Email marketing, that age-old strategy still takes centre stage in digital marketing campaigns.
Email marketing involves sending business-related emails to email subscribers to notify, increase sales, express brand values and establish a community for your company.
There’s been a shift from mass mailers sent to everyone and nowadays the focus is on segmentation, personalization and consent.
You could combine automation and personalization to make a strategy that appeals to your customers and boosts your return on investment.
Email marketing can be used to contact hundreds of people and is highly effective in a remote environment.
You must build your mailing list on a priority basis so that you can reap the best results out of email marketing. Your email subscribers can drive organic traffic to your website and enable you to easily track customer engagement analytics.
Keep reading to learn how you can be at the forefront with the following email marketing methods in 2021:
- Personalization
Emails can end up sounding quite dull and formal when the customers don’t feel valued.
To prevent that, you must use automation and Artificial Intelligence to appeal to consumers belonging to various audience segments.
Analyze their shopping habits, preferred services and products, to write an email that addresses these behaviours.
If some customers tend to discard their shopping carts before buying something, a targeted email could highlight this with a useful reminder to take a decisive call to action.
Remember to always refer to the customer by name and think about featuring a personalized note.
Although the process sounds very time-consuming, you should know that you can automate personalization, all you need to do is lay out a foundation.
Based on the information you have, you could compile a series of email templates along with customers’ names. You can then leave it to automation to take care of the rest.
- Leveraging AI to supercharge your email strategy
To gauge open rates and customer habits, AI can be utilized for a range of tasks such as:
- Survey optimization
- Result prediction with analytics
- Dealing with huge amounts of customer information in one go
- Removing customers from mailing lists who don’t engage with your promotional copy
- Composing email subject lines
- Sending emails when they’re most likely to be read
- Reorganizing email marketing campaigns
By assisting you with these tasks, AI can enhance your campaign’s speed.
- Emails for people with special needs
In the near future, accessible emails will be the standard, not the exception.
Advanced email technology will be able to cater to visually and hearing impaired people, so you must ensure that your company emails cater to their needs.
- Improving the shopping experience with Augmented Reality
Thanks to augmented reality, shoppers can wear and browse products in a virtual shop. Using smart email, marketers could send emails showing the same items which gives customers an enjoyable experience and increases the chances of them completing a purchase.
- Employing A/B testing
Your customers’ preferences will change continuously and so it’s become even more crucial for you to use A/B testing. What your customers liked a year ago may not interest them any longer.
Below is an example of A/B testing of subject lines by Swiggy.
George, K. (2021, April 19). Email Marketing Trends 2021: Are You Ready to Overhaul
Your Email Strategy? Jeffbullas’s Blog. https://www.jeffbullas.com/email-marketing-trends/
- Adding interactive content
Including interactive marketing in your emails boosts engagement and is growing in popularity by the day. There are many methods which can be easily used such as:
- GIFs and images you can zoom into
- Small games relevant to your target audience and services
- Surveys and polls
- Interactive merry-go-rounds which show services and products
- Specific calls to action
- Emails to appreciate your customers
You could send emails to express your appreciation and gratitude by:
- Sending early bird invites
- Sending emails thanking customers for making a purchase
- Personalized birthday wishes with discount offers
You could gear these to suit present day conditions like providing healthcare and other front line workers special offers.
- Optimization of email on all devices
This may sound quite obvious but it is essential that you optimize your emails for all devices. Most people check their emails on their smartphones so you must ensure that they’re getting the same quality of experience that a desktop computer user would get.
You could hire a technology company to optimize your emails for smartphones.
- Rendering your emails privacy-friendly
Customers are better informed about issues concerning their privacy and are more conscious of how their information is utilized.
Privacy has to be the central aspect of all your campaigns to guarantee that you’re fulfilling their expectations.
Thus, you must continuously review data privacy laws and be transparent with your customers. You must inform them of any future alterations to data privacy and how you’re safeguarding their information, which also positively reflects your company’s ethics.
Be cautious that you don’t commit the same mistake that Amazon did recently
with their ‘dark pattern’ controversy. The e-commerce giant experienced legal trouble for using a design which made it difficult for users to cancel a subscription.
It was revealed that cancelling involved browsing through multiple pages and encountering warning signs continuously.
So you must avoid this by ensuring that it’s easy for your customers to cancel their subscription to your mailing list.
This will also permit you to reassess your mailing list and guarantee you’re only keeping highly engaged subscribers.
