is undeniable: today’s companies must provide more effort to obtain data. Consent is a significant part of any activity that requires the manipulation of personal data.
Transparency on these processes is thus made to become a more important part of the lead capture.
Trust must be won; Businesses that want to progress must, therefore, focus on creating a genuine relationship with their customers.
Really making this change a competitive advantage requires a global change of mind, beyond just compliance with legislation. It’s about rethinking your entire email marketing process and really putting the interests and needs of your consumers first.
This is where segmentation comes in.
The use of advanced segmentation also creates a growing need for more and more different email contact lists. This poses a challenge for many email sending platforms will have to rethink their policies.
Suppliers like MailChimp, who charge for each new listing creation, will have to reconsider their business model to allow their customers to keep moving forward. More and more companies realize that it is futile to send emails to people who do not wish to receive them.
This only adds to the number of “reporter like SPAM” and unsubscribe they collect in return. By organizing your contact list into smaller, more targeted lists, you can create more relevant content based on the interests and behaviors of each segment.
While some companies are reluctant to let their customers control what they receive, those who follow the move towards greater transparency and see it as an opportunity to create more targeted and relevant messages will, in return, see their engagement and conversion progress.
With the ePrivacy regulation expected to come in 2019 and – once again – bring about profound changes, businesses need to be proactive and prepare for a new era, one in which data protection and privacy are at the heart of everything.
We will dig and find out how you can implement these efforts in your e-mail marketing strategy.
User-generated content:
User- generated content refers to any kind of content – be it images, audio, visual, or images, created by the end-users. Just like any other marketing channel, user generated content creates real time engagement with prospects. It also motivates and encourages the consumers to contribute content via email marketing while promoting authenticity and improving conversion.
3Dcart, an e-commerce company, says that 82% of the consumer places a premium on user reviews and as much as 70% of the consumers turn to ratings and reviews before making the buying decision. Apart from this, email subscribers offer a symbiotic relationship with social media, making it easy to pull UGC.
Now it has become easier than ever to instantly collect UGC via email marketing efforts. Knowing when, how, why to get feedbacks and reviews is good starting point for your efforts.
Commitment
Next year could be the first where more emails will be opened on mobile devices rather than on laptop or desktop. Since mobile users can easily delete your emails, it will be better to adopt a multi device approach to stay up to date with the trends. Better combine interactivity with responsiveness which might appear as a challenge for most of the email marketing specialists.
Beyond 2020, this features will be used in a functional way while encouraging engagement, preventing customers from leaving emails and getting committed to your brand. Some of the most popular elements for interactive emails by 2020 are:
- Rollover effects for presenting the product offers
- Animated buttons as well as incentive for action
- Interactive carousels of products and images
- Accordion features to make long term emails compact
Accessible content
Make sure your email copy is concise and accurate. Litmus research suggests that the average amount of attention in an email is only 13.4 seconds. Since the average adult reader can read between 250 and 300 words per minute, the ideal copy length in an email is about 50 words.
Our experts recommend the following tips:
Use shorter sentences
Limit jargon and difficult words
Locate your content for a global audience
Accessible design
To design accessibility, you need to use e-mail templates with only images and focus on the real text in HTML format. There are simple ways to make your email design more accessible and efficient to a wider audience:
Use real HTML text
Create a strong visual hierarchy in your email
Be aware of the justification of the text; avoiding the long
parts of the text justified in the center
Use appropriate font sizes
Optimize line spacing
Use high contrast colors for easy reading
The power of email marketing rises from its ability to overcome cultural, generational and class barriers. Its effectiveness for marketers lies in its regular return on investment of about 39.40 dollars per email.
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