If there’s one lesson the pandemic might have taught you, it’s that things often change at the speed of light. Your plans and predictions made today might not come to fruition tomorrow. Thus, there’s a constant need to monitor the most recent trends and tools to stay ahead of your competitors for email marketing plans .
As 2020 took its course, word had it that email marketing was about to bite the dust. Then COVID-19 hit, and things changed drastically. These days, e-commerce business owners are shifting to online channels, making email marketing one of the most vital tools for connection and elevating it to an even higher level of prominence than before.
Whether you’re new to online marketing or know a thing or two about it already, keeping up with the latest trends we’ve listed below will help your business thrive in 2021. Keep reading and enjoy nailing your email marketing strategy. For more details on How to Send Mass Emails: Gmail, Outlook, Specialized Software, check out one of our other posts.
Table of Contents
1. Personalization Is Key: Some Things Don’t Change
Your clients like it when you call them by name. They like it when you’re well aware of their preferences. It appeals to them when you approach their inquiries based on their unique tastes and requirements. In their ‘Should You Personalize Your Subject Lines?’ post, Campaign Monitor concludes that people are nearly 30% more likely to view emails with personalized subject lines.
This is natural. This is hugely important. This trend will hardly ever change. But simply adjusting your email subject line to reflect your client’s personality and preferences is no longer enough. In 2021, you should sometimes make the most of the best AI-based tools when it comes to enhancing your email marketing strategy. These days, consumers want to receive emails that feel as if they were meant exclusively for them. Therefore, a hyper-personalized and micro-segmented email marketing campaign is sure to make your efforts stand out.
Prior to starting your campaign, focus on creating segments that single out your customers’ purchase patterns and preferences. Then analyze this data and get the personalization going, addressing your clients’ most detailed needs or issues. Here are some effective segmentation tactics:
- segment your clients by age, gender, country/state of residence;
- offer quizzes to get a feel of their needs;
- monitor and examine their purchase patterns;
- analyze their behavior on your website/mobile application.
2. Emails with Nothing but Text: No Image-Heaviness
In 2021 and 2022, feel free to try sending text-only emails to your clients. It’s not that brightness and image-heaviness are totally out of style. HTML emails with all the bells and whistles and a variety of formatting components are still applauded by many industry experts. It’s just that you no longer have to focus on these highly-ad-resembling elements. If conveying your message in a straightforward, online-letter-vs-marketing-email way is your goal, this trend is right up your street.
Delving deeper into the hyper-personalization trend, plain-text business emails feel more exclusive and important. In other words, those are messages that look as if you’ve written them to a friend. They don’t scream ‘Buy now!’ the very first instant they get opened. Because let’s be honest, nobody sends flashy attention-grabbing emails to their friends or family members.
3. Interactivity: Cherry on Top of Email Marketing Cake
Plain-text emails might bore your customers to sleep if you don’t add a pop of color on occasion. So, for the purpose of entertaining and engaging your clients, inject interactive marketing tools into your email campaigns from time to time.
Here’s what you can use to bring the interactivity trend to life:
- animated buttons;
- product/service carousels;
- surveys, polls, and quizzes;
- gamification items;
- hover-over imagery.
Don’t forget that you can use interactivity as a means of personalization, sending your precious clients emails that cater uniquely to their personal preferences.
4. Automate Like a Pro: Since Personalization Is Time-Consuming
No doubt, manual user behavior analysis and email customization will drive you crazy. Therefore, you should focus on finding and making the best out of as many automation tools and tactics as you can. Basically, email automation is a way to use specialized software to create emails that are sent to the right people at the right time, as well as convey the right message. As a result, you get great results without having to spend hours and hours doing the work by hand.
Here are some more trendy tactics to practice when automating your email marketing campaigns in 2021 and 2022:
- work up a group of short welcome emails;
- improve your transactional emails (those that you send to people who’ve taken action on your site);
- don’t neglect birthday emails;
- reach out to your website users based on their activity.
5. Make Your Clients’ Privacy Your Priority
Today, consumers are more mindful of their privacy and the ways their personal information is used. With that said, making data privacy your priority should be among your tasks in 2021 and 2022. Keep tabs on the most current laws in terms of data privacy and make sure that your email campaigns comply with them. Always inform your customers of the ways you protect their confidentiality. This is sure to earn your clients’ trust (read as boost your sales).
Bottom Line: Follow Trends and Set Your Own
Be sure to take all the afore-described trends into consideration when planning your next email marketing plans and campaigns. Also, don’t forget that out-of-the-box thinking and freedom of expression are also allowed in email marketing plans . Making it simple is good. But making it different (and diverse!) is a trend that’s here to stay. Following trends is great. But setting your own (when you’re professional enough) is what can make your business truly shine.
Have anything to add on the topic of email marketing trends or the power of personalization? Leave a reply in the comments box below. We greatly value your opinion.
