Email marketing is constantly evolving, thanks to new tools and consumer behaviors. Keeping up with these changes can help you deliver emails that drive engagement and increase your ROI.
One of the top trends for 2023 is introducing interactivity to your email campaigns. Interactive elements like image carousels, menus, and clickable items can be a great way to engage subscribers and boost your open rates.
1. Hyper-personalization
While personalization has always been important, hyper-personalization goes one step further and allows brands to target customers at a granular level by using data. This can include customer preferences, purchase history and behavioral information.
In addition to helping companies deliver relevant content, hyper-personalization can also help improve open rates and click-throughs. It’s a trend that is quickly becoming a priority for e-commerce brands looking to build strong customer relationships and boost revenue.
For a brand to successfully implement hyper-personalization, it must be able to integrate data from multiple systems, including point of sale, digital experience, and customer relationship management. This is often not easy due to the vast volume of data that’s generated on a daily basis.
Marketers can leverage this data to send personalized messages at specific times and places. For instance, L’Occitane’s ecommerce team noticed that users in Brazil were visiting their website between the hours of 10pm and 5am, so they implemented a customized overlay for these times.
This type of hyper-personalization is effective because it helps shoppers connect faster to products they are interested in. It also prevents them from being overwhelmed by choice overload and gives them a more efficient shopping experience.
While hyper-personalization can be complex and take some planning, it can create lifelong customers for brands. This is largely because it can make their brand stand out from the competition and help them build a stronger and longer-lasting relationship with consumers. In fact, a McKinsey study found that companies that adopted this approach saw a 5 to 15 percent increase in their sales.
2. BIMI
BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is an emerging email standard that will make it easy for brands to display their logos in the inbox. This technology is designed to build trust between brands and subscribers by showing their logo alongside their sender names in the inbox. It also enhances deliverability and helps prevent phishing and other forms of email fraud.
Using DMARC, SPF, and DKIM to verify the identity of an email’s sender, BIMI can increase your brand’s credibility and visibility, and establish trust with your subscribers. However, the process is more complicated than it looks–it requires the involvement of different email services, and sometimes involves third-party tools.
To make BIMI work, you need to have an AuthIndicators record with your domain publishing records that contains a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). VMCs are certificates that show that you own the brand logo as a trademark.
With BIMI, your emails look more authentic and trustworthy, which will boost open rates and lead to higher conversions. This is because users will know that your emails are sent from a legitimate business.
In fact, studies have shown that BIMI implementation can increase your open rates by up to 10%. This is because the brand logo in the email makes the user feel more confident and safe to open it.
In an increasingly competitive market, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd with your email campaigns. To do that, you need to increase brand recognition and improve your email engagement. BIMI is the solution for you!
3. Gamification
Gamification is a marketing strategy that uses games to attract customers and build loyalty. It is a fun way to get people engaged with your brand, and it can increase the conversion rate of your email campaigns.
One of the best ways to use gamification is to integrate it into your email campaigns. The most important thing to remember is that you need to make your games fun and easy for your subscribers to play. Otherwise, they will likely close the email and delete it without ever playing it!
Moreover, you must also ensure that your gamified emails are responsive and look great on all devices. There are many ESPs that offer previews and responsiveness tests for their emails.
Another important factor is that gamification should always be relevant to your business. For example, if you run a campaign for a new product launch, you should incorporate a game in your email that will make people want to buy the product.
You can even integrate a social media feature in your gamified email, which will help you attract more engagement from your subscribers. The more engaged your subscribers are, the better chance you have of gaining repeat sales and generating referrals.
It is also a good idea to use gamification in your campaigns during holidays, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This is because consumers are more inclined to open emails that offer discounts.
However, if you are planning to use a gamified email in your email campaigns, it is essential to know the right time to launch them. For example, if you are launching a campaign for an upcoming event, it is best to use gamification in the first month of the event. This will create a hype and encourage your audience to keep checking their inboxes for updates.
4. Automation
Automation is a growing email marketing trend that can help businesses save time and money by sending relevant emails to customers at the right times. This process works by triggering emails based on certain events or actions, such as when someone leaves a shopping cart or signs up for a mailing list.
In addition to helping businesses send personalized messages, email automation can also help them track campaign performance and improve results. This type of system is ideal for any business that wants to streamline their email marketing efforts and focus more time on other projects.
One of the biggest benefits of using automation is that it helps to increase open rates and click-through rates. These statistics show how engaging your emails are, and they can be used as a good indicator of whether you’re on the right track or not.
Another great use of automated emails is to send out surveys and request feedback from customers. This can help businesses learn more about what their customers want and need, which helps them create better products and services.
Lastly, automated emails can help keep your customers engaged with your brand and build relationships over time. This can be especially helpful when you have a new product or service coming out or you’re planning an upcoming sale.
Automated email campaigns are a key part of any successful email marketing strategy, and they’re especially useful when you’re looking to convert your list of subscribers into paying customers. The key to a successful automated email campaign is to make sure that your content is high-quality and relevant. These types of emails will be more likely to get through the spam filters and make it into your subscriber’s inbox.
5. Interactivity
Interactive email is a relatively new form of marketing that incorporates web-like functionality in an email to provide readers with a more engaging experience. Interactivity comes in many forms, from simple interactions like hover states to more complex experiences, such as galleries and in-email product review forms.
The best part is that integrating interactivity into your emails can improve user engagement, increase conversion rates, and deliver better quality leads. It also reduces the amount of friction in your funnel, since users are able to take action within the email without leaving their inbox.
It’s important to note that while this trend is gaining popularity, it’s not something that should be used in every campaign. Some email clients don’t support some interactive elements, so it’s important to always create a fallback version that viewers can see in case they can’t render the interactive content.
Some of the most common types of interactive emails include highlighted buttons, which change color, font, shape, or all of the above when a mouse cursor passes over them. However, interactive emails don’t just need to be static – they can come in the form of animations and GIFs as well!
In addition to these visual elements, interactive email campaigns can also feature more textual content. Puzzles, accordions, sliders, and carousels are all great ways to bring more information into your email.
While interactive emails can be more engaging, they also require a bit more work on the part of marketers. They need to ensure they’re working properly before sending, and that they don’t dilute the message or detract from its conversion rate. Additionally, they need to create effective pre-send testing to make sure that all the different interactive elements don’t interfere with each other and fail to render correctly.