Email marketing can take many forms, including newsletters, promotion emails, retention emails and acquisition emails. But with marketing and selling techniques constantly shifting, people find themselves wondering which approaches to adopt. Email marketing platforms, such as Ongage, develop clear strategies to enable the nurturing of leads with customers and for the achievement of more efficient marketing. This article will explore three current email trends which can build upon your strategy, and how they can benefit your business. 

AI (artificial intelligence)

In our current society, Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being adopted. When placed in correlation with email marketing, it can aid personalization through its ability to gather more data at a faster rate. This personalization materializes through AI’s ability to consider a customer’s purchase history. Such history can then be utilized to streamline offers, therefore driving sales. Other functions of AI allow for the analysis of the emails specific customers tend to open, thus segmenting mailing lists and deciphering which customers should receive which pieces of marketing information. 

Of course, at an initial glance the thought of combining AI with email marketing may be daunting. However, its aims of optimizing your workload and scaling your email marketing strategy offer nothing to fear. Additional benefits to derive from AI and email marketing include: 

1. Building mailing lists
2. Streamlining mailing lists
3. Automated writing of subject lines 
4. Restructuring email campaigns 
5. Enabling companies to send personalized emails to clients, with these being proven to increase customer retention rates. 

Aside from the benefits above, the main feature provided by AI is its ability to function at a large scale, catering to the entirety of your customer base. The technology has been praised for its optimization of time and resources on behalf of both marketing and sales teams. Finally is AIs use of predictive analysis. Ultimately this means that the technology will predict when certain customers are most likely to be actively online, and it is at these points that it will send promotional emails. 

Interactivity 

Interactive emails have received praise for increasing customer engagement. Popular means of interactivity range from: 

1. Interactive images
2. Questionnaires, surveys, and user-generated interactive content
3. Animated buttons and CTAs (calls to action)
4. ‘Accordion’ features, known for compacting long emails and thus maintaining the attention of those reading it 
5. Tools such as rollover effects which demonstrate the services being offered 

Gamification as a form of interactivity

The means explored above often coincide with the term “email marketing gamification”. Email marketing gamification is the application of elements from games to enhance interactivity between marketing strategies and customers. To better explain gamification are the following benefits: the boosting of email open rates, the driving of cross-channel engagement, and attracting more subscribers to your mailing lists, ultimately enabling you to market deals to more of your customers. Psychologically, the use of gamification will link the idea of fun with the consumption of your products, thus encouraging customers to invest more into your business. However, it must be noted that gamification doesn’t always amount to direct sales. Instead, the number of sales increases as a secondary effect of customer engagement. 

Further benefits of gamification

If you want gamification to lead to direct sales, the following tip is extremely significant. As a reward for winning the game, discounts to your products can be attained. When a prize is involved not only will customers be increasingly likely to engage, but such engagement will help with the scaling of your business and its return on investment. 

Games are a great marketing technique, and can help raise awareness about your brand. One of the most current examples of this is Wordle, a word guessing game issued by The New York Times. With the game rapidly gaining traction amongst younger demographics, the newspaper has attained a younger target market who otherwise may not have engaged with their articles or website. 

Mobile Optimization

In a world where more and more people are working remotely, alongside the increased use of mobile devices, it is of great importance that companies adopt a ‘mobile first’ approach to email marketing. The first step to optimization is through the use of mobile-ready templates. These templates ensure that the text is a readable size and that continuity is attained for customers across devices, ultimately making your marketing remain effective. Another way of optimizing your email marketing to mobile phones is through short subject lines, as on average a line over 30 characters will be cut off on smaller devices. In addition to this is considering what is referred to as the “from” name. When emails are accessed through a mobile phone, this name appears extremely prominently. Akin to the subject line, many devices have a character limit before the “from” name gets cut off. 

Two final tips for mobile optimization

1. Use landing pages which can integrate with mobile phones:

It is undoubtedly important that mobile users can access your website to make purchases, read your material, and enter competitions. Without this availability, a large number of potential clientele are deterred. 

2. Balance image size and text: 

It is common knowledge that email campaigns rely on vibrant images to draw a customer’s attention. This is why it’s important that when the email is opened on a mobile phone, the proportions of image and text are balanced so that all information remains readable. 

Concluding statement

To conclude, three current email marketing trends are the use of AI, interactivity through gamification, and mobile optimization. AI is beneficial in increasing the personalization of emails through its gathering of data, including purchase histories. In addition to this is its ability to segment the data it gathers, making marketing more streamlined and relevant to the customer at hand. Its main feature is its ability to work at a large scale, beyond the capabilities of a manual worker. Interactivity tends to materialize through gamification, which increases customer engagement whilst also creating a “buzz” surrounding a business, with the potential of reaching new target audiences. Finally is mobile optimization which ensures accessibility and avoids the deterrence of potential customers.