Despite being declared dead and outdated repeatedly throughout the last decade, email as a form of communication and, by extension, marketing is still a surprisingly relevant and effective method for reaching your target audience. Amongst concerns surrounding the younger generations’ penchant for more modern social media platforms for content consumption, email has remained a surprisingly strong channel in today’s online world. The flexible, highly customizable format of email allows it to adapt and advance with the constantly evolving digital landscape, maintaining its status as one of the most prevalent forms of both communication and marketing.
How to Use Email Marketing in 2020
Any business can use this simple channel to interact with their audience and promote their brand. It is a well-founded, trusted method of marketing, with a relatively high return on investment (ROI) when compared to other digital marketing platforms.
While direct sales offer sent out to inboxes used to be a popular choice for email marketing, these techniques will no longer be effective. People are much more jaded to the influx of spam mail they receive, so are unlikely to read any emails marked as spam. This means you will need to develop innovative email marketing campaigns that are personalized, informative, entertaining, and engaging for readers who are more attuned to modern digital marketing tools, such as social media.
Pay attention to the most basic elements of email marketing techniques, including:
- Scheduling emails for optimum attention
- Creating enticing subject lines to encourage readers to open the email
- Designing visuals to make your emails more appealing and easily digestible
- Keeping track of the current trending strategies in email marketing
Trending Email Marketing Strategies for 2020
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content created by the users of the product or service. Because the product’s end-user is responsible for generating marketing content, UGC provides audience engagement in real-time by incentivizing consumers to contribute content. Through email marketing, UGC is easy to cultivate using simple, accessible, easily digestible feedback modules embedded in your emails.
User-generated content is an email-stimulated trend that can be incredibly successful in boosting the exposure your brand receives. However, it is important to know how, when, and why to gather such responses in order to yield the best results. Start with simple interactive elements, or easy to answer questions before embarking on fuller UGC feedback endeavors, such as longer surveys.
Responsive Interactivity
Interactivity drives click-through by entertaining and enticing consumers with simple features like animations, buttons, rollover effects, interactive UGC, surveys, and more. Responsive interactivity isn’t just about entertaining the recipient, it is also a valued functionality in email marketing strategy. Responsive and interactive emails are ideal for mobile users who desire content that is visually appealing and easy to process.
Accessibility
Creating accessible marketing campaigns means developing innovative methods for content, design, and code going into the future. With increasingly commonplace smart devices like smart speakers and voice assistants, generating content that is compatible with audio systems is essential. Whether users are relying on auditory assistance for convenience or due to impairments and disabilities, creating email marketing campaigns that are accessible across a variety of platforms is more important than ever.
This can be achieved by email marketers through such simple techniques as making the text more concise and using real text HTML rather than text displayed in images. Space out your content into smaller chunks for easy reading and easy listening, ensure any HTML tables are compatible with screen reader software.
Accessibility also refers to making your content usable for all viewers: don’t use technical jargon or over-complicate your emails and alienate broader audiences, such as international readers or viewers with varying reading abilities. By boosting the accessibility of your content, you are not only promoting inclusion but also increasing your potential audience reach and, consequently, your ROI.
Automation and AI
Continuing the theme of emerging technologies: automation services have advanced considerably in the last decade. Machine learning and data collection are invaluable when it comes to developing and managing a marketing campaign. These technologies can produce smarter segmentation for improved content, while streamlining and simplifying the process for marketers for a boosted ROI. The digital experience is constantly evolving and improving, through increased integration between marketing cloud services.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applies marketers with the means for fully automated processes and seamless collection and application of data to advertising content. Its real-time abilities allow marketers to stay relevant in the ever-changing digital world. AI eradicates the need for many arduous manual procedures in the process of developing and managing an email marketing campaign, using intelligent, efficient software instead. AI software can automate the process of segmentation for dynamic personalized content, taking just a fraction of the time and costs.
AI and automation software are paving the way for the future of email marketing: tech-driven email optimization tools are becoming more commonplace among marketers every day. This software will remove the element of guesswork, assess actual and predicted data, act in real-time, aggregate tests and results, and overcome human bias.
Be Mobile-Friendly
Given the rapid rise in the popularity of mobile devices in the last decade, optimizing your email marketing campaigns for compatibility with mobile platforms is vital. Adopt a multi-device approach in combination with responsive interactivity for maximum engagement.
For mobile optimization, consider such techniques as the number of columns, size of the text, use of visuals, and call-to-action (CTA) placement. While visual elements are important – especially for mobile users – you must be aware of the size of the files, as some images my slow downloading or simply not display on a smartphone. Ultimately, the goal is easy to consume content that is fresh and appealing.
Final Thoughts
While email has been considered an obsolete channel by many over the years, it continues to produce persistent advancements in new strategies and technologies. The landscape of digital marketing and the available technology is shifting day by day, so keeping up with email marketing trends and changes in software and channels of communication has never been more vital to digital marketing.