As we round out the first quarter of 2017, it is the perfect time to look back at the year so far and identify email marketing campaign opportunities for the rest of 2017, and beyond. Email as a marketing medium continues to grow, making it increasingly necessary to create separation and differentiation within the inbox.One of the best way to differentiate your campaigns from others is to increase content personalization. As email marketing technology advances, the opportunity for accurately personalizing campaigns becomes easier to achieve. Automation, coupled with contextual email technology, has changed the email marketing landscape. Hyper-personalized, real-time content can be delivered to each recipient as they open an email.
Compared to a few years ago, email marketing as a whole has become more intelligent and analytical. Triggered marketing automation has adopted data-driven content and even gone as far as integrating real-time technology that achieves 100% segmentation at scale, without previous knowledge of recipient information—responsive to moment-of-open triggers to create real-time context. Going forward, what is important in the email marketing world and what will happen in the months to come?
I hope to see the email marketing world mature to new levels.
Trends building momentum for 2017:
Email personalization will get better at 1-to-1 conversations
- As known data and real-time technology become more prevalent in the inbox, email personalization will shift from group segmentation to one-on-one conversations. Real-time technology continually changes the way openers interact with email content, developing a tighter relationship with them over time.
- “74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.”
– eConsultancy - This Campaign Monitor-cited email a great example showcasing how Adidas used dynamic content to change images and offerings in its email. Previously known data was used to render different content for males and females.
http://realtime.email/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Personalized-content-sections.gif
- More deep linking from ecommerce emails
- Online retailers will begin linking directly to items ready for purchase on their website; targeting device type and email client to create a direct connection between the customer and the product. Device type can be used to target mobile application offerings as well.
- Mobile becomes #1 priority for B-to-C companies
- Mobile has taken over the consumer device market with phones, tablets, watches, and touchscreen experiences. Retailers without competency in a mobile email will miss large opportunities for list growth and sales revenue.
“75% of Gmail’s 900M users access their accounts via mobile devices.”
–TechCrunch
- Mobile has taken over the consumer device market with phones, tablets, watches, and touchscreen experiences. Retailers without competency in a mobile email will miss large opportunities for list growth and sales revenue.
- Live social media content more abundant in the inbox
- If you can’t beat them, join them. Since social media has not replaced email, it would be a good idea to start using contextual email technology to blend the two channels. Live social content in an email can boost engagement dramatically.
- Email interactivity reaches an all-time high
- Contextual email technology and kinetic email design will reshape how the inbox looks in 2017. Email content and template personalization will reach new benchmarks, higher coding standards will be set, and static emails will lose ground to emails that carry more interactive properties.
Other 2017 Email Marketing Trends
These background trends will show additional industry maturation as the digital relationship between companies and their markets tighten using personal context. Email will blend digital channels, create interactive inboxes, and offer more personal communication than ever before.
- More adoption of email across business sectors
- Email marketing began as more of a sales and marketing tool, but more recently has become an important communication technology for fostering and enabling the customer lifecycle. Companies previously shying away from email will begin to adopt it as a standard tool for customer outreach.
- Email design will simplify to create less cluttered messaging
- As motion becomes more ubiquitous in the inbox, the design will become less cluttered. Slideshows, video, and kinetic menus will alleviate the need for busy text-laden email templates. Also, full-screen emails will become the normal operating procedure as inbox real estate is very precious.
- Email marketing analytics will broaden key performance indicators
- The addition of real-time email to the marketing world will change how marketers collect and report on email campaigns. These new analytics variables will open new doors for reporting and developing strong key performance indicators.
Summary
These emerging trends and predictions inherently depend on market momentum as well as the ability to show real value at the bottom line. The performance of the newer email technology will dictate how fast companies deliver real-time content and interaction to the inbox. However, we will continue to see the adoption of email marketing in new areas, the rise of mobile dominant email lists, and the growth of social-based email content, now that real-time triggers can target openers and display the most current data.