Email Marketing Is Evolving: Are Your Campaigns Keeping Up?

If email were a cat, it’d be on its seventh life. The popularity of email marketing has dipped and grown over time, and 2015 was the year that people started to embrace it again.

Email’s been around since the seventies, and other technology has certainly surpassed the excitement of an electronic message, but this doesn’t mean that business owners should neglect their email marketing campaigns. After all, over 70 percent of people still prefer communication with companies to happen via their inbox.

But what’s in store for the future of email marketing? This will be the year that the relationship between you and your email marketing audience is tested--there’s simply more clutter and noise to get through. And who knows what Gmail (the largest email service in the world right now) will do next to "improve" your inbox?

The success of your future email marketing campaigns will revolve around being hyper relevant. To accomplish this, here’s what you need to know about the future and what it holds for successful email marketing.

Automation

Sending emails “every Monday” was a great tactic in 2005; automation should be an even better tactic in 2016. It’s all about sending an email when your customer has purchased something or performed a specific action. There isn’t always going to be a right time and day to send. Instead, that perfect moment should be based off of customer actions and attributes.

For example, someone who has signed up for your email list without downloading the informational PDF you offer should get a completely different message than someone who has chosen to download your incentive. You can predict people’s interests based on what they do on your site. Send messages according to what types of content they’re viewing or downloading on the site or the types of items items they’re purchasing. Advancing your automation so that it becomes hyper specific will bring your email campaigns up a notch.

Curation

Curating is all about gathering content that you know your audience will want to see and making it readily. You may already be doing this now, but in the future, plan to include things like articles and photos that go beyond the assets that you own, such as your blog posts, Instagram photos, and Pinterest pins.

And since you should have a strong relationship with your audience, you will know the type of information and content they want to see in their emails. Focus on other tangential, but still valuable, content sources via partnerships or complementary services.

Show your audience that you know your stuff--and them--by sharing web content that’s relevant to your business or specialty. Ultimately, this will help relieve the pressure of having to constantly come up with original content, and it’ll also save your subscribers some time and web surfing when you present web content they want and care about in a nice package. Providing a wealth of knowledge and pertinent information will add major value to your email campaigns.

Personalization

Finally, the future of email marketing means that personalization needs to go way beyond addressing someone by their name in an email. I’m talking about personalization that deals with specific demographics like age, gender, previous purchases, the customer’s life cycle with your brand, and so on.

Take Amazon, for example. Millions of data points are captured by the company about consumer shopping trends, habits and history; we are starting to see more predictive emails from them that are geared towards replenishment before a person even realizes it's time to replenish. This is evident with consumer and household products, but there's also opportunity with other life stage purchases such children’s clothes. (Infant size purchases can yield toddler size reminders for 12 to 24 months.)

This is what personalization will be like: less about “Hi (insert name here)” and more about “You bought this, so you might also like this and you’ll need to buy this in X days.” Think about using the data you have about your audience to anticipate their next moves. This will be a great driver of sales as your subscribers are definitely more likely to visit your website and click around if they see something in your email campaign that’s relative to a previous purchase, predictive intelligence, or some other content they’ve already expressed interest in.

So, why not commit to sending smarter emails? Your email campaigns should be constantly changing and evolving. And considering email is anything but dead, there’s no excuse not to stick to your resolution to get it done.