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Email is still most effective ways to communicate with your audiences, and it is still evolving. This isn’t going to change in 2018.
According to reports, Gmail alone has 1 billion users worldwide, and The Radicati Group forecasts that there will be 3 billion email users worldwide by 2020.
It can yield the highest ROI of all your marketing channels. Keeping up-to-date on email marketing best practices allows you to constantly improve your program and acquire a growing ROI.
Here are some strategies you should start executing and keep up in 2018 and beyond.
1) Automated Emails
In automatic email campaign that you create and send to a whole list of people in one go.
Small businesses will need to take advantage of automation if they want to stay competitive. The aim behind automation is that it’s planned to save businesses time and money.
Setting up automated emails can help you drive results without having to spend time working on them over and over again.
It nurtures the relationship with clients, streamlines the sales funnel and helps a lot in sending personalized messages. It offers information to your customers exactly when they need it.
If you use email automation sagely, you have the chance to deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience. It positively boosts engagement and can help you to turn your receivers into brand advocates.
2) Interactive Emails
This year, email interactivity has brought across some of the elements you would normally see on websites into email. This new interactivity encourages user engagement, increase interest and improves conversion rates.
There are limitless options you can try in your next email campaign; some are here as we’re seeing in inboxes:
- Animated GIFs
- Quizzes
- Reviews
- Search bars
- Poll or surveys
- Add-to-cart functionality
- Carousels of image
- Countdown timers and counters for promotions
3) Mobile & Responsive Design
According to reports, by the year 2018, 80% of consumers will be reading their email via their mobile device. According to Campaign Monitor, 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices.
The emails you send can be easily read on mobile devices. When thinking about the smartphone, keep your subject lines short, your content crisp, and use clear calls to action (CTA) and attractive pre-header text.
Firstly, ensure your email templates are responsive and work on all devices. If your emails look great on mobile, your customers are most likely to open them and interact and act on your marketing message.
4) Shrinking Emails
Due to explosive growth in smartphone usage is having a knock-on effect. For email marketers, the most clear change is the push to reduce the email sizes to users who using mobile to check their emails.
The optimal length for emails was between 50 and 125 words, as of 2016. Not only the content, even images, and the codes that bulk out the file size and make them take longer to load on 3G connections are shrinking.
In 2017 and beyond, email lengths and file sizes are likely to decrease in line with a greater focus on super significant bite-sized content. It’s up to marketers to change their method to see audience demands.
5) Embedded Video
If an image speaks a thousand words, then a video clip is definitely worth a thousand images or 1 million words.
Video needs little efforts to understand and is rapidly and easily consumed, especially on mobile devices.
Video in email is a no-brainer. It attracts higher engagement. Using video, marketers can simply explain the features of a new product or show a model wearing this season’s latest fashions, right in a user’s inbox.
In the meantime, animated GIF’s can be used in place of video or you can even use an image with a play button as a way to link to a site where your customers can play your video. Video in email is a win-win.
6) Monitoring of Emails
Monitoring the email messages that gets the most opens and clicks can give you insight into what’s happening with your audience.
If your email open rate is failing, it means you’re missing the expectations of your recipients and that you should prepare for worse results.
Measuring how subscribers respond to different email copy and offer can help you deliver more value to them and, at the same time, increase your engagement and conversion. So don’t forget to pay attention to what’s working.
If you’re not clear about you campaigns goal from the very beginning, you’re not going to achieve it.
7) AI and Machine Learning
When AI and machine learning becomes more affordable for small businesses, then all the emails, offers, websites and Facebook chat messages will be personalized to fit our personal profiles.
Here are some ways an email marketing AI can help you:
- Automatically improve open rates by mentioning new subject lines
- Personalize send time-based on your customer’s earlier practices
- Automate A/B testing
- Automate list segmentation
Ultimately, AI and machine learning will offer greater opportunities for refined segmentation and intelligent personalization.
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