Upcoming Email Marketing Trends in 2018
The Upcoming Email Marketing Trends in 2018
Part 1:
In today’s world of Facebook and WhatsApp, instant messaging is playing a big part in online marketing of goods and services. However, one thing that all instant messaging apps require is an Email account. As the number of people who have access to internet increase, so does the number of people with email accounts.
According to a survey conducted on the year 2017, more than 3.7 billion people around the world use email and this number is only expected to grow in 2018. This all makes Email one of the top choices for marketers, in fact approximately 60% of marketers name email to be the highest effective channel among others for generating revenue for their clients.
With such strong performance, Email is all set to be the best marketing platform for the year 2018 as well. If you are looking for an effective, efficient and high quality marketing tactic, Email should be your top choice.
If you would like to get ahead of the curve and learn more about the intricacies of Email marketing, where it’s headed in the future and the future of Email marketers and digital marketing as a whole, Digital Floats, a premier institute in Hyderabad, offers training in digital marketing and will equip you with the right kind of tools needed to master Digital marketing.
The future of Email marketing
We all know digital marketing is only going to grow in the coming years, but what we as marketers need to know is how big a role will Email play in marketing in the year 2018. Following are some of the 2018 Email marketing trends we can expect to see.
Making Emails interactive:
No one wants to read an email that gets boring after the first 5 words. In the year 2018, we can see a more interactive approach to the writing styles of Emails. Depending on the recipient audience, making emails more fun to read could prove to be a great way to increase reader engagement with the email content and can drastically reduce bounce rates.
According to a recent poll conducted by Litmus, approximately 27% of marketers believe interactive Emails can bridge the engagement gap and can make a significant impact in Email marketing.
Some trends seen to increase viewer engagement are the use of images, sliders, quizzes and surveys in Emails. We can expect this trend to continue into the year 2018 with a more additions like Add to Cart buttons and polling systems for promotional Emails. Interactive emails will definitely be a part of Email Marketing Trends in 2018.
List Segmentation:
List segmentation is a mechanism that allows marketers to segregate lists of people and send them pertinent content at the most appropriate time.
When the topic of higher email open rates and consequently better effective email campaigns comes, marketers standby list segmentation to be the best strategy. It was a significant tactic in email design trends 2018. List segmentation has helped businesses generate in excess of 14% Email opens and approximately 100% clicks from Email campaigns. With these results, list segmentation will take its place in the future of email marketing 2018.
Despite of the pros of list segmentation, most small business owners are still not using list segmentation in their digital marketing strategies. We expect this trend to change in 2018 as we see more business owners incorporate list segmentation into their email marketing strategies to engage a larger audience and have more effective Email campaigns. We can also see more fields being added to Email opt-in forms leading to better collection of information and consequently better segmentation process.
Part -2:
The role of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is fuelling everything in our daily lives. From our mobile phones to even home and automobile automation, Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. Development of better machine learning algorithms have enabled Artificial Intelligence to be smarter than ever.
We can expect AI to enter Email marketing as well in the year 2018. Adobe, one of the leading developers of Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is already investing its resources into bringing the power of AI into email marketing.
Adobe has already developed some AI aided email features, like suggestions for email subject lines. The next phase that the digital giant wants to bring to Email marketing is suggestion of images related to the promotional content of the Email.
As AI makes more headway in the year 2018, we can see Artificial Intelligence incorporate more Email marketing aid features like advanced AI aided segmentation, integration of product recommendations and developing an all-around personalized formal to promotional emails to increase the engagement with the target audience.
More Plain-Text Emails
In the past, the trend was to create quality email templates using HTML. As we go into the year 2018, we can expect this to be an outgoing trend being replaced by plain text emails.
Surveys suggest users resonate with plain text emails more than emails filled with images, which are considered annoying. Plain text emails have seen to deliver more effective results when compared with HTML emails. The better email open rates and higher engagement rates all point plain text emails being used extensively in the year 2018.
Many expert marketers have gone ahead of the curve and have already ditched HTML emails in favor of plain text emails. Plain text emails in addition to carrying a more personal touch, also provide an easier way to format for mobile devices which is a huge pro considering more and more people are now used to reading their emails on mobile devices and this trend will only grow throughout the year 2018.
Mobile First world
As we stated earlier, we’re already into a mobile first world. More than 54% emails today are opened on mobile devices and this trend will only grow though out 2018. 2018 will be the year we give priority on designing Email marketing strategies specific to the mobile device. We can expect Email subscription forms to be designed specifically for mobile computing systems to take the full advantage mobile devices offer.
Throughout 2018, we will see more Email campaigns being designed and optimized for mobile devices with focus on offering effective, efficient and an all around easy experience to mobile users. Marketers will have to develop new more creative ways to utilize the full potential of increasing Email conversations on mobile devices.
Two-Step signup
A large portion of marketers use single step sign up mechanism for their newsletters in order to get customers’ email addresses. Although this approach may generate a large database of emails, most of these emails will end up being bogus and will generate a very bad Email open percentage as most of the customers who subscribed just did it because it was too easy and not because they were really interested. This leads to customers often forgetting that they had subscribed and the emails end up in spam folder.
Two step signup process eliminates such bogus email addresses. By asking the customer to fill in a survey or an opt-in form, we are ensuring the customers commitment to the newsletter. This in turn ensures the promotional Emails that will be sent will not end up in the customers spam folder as the customer will remember having subscribed to the newsletter.
We can expect more marketers to opt for two step sign up method to ensure a higher interaction and email open rate.
A/B testing
A/B testing is a method where we send different variations of an email to different sets of subscribers. The variations could be a combination of different subject lines, subject matter, images, action buttons etc.
The testing enables marketers to establish which variation of the Email resonates best with their subscribers. The email version that performs best, is then chosen to be sent automatically to all the remaining subscribers who were not part of the test set.
We can see A/B testing being used in 2018 to improve Email open rates and further enable better Email marketing strategies.
Conclusion
Digital Marketing is an extremely beneficial skill to have. Business around the world need experienced digital marketers who are well trained in aspects like digital marketing to promote their goods and services online, in the new mobile first cloud first world. With the help of experienced staff at Digital Floats (a premier training institute in Hyderabad) you can learn the intricacies of Digital Marketing and gain a skill that will give you an edge over other marketers in the digital world we now live in.
