Email Marketing has always fetched higher ROIs for companies – $44 for every $1 spent. But then, despite proving its mettle time and again, questions have been raised about its effectiveness. But the fact is, unlike social media platforms that have gone costly with pay-to-play format, or for that matter, ad blockers obstructing the ad pop-ups, emails seem to be the only marketing strategy that remains untarnished and unhindered in the face of ever-evolving technological advancements.
The best part: It’s not only cost effective; you can even customize in keeping with the technological changes.
#1. Mobile-Friendly Emails
There’s no question of prioritizing mobile for your emails this year because if you don’t do it, your email strategy is almost dead.
The very fact that of the 900 million Gmail users, 75% of them are opening them on their mobile devices only reinforces the fact that emails have to be mobile-friendly, no matter what.
Meaning, the success of your email marketing campaign in 2019 will depend solely on the fact that whether or not your emails are mobile optimized. However, do bear in mind, optimizing emails not only comprise the designing part, to make it smartphone friendly, you also need to map out the entire customer journey for the mobile users.
Why? It’s because customers aren’t just reading emails on their mobile devices, they even shop these days on their mobile devices. Not to mention, land on your web pages via the emails.
All this means, your CTAs should be clear, which in turn will make conversions as easy as possible.
When you don’t intend to optimize for mobile, thinking that customers will check their emails on their desktop, think again. According to a recent study, if the messages aren’t getting correctly displayed on mobile devices, it will be deleted within 3 seconds.
Bottom-line: Make your emails mobile-friendly.
#2. More Personalized Emails
If you are growing your list via organic means, be rest assured, your database will be filled with real fans of your organization. In many ways, they are already in tune with your business and even value your offerings because, at some point, you offered them something of value.
This year, you could further that connection via segmentation. With the help of big data, companies can easily segment their list according to the customer base and the sort of content they previously used to communicate with customers.
When the email list is segmented, share relevant information with customers, use email drip campaigns. Within the tool, you can add custom variables so every email will look highly-personalized and as if it was composed for that person particularly. The emails with a human-like touch always have a higher open and click rate. So the conversion rate is higher too. To be the best, nurture subscribers only with relevant information, which is in their personal field of interest.
For example, American Express’ hyper-personalization email marketing strategy that resulted in a compound annual growth rate of 150% in engagement was formulated by looking at customers’ data. The data helped them arrive at their spending habits and also what made them to spend more. To conjure personalized emails that resonate with your customers, you could consult top email marketing companies.
#3. More use of Videos
As it turns out, users love to consume video content – the rise in the use of videos in social media and other channels being the case in point. Sure, by far, businesses were not really happy embedding videos into their emails.
Enter 2019, and businesses are more likely to experiment with video technologies, more so, with email clients offering tools required by the market. The best part of including videos in your emails is that it provides marketers wider variety of content. Unsurprisingly, businesses that focus on interactivity and gamifying their email campaigns will be witnessing a large-scale increase in their subscriber base.
So, if you intend to include video or gamification in your content, consider your audience. Study the email and website user data deeply to figure out what is important for your fans and then, accordingly, build customized content. Nevertheless, keep this in mind that you may not get it right all the time. But then, you can use the lessons learned and apply them immediately.
#4. Incorporate Artificial intelligence
Whenever a new technology enters the marketing space, the IT landscape gets back into the regular questioning mode. Will this new technology end killing up emails? Even the arrival of artificial intelligence made people think on similar lines. Quite contrary to the beliefs, AI will be complementing your email marketing efforts and will, in fact, make email marketing more and more successful in 2019.
According to content marketing experts, marketers can use AI to decipher the kind of content potential customers are currently reading: whether it’s user-generated content, technical content or marketing-generated content. This, in turn, will help you offer personalized customer experience and high customer satisfaction.
#5. Conjure Different Content Combinations
AI can even help you come up with different content combinations depending on what will perform the best.
Do users convert more while reading customer stories, or when you highlight the mission, vision statements? No matter what, AI looks at your content and helps nail down the best performing content. In fact, it even suggests different content combinations.
For instance, after analyzing click-through and conversions, AI might recommend combining customer stories with company profile to conjure a unique blog post explaining how your company’s ethos echoed with the customers, which, in turn, made them fall head over heels with your company products.
Final Thoughts
Technologies may come and go but email marketing has never lost its sheen. In fact, the spotlight will remain on email marketing, maybe for years to come. So, let not the new age technologies lure you away from evergreen strategies that have proved effective for your business over the years.
However, if you could bring email marketing together with new technologies, it would work like magic. Not to mention, you will be able to beat your competition hands down.