Email marketing feels like old news. Even our class on email marketing a couple weeks ago didn't do much to change my view on this - that email marketing flourishes because you can be lazy and cheap while doing it. Email marketing is simply a faster, scalable, nearly-free version of the direct mail (and junk mail) marketing we have been receiving in our letterboxes for many years.
(Sidebar: hundreds or even thousands of years, in fact. According to this, the first pieces of direct mail marketing may have been sent on papyrus in 1000 BCE, and were certainly a "mass-market" marketing device by the time printing became commonplace in the 17th and 18th centuries CE.)
Nonetheless, everyone would agree email itself is here to stay. So what does the future of email marketing look like? Litmus assembled 20 marketing experts to weigh in on the future of email marketing, say in 2020.
In a nutshell, email marketing of the future will be more customized / hyper-personalized, more context-aware / artificially intelligent, more reliant on data from other marketing channels, and more heavily integrated with them. Marketers can therefore afford to be neither lazy nor cheap.
I found these observations the most interesting:
To me this says marketers will have to adapt their content to the newest email technologies, such as Google's Inbox, Dropbox's Mailbox and other "intelligent" mail systems that are curating email differently than the past. More importantly, they will have to not just keep pace with, but maybe leapfrog the newest innovations in this space, all of which are geared towards smarter, more machine-intelligent controls and contexts for the email we receive:
This is a very different view of the world than email marketing has been in the past. It will have to be a more active and engaging channel, something resembling a bit more today's curated social media experience, if it is to continue to be relevant in 2020.
I found these observations the most interesting:
Paul Farnell, Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder, Litmus, predicts…
I BELIEVE EMAIL VOLUME IS GOING TO INCREASE DRAMATICALLY BY 2020, BUT IT WON’T FEEL LIKE IT. INBOXES WILL PRIORITIZE MESSAGES, MANY EMAIL INTERACTIONS WILL BE BRIEF, AND MANY EMAILS WON’T FEEL LIKE EMAILS AT ALL.
Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, predicts…
EMAIL READERS ARE GOING TO GET BETTER AND BETTER AT HELPING RECIPIENTS MANAGE THEIR EMAIL BY FACTORING IN CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION AND NO LONGER SIMPLY DISPLAYING EMAIL BY AN ARBITRARY FACTOR LIKE RECENCY.
To me this says marketers will have to adapt their content to the newest email technologies, such as Google's Inbox, Dropbox's Mailbox and other "intelligent" mail systems that are curating email differently than the past. More importantly, they will have to not just keep pace with, but maybe leapfrog the newest innovations in this space, all of which are geared towards smarter, more machine-intelligent controls and contexts for the email we receive:
Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant, Zettasphere, predicts…
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE WILL MANAGE AND CONTROL THE MESSAGING TO EACH INDIVIDUAL ACROSS CHANNELS, CREATING THE TRULY INTEGRATED EXPERIENCES THAT ARE CURRENTLY TALKED ABOUT A LOT BUT RARELY DELIVERED.
Eric Stahl, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, predicts…
EMAIL WILL LEVERAGE EVERY INTERACTION FROM THE INTERNET OF THINGS, LOCATION, BEHAVIORAL DATA, AND CUSTOMER PREFERENCES TO DELIVER MESSAGES TO THE CUSTOMER IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT CONTEXT.
This is a very different view of the world than email marketing has been in the past. It will have to be a more active and engaging channel, something resembling a bit more today's curated social media experience, if it is to continue to be relevant in 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment