Plan Your 2020 with Latest Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing is prevalent and reliable, and I assure you, it remains the same in 2020 and beyond. It is one of the powerful tools for businesses to both engage as well as retain the customers successfully.

But an effective email marketing strategy that worked in 2019 may not work in 2020 anymore. If you do not upgrade your tactics with the ever-evolving marketing landscape, the chances are that your email will be marked as spam, and forever left untouched. The challenge is to develop email campaigns that are not just appealing but also up-to-date in this age of social media and apps.

So, how a marketer should keep himself updated in this rapidly budding email marketing environment? What are the new trends he needs to look at in detail?

Here’s a roundup of five effective email marketing tactics that you should be aware of before heading into 2020.

1. Quality Will Still be the Key to Email Marketing Success

As per the recent email marketing report by The Radicati Group, there are roughly 3.7 billion email users in 2019. So, how do you stand out in that mammoth crowd and avoid the “spam” label? It’s simple. Create high-quality content that recipients are keen to receive.

If you have a defined audience, generate content that is relevant, helpful, and engaging. Explicit and creative content helps you get more clicks and adds value to your messages.

Some email marketing tips to produce high-quality content are:

• Put yourself in the client’s shoes and determine what would please them.
• Use the right graphics, colors, fonts, images, and witty headlines to create a compelling email.
• Hire content professionals if you lack skilled resources.
• Segment the readers based on gender, age, location, etc., and truly connect with the recipient’s interest.
• Develop a schedule and stick to it to stay top of mind.

2. Real-Time Engagement with User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) works well for every marketing channel, especially emails. UGC is any form of content like text, audio, visual, or images produced by the product’s end-user. It can include anything: testimonials, videos, tweets, pictures, blog posts, snaps, and more.

User-generated content is known to increase the engagement rate and trust. According to E-commerce leader 3dcart, 82% of customers treat user-generated reviews as extremely valuable, and 70% of them look to reviews or ratings before purchasing any product.

How to gather user-generated content from your email marketing efforts?

• Use customer surveys to generate unique and insightful information.
• Organize expert Q&A’s to educate your customers and expand your database.
• Run contests on social media that requires minimal interaction.
• Invite users to share their unique success stories to inspire others.
• Offer rewards when a customer takes a picture, shoots a short video, or writes a review.

3. Interactive Email Elements to Further Promote Engagement

Mobile clients account for approximately 41.9% of email opens during Q1 2019, as per Litmus report. This represents a massive part of all email interactions and revenue. Therefore, marketers are ought to design emails optimized for various mobile devices.

The best bet is to amalgamate interactivity with responsiveness. Interactivity will be the most-sought functional element in the coming years.

Some of the interactive email elements you could include in 2020 are:

• Show close-ups of the product or create quizzes using image roll-over effects.
• Provide radio buttons for a user to choose an item from a given list.
• Embed the questionnaire into the email where users click on the image that matches their answer.
• Design interactive “game” emails with a developer’s help.
• Use countdowns in an email to create a sense of urgency.
• Let users surf across various products or service categories with menu navigation.
• Use accordions to send out more verbose emails without making recipients scroll.

Moreover, just adding a funny GIF or embedding a video in your email would not suffice. You need to optimize these elements for devices of various screen sizes because around 66% of recipients delete emails that are not mobile optimized.

4. Accessible Email Design for Every Subscriber

In 2020, marketers should focus on building more accessible emails that work excellently for every user along with the specially-abled ones. Although creating an accessible email design sounds like a daunting task, the latest assistive technologies simplify the process for both the email marketer and the reader.

Tips to create accessible email content and design:

• Keep your email copy brief with short sentences. The ideal length of an email is 50 words.
• Stop using jargon and difficult words in your messages.
• Use alternative text for all images.
• Make your HTML tables accessible to screen readers.
• Do not forget to localize your content for global audiences.
• Form a robust visual hierarchy within your content.
• Use suitable font sizes and line spacing.

5. Automation will be the Future of Email Marketing

Unlike newsletters or one-off campaigns, an automated email campaign is set up once and sent to a particular individual automatically when a person meets specific criteria. That’s the beauty of email automation!

Several companies have already embraced this method as it helps in nurturing the customers and creating a deeper relationship with them. However, when surveyed by Liana Technologies, 64.8% revealed that their company isn’t using marketing automation.

As an email marketer, if you want to ease the burden and trim the marketing costs, I would suggest you use automation tools for successful campaign execution.

How to use email automation and reap the highest ROI?

• Turn leads into customers with a warm welcome email once they hit the “subscribe now” button.
• Recapture the interest of leads and recover the lost sales with abandoned cart email.
• Send out personalized discount coupons or promo codes to lure reluctant spenders.
• Create automated drip campaigns to reach out to the prospects who have demonstrated an interest in your brand.
• Use behavioral data to send product recommendations.

Get Ready for 2020

Predicting the future has never been easy for marketers. Fortunately, the future of email still remains strong as it continues to advance in a shifting technology landscape. It is proven to go a long way if utilized appropriately. And, these five latest email marketing tips and techniques can help you use it in the right manner and make your campaign successful in 2020.

Why wait? Embrace the plethora of opportunities mushrooming in the road ahead and make your business flourish!!