Email marketing trends come and go, year in and year out. But in 2022, the email marketing trends we are seeing look as though they’re here to stay.
Plus, they look like they’ll change the face of email marketing permanently.
A lot of experts thought that GDPR would kill off email marketing once and for all. In fact, it came back stronger than ever.
But like every online marketing channel, it’s changing and developing as technology advances and users become more and more sophisticated.
So, in this blog, we are going to look at the five biggest email marketing trends and what you can do to make the most of them 😁👍.
👉 Email Marketing Trends #1: AI and Data-Driven Marketing
The amount of data available for profiling and segmenting your email subscribers is growing rapidly. The possibilities for AI to power data-driven email marketing are growing daily:
- At the start of 2019, only 47% of marketers believed they had a complete, unified picture of their subscribers
- Only 17% of marketers looking at automation in 2018 considered incorporating AI
- But now, 61% of companies say AI is the most important element of their data strategy, and 30% plan to use AI in their sales processes this year
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AI and machine learning can analyze and correlate your data in ways that are very difficult for human beings, but will allow you to:
- Personalize and customize content and send times to ever-greater degrees
- Segment your audiences to more granular levels
- Test more and more hypotheses to learn what practices are optimal
- Analyze and learn from your results
Personalization has been a key trend in email marketing since 2017 at least, and AI is enabling marketers to really step it up a gear in 2022.
If you’re not looking at it, you can bet your competitors are 😲.
The potential applications of AI to email marketing are game-changing. Take a look at some examples here.
👉 Email Marketing Trends #2: Mobile-First
Mobile internet usage overtook desktops as long ago as 2014. In 2019, mobile accounted for 42% of all email opens.
So when designing your emails, you should think about optimizing for mobile design first:
- Ensure they are responsive to all devices
- Check the rendering – including image size – in all email clients before sending
- Keep headlines and copy short
- Position Calls To Action early in the email to ensure they are displayed above the fold (ie without making a reader scroll)
- Keep your design minimal – many email marketers are taking more of their design cues from social media to provide instant familiarity
- Ensure a seamless experience from email to websites using Accelerated Mobile Pages for landing pages
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👉 Email Marketing Trends #3: Interactivity
It’s increasingly possible to provide the sort of interactive experiences people are used to from social media and best-in-class websites INSIDE THE INBOX.
Many marketers are providing the opportunity to give feedback and ratings on purchases and services within the email, without the need to link back to a web property. The logical direction this trend is heading towards is 😎 one-click eCommerce 😎with email retaining your logged-in status and the contents of your shopping basket. That would enable you to shop and spend without ever leaving the comfort of your inbox!
When that becomes mainstream, experts predict a huge surge of interest in email marketing 💲💲👀💲💲.
As in other spheres of online marketing, User-Generated Content is becoming increasingly important to email.
- Encourage recipients to provide feedback at each stage of the customer journey
- Include reviews and testimonials in your emails to boost the social proof effect
- Conversion rates for shoppers who see UGC in emails are 166% higher than for those who don’t
👉 Email Marketing Trends #4: B2B Comes Up To Date
B2B email marketing practice and thought have lagged behind B2C from the outset.
For years, email has been treated as part of lead generation only but now, B2B marketers are realizing that it has a growing role to play further down the sales funnel. The Account-Based Marketing approach that is sweeping through B2B sales presupposes multiple touchpoints throughout the sales process, across a variety of channels. Again, this is about data and having access to a complete picture of your prospects throughout their customer life cycle.
If you’re not already using Lead to Account Matching, you should be looking into it to see how it can improve your rate of acquisition and customer experience👍.
👉 Email Marketing Trends #5: More Data Protection
Since the GDPR came into force in May 2018, the data protection regulations around email marketing have been tightening. That trend is continuing in 2022:
- The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) is coming into force in July 2020, extending the privacy-centered approach to the USA and threatening even more serious penalties for breaches than the GDPR
- Both India and Brazil, two of the fastest-growing world economies, are tightening up their regulatory environments
- The European Union has still not settled the terms of its long-awaited ePrivacy Regulation, which was always intended to complement the GDPR. Expect that to make progress in 2022
The risks of doing email marketing without GDPR-compliant policies and practices are growing.
If you haven’t already built a robust data protection system into your marketing, you need to make that a priority this year.
So that’s our overview of the most important email marketing trends for 2022.
Are you keeping up to date or falling behind?
Remember, email is regularly cited as the most cost-effective marketing channel around.
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