The Top 5 Email Marketing Innovations
This year, marketers spent more on email marketing innovation than ever before. There are more possibilities, such as video content, in-email purchasing and personalized offers. Moreover, there are more tools available that enable you to analyze your recipients data and send them automated emails. Due to increased support for HTML, CSS and video by email clients, web designers are becoming email designers and email itself is becoming the new landing page.
Consumers indicate that it is not the increasing number of emails that find their way to their inbox that bothers them, but the lack of good content is. Add the innovations mentioned below in your email marketing strategy and witness your CTR and conversions increase.
1. Interactive email
The time that email was only considered as a ‘read-only’ communication channel is permanently over. The possibilities for interactive emails are almost infinite. For example, subscribers can directly buy a product in the newsletter with direct in-email purchase. Purchase threshold is lower than ever before as there is no need to sign in to an account, or to visit a website or app.
Moreover, there are many possibilities to show visual content.
The increasing use of the rotating carousel of images is an example of a great way to share plenty of content and visual information on a limited space such as mobile email.
2. Dynamic offers
Instead of sending static general offers to a large number of subscribers, in 2017 we set up dynamic email campaigns to individual users based on their unique behavior.
For example, customer A receives a discount on his next repeat order. Customer B, who does a lot of last-minute purchases, gets free shipping and the guarantee that his order will arrive within one day.
3. Beacons
Beacon technology establishes the opportunity to send an email to a potential client who has just left the store without buying anything. Or send an email with a voucher for a free bouquet of flowers to a customer who has purchased flowers for the third time this month. Beacon technology causes the online and offline world together, which also combines the optimum use of all the data. You’re not going to find a more exceptional form of personalization in 2017 than what Beacon technology allows you to use.
4. Video
A study by eMerce has shown that including videos in emails increase CTR. The respondents also indicated that their subscribers spend more time on the email and appear to forward the emails more often. Why? Because a video makes it easier for your subscribers to understand difficult information. Whereas in the past marketers encountered issues with embedding videos as result of poor support across devices, top email clients are adding video support to email one by one. Now that Apple has relaunched HTML5 video support in iOS 10, a number of videos in emails is further on the rise.
"The right message to the right prospect at the right time."
5. Marketing automation
Converting prospects into warm leads has become part of daily routine as result of the emergence of Big Data. Marketers are now able to discern which specific product of their brand the prospect has googled for or added to his wish list. Using marketing automation tools, campaigns are increasingly fine-tuned as the prospects’ Internet behaviour is anticipated on and sending times are optimized. Now marketers can handle the increasing value of their mid-funnel prospects and simultaneously acquire more prospects to fill the funnel.
