Thursday, February 09, 2017

How to Win the Inbox in 2017

For email marketers, a new year means a fresh start as well as an opportunity to outperform the year before. However, anyone in the marketing world knows that things change fast, and innovation matters more than anything.
Email has a bad reputation, and most of us regard it as being annoying, static, and boring, which is not true, especially when you look at the ROI charts comparing it to other channels. From that perspective, email is downright sexy, depending on how you practice the email marketing. The secrets are to make it mobile-friendly, animated, and easy to share, and then email can be just as effective as any other channels. Marketers always need to look ahead and get prepared for what is going to come, so there are some tips that you can use to win the inbox in 2017.
1. Interactive email will be appearing everywhere
Simple name personalization and catchy subject lines won’t cut through the clutter and increase the open rate anymore. Customers want to experience more entertaining content from email marketers, and that’s where the interactive email joins in.
Interactive email by definition means adding elements like tabbed menus, collapsible content, image carousels, rollovers and you name it to the content. An email will behave more like an actual website in the inbox, acquiring data about the person who opens and interacts with the email, allowing marketers to know their prospects better and track their behavior. Email of this kind help to provide the data that helps move potential buyers down the sales funnel.
It will take some experimenting to get it right, but you can expect to see more of it in the year ahead, the key to success is testing and optimization.
2. Integrated solutions are necessary
As the demand from customers increases, marketers need to see a full picture of the audience behavior. By adopting the integrated solutions, marketers will save time in their research as well as be able to organize all marketing activities under one umbrella.
A comprehensive technology stack allows marketers to understand how their customers are engaging with the brand across different channels, and to provide critical data that informs how and when to communicate. Compared with five years ago, there are 11 times more B2B organizations utilizing marketing automation now.
3. Email blast is the history
Getting irrelevant email blast on a daily basis is annoying, but in 2017, they’ll finally make their way toward the history books. With 76 percent of marketers considering the personalization of all emails within the next five years, according to Econsultancy, make it clear that the blast days are numbered.
Also, consumers are smart; they instantaneously know which email should be deleted. With the increased use of web tracking, data integrations, and automation, there is no excuse not to know the target customers, and the newly-emerged technology has all made it possible to deliver tailored emails to individual subscribers at scale, helping marketers avoid the dreaded trash bin.
4. Concrete ROI will be the golden ticket
In 2017, marketers will look at the past open and click rate and focus on concrete results, like conversions and revenue. The alignment between business strategies and results matters most, and marketers need to find out which is generating the most ROI. To achieve such an objective, marketers need to keep track of the entire customer journey and know its impact, which can be achieved by emails, a main measurable channel. 

No comments: