Email marketing has been a cornerstone of digital marketing for decades, but with advancements in technology and changes in consumer behavior, it’s important to consider the future of this marketing technique. Companies looking to stay ahead must find new ways to engage with customers as email marketing evolves.
Staying on top of email marketing trends is important for several reasons, such as:
- Improved engagement: By adopting the latest email marketing trends, companies can create more engaging and personalized experiences for their subscribers, thus increasing open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
- Competitive advantage: Email marketing is a highly competitive space, and staying up to date with the latest trends can give companies a competitive advantage. By keeping ahead of the curve, you can differentiate your brand from competitors and attract more subscribers.
- Better ROI: Adopting the latest email marketing trends can help companies improve their return on investments (ROI) by increasing engagement and conversions.
- Improved customer experience: Email marketing trends often focus on improving the customer experience by delivering more relevant and personalized content to build a stronger relationship with customers.
- Adapting to changing consumer behavior: Consumer behavior and preferences are constantly evolving, and email marketing trends reflect these changes. By staying on top of trends, companies can adapt to changing consumer behavior and preferences, and ensure that their email campaigns remain relevant and effective.
Top 2023 Email Marketing Trends
If you’re looking to up your email marketing game in 2023, check out the amazing tools, practices, and features that are being used and will only become more popular as time goes on:
Hyper-personalization
Personalization is already recommended for email marketing. Including the recipient’s name in the subject line or greeting, segmenting email lists based on behavior or preferences, and delivering personalized content based on past interactions are all ways of personalizing emails, and those ways have been implemented by companies for years.
However, those methods of personalization are viewed as too simplistic nowadays. They have become standard, so email marketing experts are looking for more specific ways to personalize emails.
Hyper-personalization goes beyond basic customer information. It instead uses real-time data to send email campaigns that cater to customers at an individual level. Hyper-personalization uses data that includes:
- The customer’s browsing history
- Log-in and log-out times
- Active times
- Email preferences based on engagement
For example, if your company wants to send an email campaign advertising a sales event, using standard personalization would involve targeting the email to a segmented list of subscribers that are most likely to participate in the event based on profession, age, location, etc. Standard personalization is all about targeting specific groups of people based on commonalities.
Hyper-personalization, on the other hand, would approach the customer differently. A hyper-personalized approach would involve determining when the customer is browsing the site, so you can send the email campaign as they are browsing specific pages, such as the sales page.
Instead of sending a general campaign informing them of the event, the email contains the type of information that the individual customer engages with the most, based on past interactions. So, if the customer engages more with discount notification emails versus general event messages, you would exclusively send the former.
The key to a hyper-personalized approach is gathering and analyzing customer data. There are many tools used in email marketing that will help with this trend, such as:
- Hotjar: Allows digital marketers to see the click and scroll paths as customers navigate the site, so you can determine what they miss or what they ignore.
- Google Analytics: Helps digital marketers track specific metrics, such as session duration.
- Plausible: Allows digital marketers to see how users landed on the site.
Mobile optimization
With the majority of email opens happening on mobile devices, optimizing emails for mobile has always been of critical importance in email marketing. However, just like personalization, there’s a bigger focus on hyper-optimization as customers become less responsive to the usual practices used for standard optimization.
Standard mobile optimization techniques focus on designs that fit within mobile devices, are easy to load, aren’t too long, and are easy to read. Hyper-optimization practices focus on those too, but to a more extreme degree. Design trends lean more towards fast loading times, which means that many companies will turn to minimalism, sacrificing brand identity to capture subscriber attention.
According to a report from Sender, most emails are only given 2-8 seconds of attention, and that number dwindles on mobile because of eyestrain and distracting mobile notifications. With hyper-optimization, there will be a bigger focus on giving information as quickly as possible.
Many popular companies like Spotify and Amazon are already using eye-catching statements with bold typography at the top of their emails, instead of brand-related graphics. These statements tell the customer everything they need to know, meaning that the customer only needs to spend a second looking at the email to get the gist of things. If the customer wants to know more, there are further details under the large statement.
Interactive content
Interactive content like polls, quizzes, and surveys are becoming more popular, as they can increase engagement and help companies learn more about their customers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is being used to create more personalized experiences for subscribers. AI can analyze large amounts of data, automate email copywriting to create hyper-personalized emails, and automate email segmentation. Some powerful AI tools for email marketing include:
- Dynamic Yield
- ChatGPT
- Copy.ai
- Phrasee
- Google Bard
- Agillic
User-generated content
Customers are demanding more honesty and transparency from brands. As they become more aware of the marketing tactics used by companies, they are increasingly looking for authentic and genuine interactions with brands.
One way that brands can meet this demand for honesty is by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into their email marketing campaigns. User-generated content is content created by customers, such as social media posts, reviews, and YouTube videos. UGC can help build trust and credibility, as well as create a sense of community among customers.
Incorporating UGC into email marketing campaigns is also a cost-effective way for brands to generate content. Rather than creating all of their own marketing messaging from scratch, brands can use the content created by their customers to develop better email campaigns.
Implementing New Techniques in Your Email Marketing Campaigns
As you begin to incorporate some new techniques into your marketing strategy, always remember that testing and optimizing as you go along is the best practice for developing campaigns that your customers will love.
Always keep a look out for newer trends that might work for you and roll them out slowly. Some of the newer trends may work well for some brands, but if they don’t work for yours, then it’s best to stick to the old ways.
