The Future of Email Marketing

The clear email marketing trends for 2023 show that it will continue to be a powerhouse to keep communication open between businesses and their customers. In fact, email marketing is now considered a vital part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

But despite its popularity, email marketing remains a challenge for marketing teams. The rise of mobile devices and social media platforms means consumers expect instant access to information. This makes email less effective at reaching them.

As a result, email has evolved into a much more sophisticated form of communication. Today, email marketing campaigns are no longer limited to sending out promotional messages or newsletters. Instead, digital marketers use a wide range of tactics such as customer service, event registration, and even direct sales.

As new marketing tactics continue to spring up, email marketing still stands out as a powerful tool to engage your audience. So where does that take the future of email marketing? If you’re considering getting started, it’s good to be aware of expected upcoming trends.

1. Email Personalization Matters

The ultimate goal of an email marketing campaign is to generate more revenue either directly or indirectly. In recent years, marketers have determined that personalization is one of the best ways to improve your user experience.

Think about how you react to the emails coming to you. If you get an email that seems overly promotional or unrelated to your interests, you’re more likely to delete it or mark it as spam than read it. If you’re creating an email marketing campaign, it is important to connect people’s needs to get them engaged with your message.

One of the reasons email marketing works so well is that it provides a personal touch. You can customize and segment so that you’re sending just the right content, to just the right people on your list.

In the future, complete personalization will be the norm.

You’ll need to do more than just include subscribers’ names in your messages. You’ll have to provide them with a fully tailored experience to keep them engaged and tuned in.

2. The right email marketing software matters.

When choosing the right email software for your business, you ensure the software equips you to handle your future email marketing needs. So the software should include features including:

• personalization,
• email triggering,
• email automation,
• segmentation,
• database maintenance.

Your business will be prepared for the future of email marketing and have the ability to reach out to your customers in fresh, imaginative, and efficient manners.

Benefits of Email Marketing Software

Email marketing provides various advantages that can help expand your brand. That’s why using email software is incredibly useful. It can accomplish numerous tasks through automation to make your email marketing easier and faster to complete.

Email marketing enables you to target your audience with precision and personalization. You can also create more engaging content by segmenting your contacts into different types of campaigns. Segmentation is vital in marketing automation as it is the act of dividing (segmenting or tagging) your contacts into smaller groups, based on shared information, common characteristics, or list subscriptions. Additionally, automated email campaigns are incredibly efficient, so you can quickly send out messages to a large number of people in one go.

In the time of data-driven marketing, email software offers the ability to track the success of an email campaign. This way, you can modify an existing campaign or create new ones that better serve your goals. You’ll be able to see which messages get opened the most and which ones are clicked on, allowing you to further customize your campaigns for maximum results.

Finally, email software also helps you maintain a strong relationship with customers by providing useful information and resources. You can use it to send personalized newsletters or even automate follow-up emails after purchases have been made.

Automated Sending

Rather than the very labor-intensive manual work and the effort needed to build recognition for a brand in other industries, email marketing software makes the process much simpler.

Establishing customer loyalty can be done rapidly with just a direct written message and set in advance to ease your teams’ stress and time.

Higher Customer Interaction

Various email marketing software like ActiveCampaign and Go HighLevel can help you automate some of your interactions with your audience in a very natural manner.

The automated flows you create can be set to trigger specific messages that help your customers feel like they are being specifically cared for and not just part of a mass mailing. This allows for great personalization at a reasonable cost.

Tip: Read our ActiveCampaign review and Go HighLevel review to learn about these email marketing tools with all the key features, including personalization capabilities. These systems are easy to use either by themselves or connected with other platforms.

Measurable Marketing Results

While other types of marketing methods can produce results; email campaigns stand out because of the precise data you get from the software. It provides specific metrics that can help you shape future campaigns, such as:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates,
• Conversion rate,
• Unsubscriptions,
• As well as others you can set.

The information is set out in a way that can be read in a basic report or in a visual chart. You never have to guess what your results are.

3. Email Response AI Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will make major strides over the next year. This means more automation for your email marketing – without losing the personal touch.

When you blend the artificial intelligence being built into many software with the keyword automation already in use, you can build a powerful tool that uses the data your audience has already shared to share the messaging you send out. It results in tailored messages to the end-user and can positively impact email results.

Utilizing drip campaigns with personalized emails tends to perform the best. After the first message is sent, specific actions will dictate the next steps, leading to a much higher engagement and trust-based communication.

Shorter messages that lead naturally into each other will help prevent overwhelming your reader; all the necessary information comes in ‘drips’, rather than a wall of text that can turn some people away.

One advancement people predict for the near future is more effortless A/B testing. Right now, A/B testing takes a lot of time. Through trial and error, you can discover what works (and what doesn’t) in each element of your campaign. New AI technologies will use a vast body of data to refine your email marketing, without all the time-consuming testing.

4. Focus on Customer Lifetime Value

Over the last few years, the focus has shifted from short-term gain to long-term value. This trend is only expected to continue as more experts see online marketing as a long game.

What this means is that you’ll spend more effort building relationships with customers rather than quick sales. This will result in customer loyalty over the long term and more purchase value down the road. It’s increasingly easier to earn more from existing customers than it is to fight with competitors over new leads.

5. User-generated content in email marketing strategy.

A trend that manifested earlier this year and is projected to reach its optimum in 2023 is taking advantage of user-generated material in email marketing efforts. User-generated material (UGC) can be any form of content (videos, photos, audio, and written content) made by the customers of goods or services.

