Communicating with your customers and clients is key in a digitally-driven marketplace. Email marketing can help you connect with your customers, let them know about products and offerings, and give them great deals. Consumers who feel connected to brands and businesses are more likely to shop with them.
Top 2021 Email Marketing Trends
Email marketing, while not a new piece of the marketing puzzle, is always changing. With the right strategy, you can use it to promote new customer signups and make an impact on old customers. From automation to personalization, the marketing automation experts at eSputnik have rounded up the top email marketing trends of 2021.
1. Automation
Email marketing, when done right, takes a tremendous amount of work. It’s labor-intensive with the need to analyze your results, do segmentation, discover the best timing and frequency, and create the right content. The larger the subscription list you have, the more difficult it will be to have the best results. Automation can help automate time-consuming tasks and make email marketing easier.
Automated emails, also known as drip campaigns, allow you to send all types of emails automatically, including welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, birthday emails, and more. Drip campaigns give customers a sense of control over their email inbox because actions taken by the customer trigger an email.
You can learn more about the best drip email campaign software tools here.
2. Personalization
Nobody likes receiving emails that were clearly sent by a bot. Personalization is key to success. Not only does it help you nurture leads, but it can help you boost your revenue. These days, consumers want to connect with the brands they shop with for a better experience.
A hyper-personalized email campaign can help you achieve better results. With the right data, you can cater to your customer’s specific needs and create email campaigns that are a direct result of your subscribers’ behavior, shopping history, interests, and more.
3. Customer Appreciation
Birthday emails can help you bring back customers who have subscribed to your newsletter but haven’t made a purchase lately. Customer appreciation emails make your customers feel a more personal connection to your business, making them more likely to make a purchase. You can give your customers a discount on any email, but birthday emails can help you show your customers you care about them with a free gift or discount while adding a more personal touch.
4. Mobile Experience
These days, more and more people are using their phones and tablets to read their emails, which means that your emails need to be mobile-friendly. Your e-blast should look great across all devices, including laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. A flexible and fully responsive layout will allow you to better connect with your customers, especially when they’re on the go. To make your life easier, you can also use an email-to-SMS gateway service that allows you to write your email and have it converted from email to SMS. This way you can be confident that your message will reach your audience, since text messages have a 98% open rate.
5. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) might sound like it’s a concept from your favorite science fiction movie. However, you can use it to improve your email marketing strategy. Because we’re continuously making a shift to automation, AI can handle the massive amount of data online that humans simply can’t.
AI is great for list segmentation, content analysis, and outreach. All of these tasks are things that humans once did, but AI is able to do it more efficiently and arguably better.
6. User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content is content that is created by the end-users of your goods or services, AKA, your customers. This content can be anything from text, videos, and images to audio.
User-generated content promotes conversions. Many consumers say that UGC impacts their purchasing decisions. This user-generated content is typically in the form of reviews that consumers find extremely valuable. Consider the last time you purchased something online. You likely scrolled to the reviews to learn more about the product from real people.
Including UGC in your email marketing campaign can help you build trust with your consumers because they’ll see a real live person commenting on the quality of the product or service.
UGC can not only help you with social proof, but it can be content that you use throughout your entire campaign, especially if you’re struggling to find valuable content for your strategy.
7. Interactive Emails
When it comes to email design trends, interactive emails are key. While this isn’t a new trend, it will grow stronger in 2021 and beyond. Interactive emails boost customer engagement and increase interaction with your emails.
Some examples of interactive email elements include:
- Animated buttons
- Rollover effects
- Product carousels controlled by the user
8. Text-Only Emails
While you should always offer variety when it comes to your email marketing design, text-only emails are expected to become more popular this year. Text-only emails create a level of personalization, like a brand or business writing a personal letter to its customers.
Sending text-only emails can be a nice change of pace if you’ve only ever sent your customers image-heavy designs, but it can be beneficial to mix and match. For example, you might want to include image-heavy emails in campaigns where you’re trying to sell a product. However, you may choose text-only emails when you want to get a bit more personal with your customers, like when you’re welcoming them to your subscriber list.
9. Privacy
Privacy is always going to be important to your customers. As privacy laws tighten, you may be concerned that your digital marketing efforts won’t be as effective. However, that’s not the case. Anti-spam regulations have been around since the beginning of email, which means that brands have to make sure they’re utilizing email marketing best practices.
Doing so does not reduce the effectiveness of email marketing. Instead, it has created a better experience for marketers and customers.
When it comes to email marketing, here are a few best practices to follow:
- Always get consent from your subscribers with opt-in tools.
- Create a privacy policy and let your subscribers know what data you collect and how it’s used.
- Allow users to opt-out easily with an unsubscribe link at the bottom of all of your marketing emails.
Email Marketing Strategy Is Key
To make the most of your marketing emails, it’s important to find the right strategy for your business. Make sure that you understand your customers and what they are looking to gain from opting in to your subscriber list.
