The year 2020 was characterized by turbulent waters and much like any other marketing strategy, email marketing also witnessed considerable changes. The email marketing trends continue to evolve in the post-pandemic era, in 2021, in resonance with the innovation in the MarTech tools and the way customers perceive a brand and respond to the marketing gimmicks.
Email marketing is the most effective marketing channel and for every $1 spent, the return on investment of $5.
Email marketing is amongst the most important marketing strategies for brands that facilitate building relationships with prospects, leads, and current customers as well as even with the customers who have left.
Email allows customers to personalize their messages & tailor the messages based on customer actions. Customers can be segmented in clusters based on their behavior across omnichannel & can be provided with tailored experiences to boost their experiences. A properly planned & test-run email marketing strategy can do wonders for your overall marketing plan.
This blog talks about the 5 key email marketing trends for 2021.
Below are few email marketing strategies that will surely work for your brand:
Personalize Your Messages
The accelerated pace of digital transformation & the use of data on all the platforms across the web has led to a need to create personalized messages, especially in the post-pandemonium era.
Personalized emails are usually optimized to users’ interest & following the intent-data of the customers across omnichannel.
Also oftentimes, the success of an email campaign depends upon whether the email has been tailored according to the specific stages in the buying cycle of the customers. If you are doing a remarketing campaign, the email marketing messages have to be directed at compelling to make the users see the value proposition of the products or services & revert back to the website they abandoned. So, it should be written in a way that inspires long-term customer loyalty.
Personalized emails often have a higher open rate than un-personalized ones. Here are some ways to personalize emails for higher open rates:
- Incorporate the recipient’s name in the subject line
- Prioritize the important information up front in the emails
- The replies on the emails should be enabled
- Email signatures should be displayed
Segment Your Subscribers
Before the marketers start with a strategy for their email marketing campaigns, they need to segment their target audience groups. The target market should be segmented according to the interest of the audience groups, their demographics & on the basis of their pain-points.
Email marketers’ top initiatives are fueled by proper segmentation & include the following:
- Implement life cycle messaging
- Grow email opt-in list
- Improve data analysis
- Improve segmentation
- Increase subscriber engagement
The following are few ways to segment the target audience groups:
- Segmentation by industry
- Segmentation by company size
- Segmentation by Sales Cycle
Optimize for Mobile Websites
The marketers need to send mobile-friendly emails so that the mobile experiences of the end-users are optimized. Also, an increasing number of people are using mobile devices, and therefore, email marketing campaigns need to be optimized for mobile.
A/B Testing & Designing
The alternative forms of emails need to be test-run & optimize for users’ experiences. The marketers need to take care of the designing element that is most delightful for the users. Testing the different copies of emails & optimizing the CTAs is a must-have for most marketers to increase the open rates of the emails & ultimately the conversions generated through them.
The different components of emails that we can optimize are:
- Subject lines
- Messaging
- Call-to-action
- Design
- Personalization
- Landing Page
- Target audience
- Sender Name
Automated Emails
Employ automated email campaigns as and when required. Trigger-based emails are those that are sent automatically based on the customers’ behavior. Open rates for trigger emails can be more than 95% high for traditional emails.
According to Forrester, trigger-based marketing campaigns generate 4x more revenue and 18x more profit.
Automated emails can be sent to welcome users or when they activate the subscription of your newsletter. These emails can also be employed to win-back the customers through the retargeting campaigns and thus, fuel customer loyalty, helping both customer retention & acquisition.
Email marketing is an evergreen strategy to maximize the ROI. Employing the above strategies will help you send more personalized emails to the end-users to optimize their experiences & bolster the conversions through the email marketing campaigns.
Wrap Up
From the dawn to the next normal, our email marketing strategies and budgets are still getting impacted. During the unprecedented time, how you communicate with the customers becomes extremely important. Always ensure to keep the element of hominid genuine empathy intact. Remember to make the subject-line hyper-personalized and always focus on being value-centric. Embracing and employing the above trends will help you scale-up your email marketing game to bolster the bottom-line conversions.
Flat lay with Wooden tray with envelope -DepositPhotos