It’s predicted that our email inboxes will soon be more visual and interactive, giving us more control. What will the evolution of the inbox mean for your email marketing plans?
What’s changing
Automatically previewed links and attachments and easy three-dimensional swipe and tap interfaces will allow users to prioritise incoming items. So, the few seconds you currently have to grab someone’s attention could reduce dramatically. There are also predictions that paid-for protocols will filter your emails and limit the amount of marketing content delivered.
From May this year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will also mean your email marketing must be more transparent. Your audience must give you specific permission to contact them and should always have the option to easily ‘unsubscribe’ from any list. So, to maintain effective email marketing over time, your content must be even more relevant and valuable.
What stays the same
Email marketing will continue to be an invaluable tool to improve the relevance of your brand. There’s no doubt it will continue to drive higher conversion rates than other channels and will remain important for your customer acquisition, engagement, and retention strategies. However, identifying simple touch-points throughout your customer’s journey won’t guarantee future success.
Increasingly email marketers will need to take a complete view of the customer’s experience. Advanced tools like dotmailer are already available to enable you to create, test and send timely cross-channel messaging based on integrated views of individual customer behaviour.
Relevance and personalisation
This will be at the top of the list for email marketing excellence in 2018. There are some powerful tools available to create highly relevant and personalised content.
MailChimp’s application programming interface (API) allows you to use information about purchases on your Magento, Shopify or WooCommerce ecommerce site to tailor your MailChimp lists and campaigns. You can use pre-built segments such as potential, first-time and lapsed customers to provide bespoke messaging. You can also create your own segments based on order types or past purchases, for example.
Integrating a module that behaves like a personal shopping assistant with your ecommerce site, such as Nosto and Clerk.io, will also allow you to suggest other associated products online and send timely emails, dynamically updated with recent search histories. Your emails can make personalised recommendations and promotional offers that will really engage your customers.
Intelligent email marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) allows you to mine large volumes of data about customer behaviour. It will help you to make more accurate predictions about your customers’ future actions and their lifetime value.
AI will also make email marketing even more sophisticated, allowing ‘hyper-personalised’ content in the right tone of voice, at the right time of day, with relevant offers, and all the other personal details that will help to develop long-term relationships.
Mobile-friendly design
While desktop remains important, it’s estimated that 8 out of 10 email users will access them using their mobile devices by the end of the year. That means mobile-friendly email marketing will need to be a priority.
Almost three quarters (73%) of email marketers say they are already prioritising emails that are optimised for mobile devices. Responsive landing pages and easy-to-access apps are essential ingredients to increase conversion rates from mobile devices.
Interactive emails
Interactive elements in your email design that allow readers to interact with your content without leaving their inbox are removing an important barrier to customer engagement and conversion. Including animated GIF images, gallery carousels, social share buttons, surveys and shopping basket functions can all add to your customer’s experience and improve your results.
Are you ready to grow your ecommerce business with the latest email marketing techniques? Let’s talk.
