The Future of Email Marketing: 2020 and Beyond
Personalized Email Marketing
Email marketing isn’t disappearing anytime soon.
Email marketing trends indicate that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), along with evolving email personalization and segmentation tactics, points to the promise of this long-standing communication channel.
What does the future hold for email marketing in 2020 and beyond? Let’s look at some current trends and ideas on how you can use email to advance your marketing reach and improve your business.
The Future of Email Marketing
Can you imagine a world without email? As technology advances rapidly, one can assume that older tools like email are on the way out. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Email is one of the most common forms of communication worldwide. A recent study by the Radicati Group points out that the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will grow to over 333 billion by the end of 2022. And, the number of worldwide email users will grow to over 4.2 billion by the end of 2022.
In case you need a little more proof, here are 10 compelling email marketing statistics for 2019, courtesy of Hubspot:
- 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
- 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program.
- 40% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.
- 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device, and mobile opens accounted for 46% of all email opens.
- 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.
- 99% of consumers check their email every day, and more than 50% check their personal email account more than 10 times a day.
- 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
- 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
- Over 59% of marketers say email is their most significant source of ROI.
- Marketers who use segmented campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
6 Email Marketing Trends to Keep On Your Radar
Future-proof your marketing efforts by adopting an intelligent email marketing strategy. Here are six email marketing trends to look out for in 2020 and beyond:
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Highly personalized content
- Lead scoring
- Dynamic content
- Mobile-focus
- Data privacy
1. Artificial Intelligence
The future of AI in email marketing isn’t a question of if, but of *when*. Get excited about the possibilities AI holds for the future of intelligent email marketing.
AI uses customer data and predictive models to make your marketing smarter, faster and more accurate. Eliminate guesswork and let AI help you create just-in-time campaigns that speak to your customers’ needs.
Here are six ways AI can improve your marketing efforts:
- Better segmentation: It’s not easy to get segmentation right. AI collects demographics and purchasing patterns to pinpoint areas of interest, segmenting your customers into niche groups for powerful outreach opportunities.
- Optimized email content: What content and CTAs grab readers’ attention and entice them to convert? Knowing what to say to Group A vs. Group B is a critical element in content creation.
- Automated workflow: AI sets triggers for automated email campaigns based on customer behavior (like an abandoned cart) – even while you sleep.
- Planned message delivery: Send times dictate opening rates. AI increases the likelihood that a customer sees your email at the right time, and responds when they’re ready to buy.
- Split testing: Split testing (or A/B testing) can be a long, arduous process that’s easy to fudge, returning less than accurate results. AI analyzes results quickly, enabling you to make necessary tweaks to improve your email marketing campaigns.
- Analytics: You won’t know where to go next if you don’t understand the results of your current efforts. Many metrics can influence a campaign’s effectiveness. Interpreting your analytics is vital in measuring the success of your marketing reach.
2. Highly Personalized Content
Content fatigue: we all feel it. With the sheer volume of information we see daily, a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective in marketing communications. Therefore, creating highly personalized, engaging content should be high on your list of email marketing goals.
There’s more to email personalization than gathering generic data. You need to know more about your customers to learn what content they’re most interested in receiving. Then, use segmentation to tailor content to your customers’ needs, which builds relationships and establishes trust.
See how Personalize can help you create targeted content that increases response rates.
3. Lead Scoring
As inbound marketing drives interest in your product or service, you need a method to determine which leads require urgent follow-up. Lead scoring models help sales and marketing teams understand and gauge the interest levels of prospects.
Evaluating your leads and analyzing prospect behavior and data is the best way to create a continuous stream of quality leads. You can use a tool like Personalize to score your leads, or use it in conjunction with your own lead scoring methodology to boost your marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
4. Dynamic Content
Sadly, “dynamic content” does not indicate the usage of superheroes or explosive language in your emails (but it could).
Dynamic content, also known as adaptive content, refers to the use of content blocks in an email that are specific to a customer’s interest or demographic. Dynamic content blocks are “dropped in” to predetermined areas of an email message, reducing bounce rate and increasing conversions.
5. Mobile-Focus
The increased usage of mobile phones and wearable devices necessitates the move to mobile-focused (not just mobile-friendly) messaging.
The amount of information a contact can view on a phone or tablet is vastly different than what they can see on a smartwatch. While responsive marketing for smartphones and mobile devices is not new, creating targeted messaging for even smaller devices is a fresh challenge for marketers.
6. Data Privacy
For many marketers, email opt-in requirements seem restrictive.
But double opt-in consent is actually beneficial. Consenting indicates a recipient is genuinely interested in your offering and wants to engage with you – at least initially. It’s up to you to win the contact’s long-term interest and loyalty after that.
The California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect in January 2020 and mimics the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law. Both laws give individuals more control over their personal data, restrict what organizations can do with that data, and give regulators the power to fine non-compliant organizations.
Personalize Emails Outperform
Are you ready to ramp up your email marketing efforts in 2020 and beyond? Make sure you have the right tools to get started.
Personalize is an AI-powered personalization tool that reveals products and services people are most interested in, giving you 50% better response rates and increased revenue.
Personalize hooks directly into your CRM or email platform, providing the data you need to build automated personalized campaigns – your way!
Future-proof your email marketing campaigns. Check out Personalize and sign up for a free 30-day trial today.