There have been many changes in digital marketing trends through the years, and email marketing is no different.
Email marketing is still one of the preferred ways for marketers to get their messages to consumers—it remains the best way to ensure your message gets exactly where you want it to go at the exact time you want it there. For that reason alone, it’s worth looking into and has advantages over mediums like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Here are some trends to watch for this year:
Increased personalization. Personalizing marketing email is nothing new, but this year it will go far above and beyond merely customizing a subject line. Look for increased email list segmentation that can make it easier for your business to send information to recipients that’s relevant to their interests, based on their demographics, hobbies and other data, increasing the chances that your message will be opened.
More interactive. Marketing emails should enable your customers to personalize orders, add items and have an overall better experience without leaving the original email message. New technologies, like chatbots, will further increase the level of overall interactivity, which brings us to the next trend:
Chatbots. Last year, chatbots became really refined. Look for their use to increase this year as businesses continue to cut costs with interpretive bots that never need to eat, sleep, take breaks or, in a sense, get paid. Be careful, however, not to sacrifice customer experience if you jump on this bandwagon. They’re getting almost as good as people—but they will never be human.
More visual. Graphics are key to attracting interest and spurring engagement in emails, just like they are on a social media feed or your website. Technology has advanced to the point where short GIFs and other video snippets can be included into emails without bogging down the message. Look for more of that in 2018, particularly from larger companies with the money to spend on them.
Artificial Intelligence. This is probably something you, as a small business owner, won’t want to experiment with—yet. It’s still relatively expensive and you probably don’t have the need to dip into this emerging marketing email trend. When you do, you’ll be impressed with the ability to customize Content for different customers. Artificial intelligence, or interpretative intelligence quickly analyzing data to allow you to craft more relative content for all your customers.
Those are some email marketing trends we anticipate. What do you think? Let us know in the comments!