Email marketing has been around for decades, but as the years have gone by, the channel has become more advanced and marketing trends become an important part of any email marketers strategy. Email marketers need to stay up to date on these evolving trends and stay ahead of their competitors.
Using Expertsender’s new report, we have picked out some of the highlights that we think will be important for 2019.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a strategy that many marketers use to help their audience not only learn about their products/services, but to form an emotional connection, which in turn, can lead to customer loyalty meaning your customers will come back to you again and again. Stories allow customers to relate to the brand and engage them in ways that other traditional marketing such as print advertising may not.
4 elements you should incorporate into your story telling should include:
- Be personal: Customers want to know that you understand their needs and requirements
- Use the right medium: Depending on your target audience’s preference, which might be written, a graphic or video
- Compelling: Make the story fascinating and something worth reading
- Call to action: End the story by including a CTA that tells the audience what action to take such as ‘Download your eBook here’
GDPR Compliance
Expertsender’s report state that “only 25% of existing customer data meets GDPR requirements”. It is so important to have GDPR in the back of your mind, as it can affect many of your marketing decisions.
A big change to the EU data protection is based on personal data and according to SuperOffice there are “more than 269 billion emails sent every day and expected to reach 333 billion by 2021”. Your subscriber list should be comprised of customers and prospects that want to engage with your company, engagement rates will be higher if you have a list made up of contacts interested in your brand.
Email Encryption – E2EE
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a way to securely communicate whilst preventing third parties from accessing the data as it is transferred from one place to another. With Expertsender believing that consumers are going to be demanding E2EE in the upcoming years, it’s important to consider this emerging trend to be aware of how it might impact your marketing emails.
Some advantages of end-to-end encryption include:
- Cost effective – if the email service has encryption integrated into the server, there is no need to purchase additional equipment.
- E2EE consumes less resources and time
- Avoids spam
How Data Science Helps Email Marketing
By using customer behavioural data on what products customers browse and buy, data science helps marketers engage better with their audience.
There are many ways in which you can incorporate the data science; for example, in the form of predictive marketing (giving the user suggestions on words they are going to type based on what they have entered) or perhaps sending relevant emails to gain valuable insights. Data science gives companies access to useful bits of collated data through a variety of channels which are then used to estimate purchase decisions such as, how audiences likes to shop and when they are more likely to buy.
Email Retargeting
According to Expertsender, “Up to 95% of website visitors are anonymous and once they’ve left your website there’s no way for you to send them an email”. This is why retargeting is becoming more popular; as the technique allows you to serve ads to people who have previously been visiting your website. This is done by placing a single line of coding on the site and those who click on the email will be served ads across the web. Retargeting also applies to non-email retargeting such as ads through your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).
Email and CRM retargeting are effective in building many touch points with customers and both techniques can be used to improve the reach of email marketing campaigns.
To read the full Expertsender’s report click here