For nearly 10 years we’ve seen email marketing perform at a top level in the online business environment. 68% of today’s companies claim that email marketing has great potential and that the results are clearly based on a fruitful return on investment. There’s an outstanding return of $38 for $1 dollar spent, which we must admit is amazing. That being said, email marketing is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Email is thriving in the marketing environment because it has the potential to engage, motivate and inspire recipients. Also, it evolves and is constantly adapting to the most recent trends. Savvy marketers use email get closer to their customer base and convey a more personal message based on raw data about the recipients. It’s hard to say what the future holds for email marketing 10 years from now. But until then, here’s what 2016 has planned.
Email marketing rebirth
When social media emerged, everyone thought email marketing was going to die. That didn’t happen, and even though many believed it was uncool and under-resourced, savvy marketers managed to revive it. In fact, email marketing is now stronger than ever. It now works with social media to craft powerful campaigns that boosts leads, ROI and online response.
At this point, it is the cornerstone of e-commerce and a driving, stable force behind quality content. Mobile strategies involve the use of email to make a campaign visible to the masses; visible to people who use their smart device daily to access their email and stay updated with the recent updates on social media. Since email is going through a massive integration wave, it’s only natural to have faith in email marketing.
We’re not just talking about a powerful channel that can operate on its own, but also about the amount of targeted data it can generate. This data provides valuable, actionable data that helps marketers craft an audience that matches perfectly with their business needs.
Limitless control of email templates
2016 means a lot to modular template design. If you don’t know what that is, you can easily picture something like a Lego building block that is manageable – you can rearrange the pieces whenever you want. That’s exactly what we expect to see happening with email marketing. Marketers will have the capacity to craft an email, and then change it, rearrange it, and modify it according to their needs and wants. The main goal here is to edit a design fast and easy without doing things all over again from scratch.
Considering that email automation is now more accessible than ever to both small and big companies, it’s only natural to believe that marketers needs a solution where they can use similar version of the exact same template rather than go for a different one every time. Modular templates are incredibly convenient because users can segment them fast and cost-efficiently, thus saving precious time.
Outstanding personalization
Email marketers are finally starting to pay more attention to automation. Until now, most of them have played with low scale automation on lucrative customer experiences and touch points, so it’s time to take things on to the next level. A lot of marketers believe that success is only limited to these automated campaign; but there’s more to email marketing than meets the eye. Right now, savvy marketers are realizing that they’re on the right track the more time they spend on personalization and automation rather than on schedules email broadcasts and conventional campaigns.
No more HTML coding
Contrary to popular belief, email remains a popular and powerful channel in marketing. In the last 10 years or so, we’ve been witnessing several key shifts in the industry – from emails based on text only to multimedia content to mobile messaging, and more. This 2016, coding emails is no longer the norm. In fact, specialists in the field agree that HTML coding used to craft emails is long dead.
Right now, email marketing is all about powerful drag & drop technology that allows newbie marketers to become savvy web designers. There’s a lot going on in this area, and next year we’ll probably see even greater changes and emerging trends. We’ll just have to be patient and see what happens.