02 Mar 10 Email Marketing Trends in 2022
Email Marketing remains a key tool in the digital marketing world. With over 4 billion email users in the world, email marketing campaigns have proved an effective tool to reach your target audience, without having to spend more.
The first email ever sent was in the year 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, which was nothing but a set of letters and numbers, a spark that ignited a revolution of communication.
As with any digital channel, email marketing has consistently evolved and continues to do, with 2022 being no different. So what can we expect from email marketing this year and how can you ensure you continue to maintain email best practices?
EMAIL MARKETING TRENDS IN 2022
1. USER GENERATED CONTENT
User-Generated Content (UGC) is any form of content- text, images, videos, or reviews created by the end-users of a product or service offered by the business. UGC is the simplest and most popular tactic that has resulted in improved organic traffic and conversions for brands. UGC leads to increased engagement rates and customer-centric content could help build your audience’s trust.. Including UGC content in your email campaigns can help improve conversions since buyers make a large percentage of their purchase decisions based on the reviews and ratings they find on social media platforms or similar review sites.
2. SEGMENTATION TO MICRO-SEGMENTATION
Customer segmentation is an important process in marketing and forms the base of the campaigns. It has been key to email performance for a while now. Segmentation involves dividing a large audience into different groups or segments based on certain similar characteristics that make them the potential customers of a product or service. However, we are now seeing a shift in the segmentation strategy wherein marketers should dive deeper into their existing customer segments and further divide them into micro-segments based on their behaviour, preferences, and personality traits. Keeping in mind the fact that audience behaviour tends to change over time, marketers must update their email lists regularly resulting in an increase in the performance of the campaigns.
3. PERSONALISATION
A factor for email marketing being effective is the introduction of personalisation such as user a subscribers name or introducing dynamic content based on their preferences. This helps in building a meaningful relationship with your target audience and enticing them to take action. Personalisation has the potential to dramatically improve engagement with emails, leading to more opens, clicks and conversions.
4. A/B TESTING
A/B testing or split testing, involves the process of comparing the performance of two iterations of the same email with one change which can be in the form of text, images, videos, or any form of content, to understand which one performs better. A few common elements that could be included in your A/B testing are, the call to action (CTA), subject line, layout message, content, personalisation, tone etc. A/B testing in email marketing allows organisations to get a deeper understanding of their target audience, and what they interact with and then plan future campaigns accordingly. AB testing can also improve the performance of an email campaign as the winning design gets sent to the majority.
5. NO OPEN RATES
After the release of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) as a way to protect the privacy of the users. This has led to a major change in the way companies look at open rates to evaluate the success of a campaign. According to this new update in Apple’s Privacy policy, companies won’t be able to gain accurate information about the open rates of subscribers who exclusively use Apple Mail apps as the email is automatically marked as read when being processed, also affecting the use of metrics such as Click-To-Open-Rate (CTOR).
6. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
When speed is essential companies often rely on artificial intelligence or AI when the data involved in the analysis is huge and complex. AI tools help analyse data and customer behaviour, their preferences and personalities, to learn how well to communicate with their customers and even predict the outcome of certain messaging. This enables the tools to create customised messages at the right time, without any form of human intervention at maximum efficiency.
7. EMAIL DESIGN
It goes without saying that the more the content is visually appealing to the audience, the chances of the emails being engaged with are higher, especially when the users’ inboxes are flooded with commercial emails as it provides a point of differentiation. One trend to focus on is the growth of dark mode in systems and applications. According to the survey published by Medium, it was revealed that 82.7% of participants had used dark mode on their devices. Designing your emails keeping in mind the preferences of your audience would help you achieve your email marketing goals.
8. ADOPTION OF BIMI
BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification, which is an email feature that lets brands display their brand logo next to their brand’s emails, making the email look real and being sent from an authenticated email address. Although BIMI has been around for a long time, it was recently that it gained approval from Gmail, and Google agreed to support BIMI logos. Adopting BIMI would not just increase authenticity and build trust with the recipients, it would also increase brand visibility and reputation.
9. MOBILE OPTIMISATION
According to data gathered by Upland Adestra from campaigns sent worldwide from Adestra’s platform, it was revealed that 60% of email opens are from mobile devices. It’s highly likely that the majority of the users interact with your campaign using mobile devices. Ensure that your newsletter is appealing, loaded at an appropriate speed, and the CTA is visible and accessible to the user.
10. AUTOMATION
Email Automation is a tried and tested strategy which has so much to offer in the current year. Businesses strive to stay connected to their customers, ensure the right people, receive the right message, and at the right time, email automation has been proven the most effective marketing automation tool. An added advantage of automation is that it lets you look into other major tasks, while automation runs in the background.
Marketers should look to incorporate the best marketing strategies across all channels, including giving equal attention to email marketing to achieve the best results. Give these email trends a go and see what works for your organisation and give your subscribers an improved brand experience.
