The follow post was written by Jack Dawson, a specialized digital marketing expert and growth strategy advisor for entrepreneurs and small business owners. You can learn more about him here.
Email marketing is constantly evolving to meet consumer’s needs. Design, automation and personalization are big on the list for providing better experiences with email. Now that we’re well into the second half of 2016, we have a better sense for what resonates and what falls flat. Read on to learn some of the biggest email marketing trends in 2016 so far.
Mobile is the most popular way of reading emails
Just as it has been since the advent of smartphones, majority of people open their emails in their mobile devices instead of their desktops. Businesses have taken note of this trend. In response, they have stopped investing so much in enterprise software suites for email access in their desktops and began focusing more on mobile access.
Cloud-based software further propagates this trend. There are mobile applications that allow you to manage your emails through the Cloud. This further boosts the ability to manage emails from a mobile platform. Email marketers should take note of this and adapt their email messages for a mobile platform.
Personalized emails are received better
It used to be that email marketing focused the blast technique to send promotional emails. The messages got to the recipients, but they were general and did not have a personalized feel. This method has since been replaced by real-time action. This is where emails are sent to users as they peruse the business website. This method is agile and proactive.
Moreover, the emails can be tuned such that they reflect the current preferences of the users. They can have content that appeals to the personal taste and preferences of the user. This is accomplished by referring to the material that the user is currently reading through the website. This type of email marketing is highly engaging. In this way, the user feels as though the business actually cares about them. As a result, they are more likely to pay attention and even become a customer.
Inclusion of video and animated content
This type of content emerged as a hot trend in the past year and is here to stay. Initially used exclusively in content marketing, video and animations are now utilized in email marketing with positive results. By including multimedia in the emails, content marketers are able to grasp the attention of viewers immediately. In addition to that, the interactive media can be used to suggest specific courses of action to the users.
For example, a timer helps the consumers to know that the offer from the business has a deadline. This prompts them into action and increases the rate of click-through. Thus, email marketers can expect to see a shift towards interactive content in emails that encourages consumers to respond to the subject of promotion.
It’s all about the details
Thanks to advancements in graphic design and animation, many consumers do not pay any attention to emails that only have plain text. They lack flavor and appeal. Content marketers should strive to create emails that have impressive design and attractive graphics. This can be done using one of the many tools in the market that are for this purpose. Attractive styles of text can also be used for example, variation in typography.
In addition to that, content styles such as mixing a full image with properly contrasted text is a style that is attractive to consumers too. 2016 has proven that aesthetic design can increase the appeal of their promotional emails substantially.
Conclusion
Email marketing is has the best ROI, period. That’s why it’s so important to keep up with the constant changes in email technology and use email to your full advantage. 2016 has already brought its share of changes and innovations to email, and we can’t wait to see what 2017 has in store.