Innovating Email Marketing: Making it Customer-Centric

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is now a buzzword for most marketers. So, what is email marketing? It is simply a communication sent via emails to a targeted buyer persona.

With the evolution of social media and targeted advertising, the state of email marketing appeared to be set towards extinction. But if recent trends are anything to go by, then the channel still stands as one of the most potent forms of content-driven lead generation and conversion. In several cases, it has also come out on top when utilized for awareness-based campaigns.

But to implement this marketing format into digital strategies, it becomes essential to understand and anticipate the channel’s future. More so when you realize that said changes could impact your day-to-day activities. With the rise of newer technologies, there is a lot more to e-mail marketing than its preceding format. Think about artificial intelligence, personalization, automation, data, GDPR, or even content. There’s a lot that email marketing evolution awaits.

What are these trends, or better yet, how will they help with your email marketing strategy?

Here are the top 6 Email Marketing Trends

Let’s take a look at some of the best practices in email marketing.

1. Customer Experience Marketing via Email

It is essential to push the principles of modern channel strategies into email marketing as well, the same that make lifecycle messages work – personalization, customer focus, and helpfulness. This era urges us to take steps away from conducting regular business or only promotional emails and focusing more on the customer’s desires and needs. Customer Experience Email Marketing is simply the experience you provide in delivering what you promised to your customer for their loyalty or subscription to your brand offerings, and supporting and surprising your consumer on notable milestones.

2. Customer-Centric Marketing and Brand Authenticity

Automation is key to innovating strategies around email marketing. But even with automation, it’s crucial to observe your process from a subscriber’s point of view. The sequence, for example, needs to make sense enough to ensure that it caters to the needs of both the customer and the brand. At the same time, even with customer-centricity, a brand needs to pair email marketing strategies with emails that attest to brand authenticity, emails that show that you care about your relationship with subscribers. For example, take the time to check if your emails appeal to consumers or what new products or services they might wish for in the future. It is about giving your brand some personality.

3. Predictive Automation with Customers

There is no secret to the massive amounts of data being collected on an almost daily basis. It has increased the use of automation systems. However, rather than looking back to the data, the strategy will hover around identifying what a consumer might need or want to buy next. A classic example lies with Amazon and their eCommerce platform’s ability to suggest products based on your profile and former purchases. Automated Email Marketing is now an oft-used tactic to elevate the customer experience. Be it a Thank You emailer, or a reminder email to customer to shop the item from the cart, or even a subscription renewal, automation email marketing is a very useful technic, and this email marketing trend is on the rise, to stay connected to customers in the digital era.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI): New Opportunities. Low Adoption.

Artificial intelligence offers a new way for marketers to improve personalization, creation, delivery, and increased sales. In fact, it is easy to expect AI to push the boundaries of automation, helping it grow across several aspects in email marketing. But due to the relative complexity of managing or implementing AI into email marketing automation, the rate adoption might remain limited to high-resource companies.

5. Rewarding your Customers

Reaching out to customers only when selling products or services is not the right approach to building successful customer relationships. Reward them with discounts, coupons, etc., on their birthdays, anniversaries, and other important milestones of their lives. Even a personalized email with a wish goes a long way!

6. Analytics

Analytics is the fuel for any digital marketing activity today. Use analytics to see how your emails have performed and where you can improve your customer relationships via email. Understanding the personas of your customers through actionable insights from the analytics will increase the chances of getting your email marketing and customer experience strategy right and enhance the experience for your customers.

Conclusion:

Email is slowly beginning to reclaim some of its lost respect, and it is primarily due to innovative pushes from other forms of next-generation technologies. CMOs are beginning to include email marketing campaign in their digital strategies and realize its value to holistic and powerful strategies, for instance, including its importance to the all-essential lifetime value metric. But despite the resurgence, email marketing continues to receive small slivers of big marketing budgets, even with the incredible ROI. In the end, it is up to how you play the game. Are you eyeing some short-term success? Or are you in it for the long haul?

Frequently Asked Questions

WRITTEN BY

Team Eela

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