Monday, October 13, 2014

6 Email Marketing Trends for 2014 you shouldn’t be missing

Recently I've been signing up to a couple of interesting social commerce sites, and one thing I've noticed that a lot of these sites send out routine emails with relevant products that may be of my interest. It was interesting to find that they were keeping track with the type of products that I was looking at, and were sending out customized email pages with the list of relevant items that may be of interest on my behalf.

Starting off from that, I wanted to see if there are any posts on any current email marketing trends, and found this post that laid out the six trends in the email marketing space:

http://www.moosend.com/blog/6-email-marketing-trends-for-2014-you-shouldn-t-be-missing/540

Here are the six that they're laid out, with a brief description on each of them:

  • Integrated Marketing
How Email Marketing integrates with other marketing channels will be one of the biggest challenges during the new year. We see a lot of interest from marketers to see how to integrate various marketing channels, test marketing activities through different media and set up a long term plan for their marketing strategy. So Email Marketing reporting will have to be ready to integrate with various other tools and metrics to be part of an overall marketing view and approach to the customer.
  • Video Emails
Email is about to become more interactive, incorporating video and other interactive elements. A study by MarketingProfs recently indicated that video in email is a growing trend. Right now, only a quarter of marketers include videos in their email campaigns, but that proportion is likely to change in the near future. Marketers seem to be aware of the need to turn to this option, and by the end of the year we believe that the percentage of those that embrace video will increase.
  • Personalization
Marketers will focus even more this year on finding ways to personalize their message to the customer. Companies that stick with the “batch and blast” mentality will soon be looking like the “dinosaurs” of the email marketing world.  Personalizing the Email Experience is a tough undertaking for the marketer, a useful tool which brings higher reports on engagement and increases the rates of opens and clicks.
  • Mobile friendly newsletters and landing pages
    In a world like the one you see right above, imagine a user that finds it difficult to read through your email while on the go, or even worse he cannot quickly download your webpage after clicking on your links, or cannot easily find his way on your landing pages without page zoom or endless scrolling. Problem. As Email is making the transition from the traditional desktop environment to mobile devices, it is becoming a more time sensitive, personal communication channel, so getting the mobile experience through responsive email design is considered most critical. This year many marketers seem to focus on solving these issues. In case you haven’t done it already, now is the time to catch up with the lost pace.
    • Behavioural email marketing
    Event-triggered emails set the example of behavioural email marketing. Previous customer behaviour triggers a targeted and relevant email campaign which results in what the marketer has predicted (and hopped for): converting in any way, like purchasing a product or revisiting an abandoned shopping basket. That’s why this year behavioural emails will be on top of digital marketing priorities, and tools like Moosend’s advanced segmentation filtering will be assisting in this effort. 
    • Quality of content
    Content is the king for many marketers. Original content, targeted content, updated content, tailor-made content, quality content. So Email has to give proof of content, meaning that we all have to be careful of what we include in our Email proposals, how we address those proposals to our target audience, who we are addressing them to and how to make our recipients come back for more. Good content never ceased to be a serious focus on Email marketing.
    I'd like to add to the fourth trend of the shift towards mobile email access. While it is true that due to the physical constraint in the mobile devices it is crucial to make the marketing messages compact, the true essence of marketing should not be sacrificed in order to meet the space requirements. For instance, if people need more info on the marketing material they will simply log on their PC/laptop for detailed description of the product rather than trying to execute the transaction all on the mobile device. 

    Email marketing has come a long way from receiving irrelevant spams on your accounts to customer-friendly, useful contents. Historic lessons learned from the consequences of treating email accounts in the same manner of physical mail addresses have shown us that consumers are willing to access information that they really wanted to see on their mail. Therefore, above all the efforts to make the online mail contents as entertaining and engaging as possible, the essential factor of these mails serving as a channel of bringing customers closer to what they want to actually purchase should not be ignored.


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