The digital marketing landscape has constantly been evolving, and email marketing is no exception. Keeping up with the ever-changing trends adds more complexity for modern marketers. But, there are few trends, which you just can’t ignore otherwise you will be left behind. “Why engagement matters more than ever to reach to subscribers inbox.”
So, if you’re an email marketer, here are three specific email-marketing trends that you shouldn’t ignore in 2016:
Contextual Emails
Inbox today is no less than a war-zone for e-commerce marketers. Customers are bombarded with hundreds of emails on a daily basis, and they’re not going to open each and every email. As a marketer, your duty doesn’t end with deliverability. You need to give your subscribers a reason to open your email. Research by Epsilon shows that email open rates are hovering around 25%. Which means getting subscribers to even click on your email is a big challenge. So, what can you do to make your emails click-worthy? Well, context is the key. And, the foundation of contextual emails is relevancy!
Intelligent marketing is customer-centric marketing. And, marketers are moving from batch & blast emails to sending hyper-personalised emails.
Here are three ways to make your emails super relevant & engaging:
Segment your email relationships
Segmentation based on demographics is nothing new. However, generic segmentation isn’t the path to long-term loyalty. Break your email relationships into meaningful groups: prospects, customers, new & promising customers, loyal customers, and lost customers.
By segmenting your email list properly, you can easily make your email campaigns more targeted, personalised, and relevant. By personalising the message to their customer lifecycle stage, you can encourage the customers in that segment to take the desired action without overwhelming them with non-relevant promotions.
Pick your email timing wisely
Sending the right email to the right person with the right context will not give you favourable results if it isn’t timed well. Optimise your send time according to your subscribers to get better results. Remember, before you try to find the perfect timing for your subscribers you should segment your email list. Why? Because everyone on your list checks the marketing messages at different timing.
Use geo-targeting in your emails
Personalized and geo-targeted emails can transform your email marketing game altogether. For example, if a recipient clicks on your email when it’s raining in their area your email will show him the offer for a rainy day while a recipient opening in a sunny area may be targeted with a different offer.
Optimising Email for Mobile Devices
If you feel that you’ve mastered the email design for mobile devices, go ahead and take it one step further by writing your email subject lines for these devices.
These days more than 50% people are accessing their emails on smartphones. So when crafting your subject line, it’s important that you optimize them for mobile devices.
How to make your subject line look good on mobile?
Shorten it, as mobile devices display only a few characters of the subject line. Keep it under 40 characters so that your complete subject line can be seen before opening the email (iPhone cuts off subject lines at 32 characters).
TIP: Don’t just write your subject lines for mobile devices. Write the whole email for them. After all, getting people to open your email is only half part of a successful email-marketing program. The other half is encouraging them to click, which is tough without optimizing the complete email.
Email Marketing Automation Is More Necessary Than Ever
Email marketing has been around forever. But there’s a big difference between the old-world view and the new worldview. Gone are the days when sending a well-designed email was enough to win your customer allegiance. Now to even catch their attention, your messages need to be personalised, relevant, and timely, which isn’t possible if you send emails manually.
Setting up automated emails triggers on specific customer actions will dramatically improve your email marketing. Today, successful marketers are shaping the customer journey by sending them the right message at the right time with the right context, which isn’t possible if you send emails manually. By implementing a marketing automation tool, marketers get access to email personalisation capabilities that are way more sophisticated and are driven by the holistic customer view. Marketers cannot just get access to all the real-time customer data but can also leverage it to create highly personalised emails your customers will thank you for.
Automating your email workflows will save you more time, get more done, and wield more control. With advanced features like frequency capping, you can prioritise which messages should be delivered first, and you can even restrict the total number of marketing messages for every user per day/week/month.
Automated email workflows are also a highly efficient and measurable way to deliver value to your customers throughout the customer journey resulting in a great customer experience.
Conclusion
In today’s evolved digital landscape, email marketing isn’t merely about focusing on the top of the funnel but it’s all about engaging and retaining your customers throughout the customer lifecycle.
Companies who have achieved this high level of email marketing sophistication, for them each email acts as the next step to strengthen the relationship & increase conversions.
[This is a guest post from Reshu Rathi, Sr. Marketing Manager at Betaout. Betaout is a customer segmentation and marketing automation platform for Ecommerce]
