With one quarter of the year down, now is as good a time as any to look at your marketing strategy and see where the future is heading. Here are some new email marketing trends that experts predict will shape 2016:
- Lightboxes
Lightboxes are those sometimes annoying pop-up boxes that interrupt your reading/shopping experience on websites asking you to subscribe. They may be annoying but they do get results, growing email lists at a rate 5-10 times faster than websites who don’t use them.
Since the very effectiveness of email marketing depends on growing a list of prospects to send emails to, this trend will only increase in 2016. If the thought of using a lightbox is not appealing, consider that it is merely a call-to-action similar to any other CTA. To avoid interrupting a user’s experience many companies are now setting their lightboxes to only appear when a user’s cursor scrolls off their webpage and back to their browser. This limits intrusiveness.
- Better design
2016 will be the year of beautification of emails. No more plain text for me thanks! With a range of fabulous design tools out there that let you simply drag and drop in images, text and CTA buttons with a few clicks, and your attractive campaign can be sent.
- Email that’s mobile-minded
First, webpages adapted to the smaller screen sizes of mobile; now it’s time for email too as well. More increasingly people are reading their emails on the go and content that does not adapt to the smaller screen will get lower click through rates and ROI.
- Creating separate campaign lists
Email is set to get more personal by businesses creating separate email campaigns for different audiences. The first step to going about this is to create separate groups within your contacts list e.g. a clothing retailer might split up their list into: “active wear”, “shoes”, “men’s suits”, “maternity wear” etc based on gender, age and a variety of other factors. By sending targeted emails to each category the emails will only be sent to customers who find the content relevant, in turn potentially helping increase conversions.
- Email ROI will improve
Better design, email that mobile-minded and targeted email lists mean 2016 will truly be the year of email marketing success. With advertising costs low for this form of marketing, expect that if you make some of these changes your email ROI will improve significantly.
- Detailed tracking
Google Analytics can now append your URLs with parameters to help you track email campaigns allowing you to view the success of various types of emails such as promotions, new product announcements, cart abandonments etc.
- Increased automation
The process of sending emails out to your customer base is getting easier by the second as new tools help you automate nearly every step of the process. Take advantage of the tools that are out there and set up a system that allows you to compile emails mainly on auto-pilot.
- Animation, interactivity and embedded social elements
Finally, in 2016, the one major change that will affect all businesses is that emails will need to be fun and engaging. Use embeddable content, animated GIFs, hashtags, social sharing buttons, humour, great design features and hyper personalisation to stand out! Get creative and don’t be afraid to stand out from the crowd!
Luke Chaffey is a Digital Marketing Specialist with KBB Digital. For advice on Digital Marketing, including SEO services and Digital Strategy, visitKBB Digital.
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