Email Marketing Trends

2017 is well underway, and with a new year comes fresh and forward thinking. Email marketing is essential for any business and new trends are emerging constantly to reflect digital developments and customer needs. We’ve gathered up a few trends that will be big this year, and ones you need to think about inputting into your own email marketing.

Personalisation

Emails have had some form of personalisation for a while now, such as addressing the recipient by name, but through more specific targeting it’s possible to truly understand your customers, and tailor your email content to the customer through data enhancement. Following the customer’s journey and retaining information through HTTP Cookies, it’s possible to gain information on your customer’s hobbies, interests, clothes size and other personal data. This data can then be used to personalise your email content for each customer, meaning personalised discount offers, increasing your ROI. Monitoring purchase behaviour and store browsing means you can also create automated emails, such as ‘cart abandonment’ messages, which will increase your chances of finalising a sale.

Interactive

This one has been tricky to catch on due to the concern that some email clients won’t support the amount of data in these mini-website experiences that crop up in our inboxes. However, with HTML5 and its media-friendly language introducing a more responsive email design, the interactive approach is becoming more mainstream. You can now have a full-immersive shopping experience in your email inbox, including dynamic content like videos and maps, which will all help improve your click-through rates. As more developments are made, it’s likely that this interactive experience will also feature mobile-friendly content, so you can cover all your bases. However, it’s important to be aware that dynamic content features may still not work across certain email clients, which is where problems arise.

Social Media

There’s no doubt that social media is a dynamic force when it comes to attracting new customers. Integrating social media components that are built into email content will drive up click-through rates, and bring more recognition to your business.

Data Protection 

So it might not necessarily be a ‘trend’, but it is an important part of email marketing that is experiencing changes. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regularity) has set new guidelines in which marketers have until 2018 to review their data gathering and protection practices. It also means that anyone sending emails to the EU must comply with these new regulations. It’s important to stay on side of the GDPR, so we suggest you research how these changes might affect you.

With regards to SPAM, filtering is getting better and there is a future possibility that SPAM will be completely eradicated. There are things you can do to prevent your marketing emails from heading for that junk folder, but as developments are made, it will hopefully be a lot easier to build trust with your customers.

What trends do you think will take off in email marketing this year?

If you would like some more information on how 5874 can help you improve your email marketing, contact us right here.