Statista data shows that in 2023, the world will have approx 4.3 billion email users. This answers a long-standing question – whether email marketing is still relevant.
The answer is email marketing is more relevant than ever, even in the time of the social media boom. In fact, email marketing yields the most revenue for every dollar spent, $42. However, the fast-changing technological landscape and the introduction of AI in marketing are changing the future of email marketing.
In this blog post, we’ll look at the most important trends and analyze them to help you stay on par and create successful email campaigns in the future. Let’s get started.
With the Apple Mail Privacy Protection coming into action, email open rates have become an unreliable KPI for most businesses. Most marketers have stated that they have seen inflated email open rates.
Then which KPIs to rely on to generate accurate data for your email marketing campaigns? Click-through rates, response rates, conversions, and other engagement metrics.
Email personalization has shown incredible results for businesses all around the world. In fact, a study reveals that 79% of consumers prefer to communicate with a brand only if they receive personalized messages.
This stat proves that personalization is the key to your prospects’ hearts. Hyper-personalization is not scalable for most businesses, especially in the B2B industries. That's why many B2B organizations look to appointment setting companies to help personalize their email marketing at scale. However, you should test hyper-personalized emails for your campaigns and analyze how you can implement it successfully. Additionally, using an SPF checker can enhance your email deliverability, ensuring your personalized messages reach the target audience's inboxes..
It's undoubtedly a fact that email marketing has significantly changed since ready-made email templates appeared. They make the process so much easier and better for both the companies and the customers. But there's another side to this. On one hand, templates offer efficiency and consistency, enabling businesses to streamline their communication and maintain a professional image. However, the risk lies in becoming too formulaic, potentially diminishing the personal touch that fosters genuine connections with recipients.
The key lies in striking a balance between automation and authenticity. Marketers must carefully tailor templates to align with their brand personality while ensuring the content resonates with the target audience. Find out more on how to achieve the perfect balance, and use templates to your benefit.
The involvement of automation tools and AI in marketing has changed the email game completely. Nowadays, AI can segment and clean email lists, generate effective content frameworks, analyze your campaigns, and automation has helped streamline email campaigns.
So, you should implement AI and marketing automation tools in your marketing and sales efforts.
More than ever, consumers all around the world are trusting user interactions or user reviews to make purchase decisions. User-generated content (UGC) such as testimonials, case studies, reviews, photos, etc. are impacting prospects or customers to make decisions.
The best part is that user-generated content is absolutely free. If you're not already doing it, you should encourage your users/customers to share content in favor of your brand or business.
Did you know that the SaaS customer retention rate is on average 72.5% across industries? Well, the exact number might change for your industry and niche, but it’s proven that businesses grow on the foundation of customer retention.
Not just for the sake of email marketing campaigns, try to build strong connections with your prospects, make them feel appreciated and valued, and add value to their pain points.
For example, you can send a Thank you email whenever a customer makes a purchase. You can also combine special offers on their birthdays or anniversaries. This will help you maintain healthy communication with your existing customers and help you retain them at a much higher rate.
Data privacy is an alarming issue in the current situation. Your email campaigns must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) & the CAN-SPAM Act and stay up to date with new email marketing guidelines.
Alongside these compliances, as one of your email content best practices, each of your emails should come with opt–out/unsubscribe buttons. This builds trust among customers and if they don’t feel comfortable with your data privacy policies, they can easily opt out of your email list.
A/B testing or split testing is the method of comparing two different variations of a single email to separate email lists to check which one works best. Although A/B testing is becoming immensely popular, a study has shown that only 59% of businesses perform A/B testing in their emails.
In 2023 and in time moving forward, A/B testing is about to become a must for every email campaign to test its effectiveness. Besides emails, you should A/B test your landing pages, website, and UX designs.
Brand Indicators for Message Identification, or BIMI, is an email authenticity checking system used by businesses. Apple already supports BIMI with MacOS Ventura and iOS 16, followed by ESPs such as Google, Fastmail, and Yahoo.
Simply put, BIMI will ensure that emails sent from legitimate businesses will contain the businesses’ logos. It ensures the authenticity of a sender and reduces fraudulent activities. In 2023, BIMI is one of the most important and biggest changes for marketers.
The ESPs are focusing more on email users, personal data protection, user preferences, and user experiences. This phenomenon will change the shape of email marketing in the coming years.
It’s time you focus on user-first content and personalized email messages. Make sure you are segmenting your email list from time to time and adding the ‘Unsubscribe/opt-out’ button in your marketing emails.
The trend is already on and more and more businesses will follow. As we are moving towards a social-media-dominant and mobile-first world, more and more email marketers are relying on omnichannel outreach.
So, you better focus and adapt to various platforms such as SMS, push messaging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. Engage all these platforms (based on where your audiences are) to create an omnichannel email marketing strategy.
The only constant in the digital marketing industry (especially email marketing) is change. So, no matter how much data you collect or understand the trends, you will still have to adapt to the fast-changing means of marketing.
Now that you have the biggest upcoming trends in the email marketing field, you can successfully create foolproof email marketing strategies accordingly. However, the best way to decide what works and what doesn’t is through split testing or A/B testing.
So, make it a priority for your business and add value to your clients with meaningful content.