Email marketing has a living definition, constantly adjusting itself to the world we live in. The only thing consistent in it is the basic “marketing by email” aspect. What is being marketed, how it’s presented, and the distribution process are open for interpretation and innovation.
Thankfully, those encapsulated in the email marketing world watch each other closely and learn from each other. The give and take, although it may be for reasons of competition, is transforming the world of email marketing as it’s known!
In 2018, this continues to be the case, and it will in the future as well. Here are some of the trends that are transforming email marketing practices as we know them right now. Read them, learn from them, and add them to your list of tools to write the best marketing emails you possibly can!
Brand Loyalty Through Email Automation
While automation may seem oddly unhuman, it actually gives you a chance to connect with your customers and earn their loyalty on a widespread scale. As BigCommercewrote, you can set up your email automation to send “thank you” messages for purchases, birthday messages, and invite personal conversations about customer feedback. Automation can get your tasks done more efficiently and quickly, and it paves the way for more personal relationships and interactions in the future.
Building a personal relationship with you, seeing that you care for your customers, and knowing you’re consistent with your emails and products — these are the things that build brand loyalty! Email automation can be used for all of those things and is definitely worth your time.
Lead Segmentation
We are finding that segmenting your leads or customers is necessary to effective email marketing. You should typically segment your leads and customers by trends in their buying. This does not just include what products or kind of products they like best, however.
For instance, some leads may be clients you work with rather than customers you serve. Let’s say you sell to not only individual customers, but chain stores and in bulk to companies who need your products on the regular. Each of these probably have a different purchase process with you.
Delving further into this concept, let’s say that a client only purchases products on an offer basis. You might put them on a separate email list than those who buy your products on a subscription basis and then those from occasional customers that come to you. These ways are currently how companies are experimenting with lead segmentation for their email lists.
Email Newsletters
An email newsletter is different than typical email marketing. Newsletters broadly cover what’s new with your company, what new products you offer, and many times are not necessarily sent to only leads and previous customers, but also to people who sign up for them, regardless of any affiliation they have with you. While not a new thing, companies are learning to build their newsletters to be less spam-like and innovating toward more customer-want based messages.
Newsletters are good for relevance — they remind people that you not only exist but are active. A lot of companies choose to put previous customers on their mailing lists without asking them first, but although it’s not illegal, this has a tendency to make people upset. Instead, leave a “sign up for our mailing list” box for people to check when they are checking out of your store.
Additionally, you could make a landing page for them to go to and share it across social media.
Multi-Channel Attribution
Attribution is the process of getting finding what marketing channels produce the most conversion results. As Zack Bedingfield, a marketing manager from the call-analytics focused CallRail, put it, “this helps your business by increasing the efficiency of your spend as you decide to focus on only the channels you know are driving growth.” It’s a fat-trimming process — it gets rid of your excess efforts and puts them in a place where they will work, rather than wasting time, energy, and resources.
This, if not a new concept, is happening faster nowadays with the internet, technology, and anything else that speeds up our internal data analysis. So putting this idea into email marketing, you can use analytics and the principles of multi-channel attribution to see what kind of emails are converting, what emails are being opened, and what’s landing you in the spam folder!
How are you changing your methods of email marketing? Anything in particular other people should know about that you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments and replies below!