There are several popular and effective digital marketing channels marketers use to improvise and boost their audience outreach. Email marketing is the most affordable and effective among them. Many SaaS and eCommerce businesses rely on this strategy for converting customers and gaining traction.
In times when over half of the internet population tends to buy things online, businesses find no other way as effective as email marketing to engage and connect their potential customers digitally. Further advancements in email marketing like email automation and personalization can add up to the overall efficacy of email marketing campaigns and increase your return on investment (ROI).
Key Email Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2021
In today's digital landscape email marketing is considered a great tool to promote your products as well as services, make your brand vocal and distribute business communication. If you’re also planning to launch a successful email marketing strategy, build a plan that includes the latest trends and innovations in email marketing. I have got a few important email marketing trends covered here that can make your 2021 email marketing strategy super successful.
Email Personalization
A message without personal touch is a message wasted. Your customers want to feel valued. The biggest concern so far with email marketing is the lack of personalized emails catered to target a specific set of customers. Moreover, creating personalized email campaigns is time-consuming and tedious. Now, marketers are leveraging automation and machine learning with AI to produce emails that are highly customized and interactive.
Automation in email marketing allows you to shoot targeted emails to specific audience segments. Before planning a custom email campaign devote time to analyze customers’ shopping habits, their buying patterns, and services as well as products they are interested in. Now you can create custom email templates having in mind these attributes. Basic courtesy matters the most in email communication. While writing emails, don’t forget to add the customer’s name and a salutation.
You can send hyper-personalized emails to greet customers on their birthdays, motivate them to complete the purchase if they drop the shopping midway, or encourage existing buyers to repurchase from your site.
User-Generated Content
Using user-generated content in emails can generate organic traffic and convert more subscribers into high-paying customers. Positive feedback about your brand encourages customers to buy from you. It instills brand trust. More positive feedback increases the chances of getting more converting and paying customers.
While writing an email you can incorporate user-generated content such as customer reviews, polls, and photos of your customers using your products and services. To encourage more user-generated content through emails you can add surveys and ask people to participate. If you have an astounding social media follower base, request them to tag photos of them while enjoying your product.
Interactive Email Content
The way email marketing was done in the past is completely changed. Now, emails are no more a combination of the subject lines and a few paragraphs. It’s beyond that. An ideal email can now incorporate images, videos, infographics, and many other interactive elements that skyrocket user engagement.
Adding interactive content in your email doesn’t cost a penny. Instead, it brings you more interested and engaged buyers. Interactive content can be of different types including Gifs, innovative CTAs, dark as well as light modes and polls, etc. Some email campaigns are now leveraging gamification content as well to enhance the level of user engagement. If your niche is gaming, you can incorporate a mini-game into your email campaigns. But make sure, it should be relevant to your industry and what you’re offering to your customers.
Privacy Friendly Emails
Customers have become more privacy-conscious now. They care about the ways their data and personal information is being used. Whatever is the goal of your email marketing campaign, you must make sure that user privacy is intact. Be up to date about changes in legislation related to data privacy. Send emails to your customer to update them about the upcoming change and mention how you are complying with the legislation to protect their information.
Allow subscribers to unsubscribe from your emailing list whenever they want to go. Make sure that the process is easy and easily visible to the users. It will help you retain the most engaged customers.
Optimize Email across Platforms
Customers may be using different devices to access emails. Thus, emails should be optimized across devices and platforms. That means the emails should be giving the same level of user experience on every device whether mobile, desktop, or tablet. If you’re not tech-savvy, consult a website designer who can help you in making your emails responsive across devices and platforms.
Customer Appreciation Emails
Last but not least. Sending customer appreciation emails can help you obtain more loyal customers and provide a sense of value to users. Such emails come in many forms including personalized birthday messages, early access invites and thank you emails, etc.
Conclusion:
An ideal email marketing strategy should incorporate all the above points mentioned. Besides that, there are many other important things you can do to make email marketing campaigns a huge success. Use compelling and thought-provoking subject lines in emails. Choose the perfect timing for sending out campaigns. Clean up your emailing list regularly to avoid sending emails to invalid and non-existing emails in the list.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.