Email marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways to interact with your customers. After all, the ROI of email marketing is 4400%. That means for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a return of $44. With 59% of consumers saying that email marketing influences their purchasing decision, extracting higher ROI through emails isn’t surprising. That’s the reason 93% of marketers are already using email marketing for distributing their content.
Given the kind of footing email marketing has on consumers, it becomes imperative for businesses to make their email marketing game top-notch. So, if you are a marketer and want to generate ample revenue while increasing sales, email marketing can be your gateway to success. All you need to do is update yourself with the latest email marketing trends and boost your performance.
7 email marketing trends to follow
Employing the latest email marketing trends wouldn’t only help you delight your subscriber base but also give you the ability to derive impeccable results out of your email marketing campaign. Here’s a look at the biggest email marketing trends that can help you do the needful.
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Say hello to interactive elements
Interactivity plays a great role in making emails engaging and attractive. Emails that contain interactive elements keep the subscribers hooked as they actively participate and engage with the content, thereby increasing the likelihood of making a purchase. That’s the reason interactive email content increases the click to open rate by 73%.
Here’s a look at some of the most engaging interactive elements.
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Rollover effect
Rollover effect effectively changes the appearance of the image on the basis of the location of the user’s mouse pointer. See how Nike does a great job by using the rollover effect in its HTML email template to create tooltips with product details.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Carousels
Carousels are a great way of displaying a few photos of product items on a single screen. You can even include multiple hero images and display several angles of a product without overcrowding the screen. You can take some inspiration from this carousel email from Adidas. In case this seems to be a daunting task for you, you can hire a professional HTML email developer to design such innovative emails for you.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Accordions
Accordions make long-form email compact yet creative. Simply put, It is a great way of reducing the email length without compromising with the email copy. Here’s how Property Dreams does it like a pro.
Source: Email Uplers.
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Surveys and polls
Surveys and polls are a great way of gaining more insight from your audience. To put it in other words, it gives your customers a chance to bring forward their opinion, thereby helping you collect their feedback while directly engaging with them. In fact, you can even make these surveys and polls interactive by embedding them within your email. Take a look at how Harry’s did a perfect job by embedding a survey into their email.
Source: Really Good Emails
This interactive survey manages to keep the subscriber’s attention for a longer period. It also shows the customer that the brand cares for their individual preferences and needs.
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Gamification
Gamification has the ability to give a fresh perspective to your email. From attracting new subscribers and entertaining them to accelerating engagement, it can help you do it all. Take a look at this interactive holiday email from Email Uplers. The brand has made good use of gamification by leveraging the festival of Easter.
Source: Email Uplers
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Kinetic emails
Kinetic emails combine CSS and HTML to facilitate interactivity by taking control of the template level design element. This allows users to fully interact with the major parts of the email design. Here’s a kinetic email template example from B&Q. See how it makes use of “tap to interact” call-outs seamlessly while displaying the content instantly within the in-email slideshow.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Make way for user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is the content created by the end-user of the product. It could be anything from a text and image to videos and audios. Such content is a great way of engaging your loyal customers along with your potential clients in real-time. In other words, when you entice your subscribers to create content through email marketing, it goes a long way in building authenticity and accelerating conversions.
Moreover, with 82% of consumers considering user-generated content to be extremely valuable, it becomes all the more imperative to incorporate it in your email marketing strategy. Further, it can help you save on cost and time too. For instance, instead of putting your time, money, and efforts on creating email copies or creating videos of your product or services, all you need to do is ask for feedback from your subscriber and embed the review in your email. See how seamlessly Bose has incorporated reviews and testimonials about their various products into their email for enticing the subscribers to purchase from their Black Friday Sale.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Leverage automation
With 75% of marketers already making use of some sort of marketing automation tool, it wouldn’t be wrong to say it is a trend which is on an all-time high. From mapping the customer experience and personalizing the email content to creating drip campaigns and scheduling follow-up and reminder emails, automation does it all smoothly. Here’s a personalized follow-up email from Cocktails 101 that doesn’t only thank customers for attending their happy hour but also subtly promotes its products while sharing recipes of a few drinks discussed at the event.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Say hello to artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and automation might look the same, there are a lot of differences between the two. While automation works on streamlining the task, artificial intelligence is all about improving your decision-making process. AI makes use of predictive analytics and machine learning to give your subscribers a more personalized experience. From writing highly engaging subject lines and determining the best copy and content to determining the best send time and frequency of the email, it does it all.
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Deliver accessible content
According to Litmus, the average attention span of a user while reading an email is 13.4 seconds. Moreover, an average adult reader has the ability to read between 250-300 words in a minute. Therefore, it is critical to deliver such email content that’s accessible. You can do it by keeping your copy precise and on point.
Moreover, with 2.2 billion people across the globe having a vision impairment or blindness, it becomes all the more important to create accessible content that can reach anyone irrespective of their disability. The following tips can help you do the needful.
- Include a robust visual hierarchy within your email copy just the way Invision did. From placing the eye-catching imagery at the top to including a clear CTA above the fold, they have done it all to make it easy for the customers to read and comprehend the email copy.
Source: Really Good Emails
- Use appropriate font sizes.
- Work on line spacing optimization.
- Leverage high contrasting colors to make the reading process easy for everyone.
- Incorporate Alt text for all the images to aid the screen readers in understanding what the email is about. .
- Make your HTML table accessible to readers.
- Include semantic HTML.
- Do not add flashy GIFs that could trigger seizures in photosensitive patients.
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Include rich media
An average person receives 129 emails per day. Therefore, it becomes critical to stand out in your customer’s jam-packed inbox and garner their attention. You can do so by including rich media such as videos, GIFs, and animations within your email. After all, adding rich media such as videos in your emails can increase your click rates by 300%. Here’s how Wistia makes good use of video in their business email template for introducing its new Chrome extension Soapbox.
Source: Really Good Emails
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Incorporate BIMI
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a security standard that gives brands with DMARC protection the ability to display their logos beside their email subject lines. It is a great way of building brand credibility while mitigating email security issues.
According to preliminary data from Yahoo, displaying the logo within the subject line can enhance the open rate by 10%. So, if you haven’t already used BIMI, it’s high time you do it and get an edge over your competitors.
Take a look at this email that demonstrates the usage of BIMI.
Wrap up
Email marketing can help you reach and connect with your customers seamlessly. All you need to do is keep working on your email marketing efforts. The above-mentioned email marketing trends will help you streamline your efforts while saving both your time and money.
So, get going with these trends and make the most out of your email marketing campaign.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and Salesforce email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