Evidence exists to suggest that user-generated material encourages conversion.

A vast majority of buyers (82%) state that user-generated reviews are remarkably useful. Roughly 70% of all consumers base their purchasing decision on reviews and ratings from other users.

Approximately 70% of consumers make their purchasing choices based on feedback and scores from other customers.

But wait there’s more! UGC can serve as its own type of content. If you’re having difficulty satisfying email content requirements, you can always utilize user content to create more robust campaigns.

Potential customers are more likely to purchase items that have been recommended by others. Showcasing user-generated material in your promotional messages helps to illustrate that genuine individuals actually buy what you offer and, crucially, they are happy enough to share it online.

After customers have made a purchase, you can send them an automated request to leave a review and include photos. This will not only save you money but also provide a great opportunity to strengthen your email marketing strategy.

6. Smarter Email Design

Today, fewer people pore over their email inbox sitting at a computer. Some people don’t use a PC at all. In order to thrive over the next year, your email marketing needs to be designed for smartphones and other mobile devices. This includes how you format your messages and things like push notifications.

Craft a strong subject line.

The subject or headline of your email is the first thing that people see when they receive your message. It’s a short statement designed to grab their interest and make them want to read more. Your subject line must draw attention in order for them to open your email.

An effective subject line should have these features:

• Engage your audience quickly and concisely.
• Offer something of worth that makes the audience to open the message.
• Outline the contents of the email for recipients so they know what to expect when they open it.

Add automation to a subject line or module

Many email software programs allow you to add personalization directly into the subject line with either names or topics. In order for these to work, you must have prior information on the audience you are speaking to.

Write an attention-grabbing pre-header.

The initial text that appears in your email, before the main content, is called a pre-header. It is comparable to the meta description of a website and it is the second thing that people who receive the email will observe. Rather than rewriting the initial sentence of your email, you can modify the pre-header to give a sneak peek into what your audience will find in the message.

Be concise.

How many times throughout the day do you find yourself opening an email thinking, I can’t wait to sit down and take the next 5-10 minutes to really dive into this email from Business X!

If you’re like me, it’s probably almost never or never.

The key is to provide email recipients with the pertinent information they expect without getting overly detailed. This will show that you respect their time, which could lead to higher levels of reader engagement.

Keep your email on-brand.

When the recipient opens your email, they should recognize that it was from you and your business. This means that your messages should be personalized with the company’s logo and colors.

To ensure that your email has a consistent style, think about employing the following techniques:

• Your emails should be consistent in tone & brand to your other content, written or otherwise.
• Include your branding, a connection to your website, links to your social media profiles, and CTAs correlated with your wares or services. This is a great way to broaden the recognition of your brand while also heightening sales.

7. Interactive Messages Email Marketing

Traditionally, email marketing messages consist of static text with images. There’s nothing for the recipient to do, except read and click on links. While this has served businesses well, the future of email marketing will involve more interactivity, with messages that function almost like mini-websites. This trend could start to take off over the next year.

What kind of interactivity might the future hold? Messages might include small videos or interactive calls to action. Or, they might contain a sample of a product or service the person can use within the email or allow the user to generate their own content.

It’s tough to predict the future of email marketing with ever-changing trends, but one thing that’s for sure is that email marketing is here to stay.

This focus has been in working for some time, yet it is expected to become even more popular by 2023. Interactive and reactive emails are the perfect match for email marketing as they boost customer involvement and augment email connections. Some specific interactive email components are projected to reach their peak in 2023:

• Animated buttons and CTAs.
• Rollover effects to showcase product offerings.
• Interactive image and product carousels, controlled by the user.
• Accordion options are developed to reduce the size of extended emails.
• Surveys, polls, and user-generated interactive content.

These strategies are associated with the current trend of email marketing gamification, which can give businesses an edge over their competitors by making their messages stand out in recipients’ inboxes. Gamified solutions provide a way to differentiate from the crowd.

Still, it’s nothing complicated. There are a number of tools out there that can help you create some of these animations and gamification.

8. Better data

Stop believing that open rates are always a reliable measure of how well people connect with your emails. In the year 2023, we’ll move away from using only open rates as one of the major email marketing indicators and switch to something else.

Email monitoring programs take advantage of pixels that are activated when the recipient opens their email to determine the open rate. Apple now automatically loads all elements of the email, including these tracking pixels. Thus, even if the user doesn’t actually look at the message, it will still be marked as ‘read’.

The bulk of customers (66%) access emails on a handheld device. Of those who check emails on their cell, 58% utilize an Apple product.

To make emails more effective, you’ll need to use data from different marketing channels. This data will enable you to tailor email campaigns according to how subscribers engage with your enterprise across the web.

9. Customer Data privacy & Security will be paramount.

The introduction of the GDPR and modifications to rules for email marketing requires evidence that those on your mailing list have given their permission to receive emails. These alterations show the rising concern of customers regarding data security & privacy.

Tackling this issue could be as straightforward as asserting that your emails are consistent with PCI and GDPR compliance. Furthermore, when you modify your privacy terms, make sure to email customers about it. With these notifications – and every email – you should include the possibility of opting out. This way, if people feel uneasy about your data handling, they can cancel their opt-ins and protect their data.

Want to learn more about how you can get started with email marketing? Get Fired Up with one of our team today!