Here's our rundown of the top email marketing trends to look out for this year. Email marketing continues to grow and evolve, this section has some great ideas to incorporate with your digital marketing campaigns this year.
Segmentation isn’t really that new when it comes to email marketing, however, in recent years it’s become a key element in developing successful email marketing campaigns.
Data segmentation refers to splitting your data into smaller sets or subsets, based on how subscribers are reacting to your email marketing campaigns. This could mean that everybody who clicked on a link contained within your mailer to product number one is then put into their own list. You then end up with smaller lists containing groups of people who all engaged with your emailer in the same way.
This year, this trend of looking to identify and group engagement trends will develop still further. Lots of email marketers have had a lot of success with this approach and are continuing to take this concept further with hyper segmentation. This involves looking for
One of the popular hyper segmentation groupings is to create subsets based on which day’s or times people typically open and engage with emails. This grouping would be derived from an existing set of all of the people who had previously clicked on product number one.
Using hyper segmentation means that you are targeting the right people with the right product offering at the right time. This approach really boosts conversions, whilst employing this email marketing technique may appear as being quite labour intensive, any decent email marketing software, such as email blaster for example will do all of the heavy lifting for you with automation.
Email marketing trends for 2023 are all about the further development of techniques and strategies that have seen great results over the last few years.
Omnichannel marketing is a further extension of multichannel marketing. For quite a while now, digital marketing has incorporated email marketing, SMS and social media. With campaigns being sent out via all three channels.
Historically, whilst used together, there was little interaction between these channels, multichannel email marketing just referred to sending out your email marketing message via all three. Omnichannel develops this basic concept and increases sales conversion by allowing these channels to support and interact with each other.
A great example of this is using an abandoned shopping cart on your website as a trigger. With automation, leaving the cart could be used to trigger an email, or an SMS reminding the viewer that they have products in the cart still.
This can also include targeted social media advertisements, based on product interests first identified by an abandoned basket or clicks in an email marketing campaign. These highly targeted social media advertisements can be presented to the viewer when they visit their social media feeds.
Dynamic campaigns will listen to how your viewers are interacting with your sends and serve them a new email based on their previous interactions. A typical usage for this could be which calls to action or product links your viewers clicked on. If, for example, people clicked on product number one, they would then be sent a timed campaign of email marketing templates based around this product - these are typically further information and eventually an offer based email.
2023 will see the continued growth of this area. The development of sophisticated email marketing software over the last few years has given email marketers access to a powerful set of tools that automate the process of presenting the right product to the right viewer at the right time.
Over the last few years, mobile devices have really accelerated past desktop as the preferred device for viewing emails. 2023 should see continued growth in this margin between the two. In 2021 we saw email opens on mobile devices growing to 60% as the preferred primary device.
This email marketing trend is quite significant and will continue and grow in 2023. This means that when it comes to designing email marketing campaigns, email marketers should design for mobile first and desktop second.
When designing for smaller screens, it’s important to use larger fonts, less text and larger buttons. You should also make sure that the file size of any images that you use is kept as small as possible. As mobile viewers may be accessing your email on slower cellular data networks, download speeds will be critical. Email marketing campaigns with large image file sizes often gets deleted without reading.
GDPR has continued to have a large impact on how email marketers collect, store and use data. The security of your recipient’s private data must be protected by the data controller (the owner of the list), the data controller is also responsible for making sure that the Data Processor (the owner of the email marketing software in this instance) is storing the data in a safe and responsible way.
Over the past few years, people have become more and more aware of the protection of GDPR and how it works. This means that in 2023 you can expect your target audience to be very cautious about supplying you with their private data unless you make them feel comfortable that you have adequate security in place to safeguard their private information.
In 2023, we can expect to see email marketers giving increased visibility to their privacy policy. This email marketing trend will continue to merit a front and centre position in the strategy of more and more email marketers. People will only sign up to receive your email marketing if they feel it is safe to do so.
As GDPR is a UK (and EU) law, more and more email marketers are choosing UK based email marketing software as their preferred choice. GDPR offers people the protection that they are looking for, if you are using US-based email marketing software, this means that you are uploading your contact’s private data outside of the protection of GDPR. In 2023, UK based software is really important to all responsible email marketers.
Email marketing has really seen some major steps forward in terms of the tools available to email marketers over the last few years. One of the really important ones in 2023 will be increased visibility over the total journey of your email marketing interactions.
Pretty much all software will present you with an email marketing analytics package to see how many reads, clicks and other interactions your campaign received. Typically though, this visibility had stopped there - it didn’t show you what those interactions then went on to do when they visited your company website.
2023 has already been a real game-changer regarding this visibility though. Email marketing software such as Email Blaster will allow you to install a small line of code into your company website that then opens the door to seeing what those viewers did when they visited your website. This means that you then have visibility over the complete journey, from email open all the way through to a successful purchase (or conversely an abandoned cart).
Total journey metrics will enable you to directly identify the exact amount of sales revenue that your email campaigns are generating. This is marketing gold for email marketers as it really helps to fine-tune the complete journey that your email subscribers are taking.
Over the past few years, mail filters have got much more strict with penalising senders for receiving high bounces, unsubscribes and low rates of engagement. Your email marketing sending server will carry with it a sender score - this is a percentage score that moves up or down depending on your previous campaigns.
This means that if you had previously recorded high bounces and low email marketing viewer engagement then your score will decrease. A low score dramatically increases the chances that your future sends would be classed as spam or could even be blocked by your recipient’s email filter.
So, in 2023 it’s more important than ever to keep your email marketing databases as clean as possible. This means deleting any bounces and people who haven’t engaged with your email marketing for a while, doing this regular housekeeping will help to ensure that your sender score remains high and your future email marketing campaigns receive great stats and conversions.
The good news is that any decent email marketing software, such as Email Blaster will automatically remove bounces and unsubscribes, this means that housekeeping your data is mainly automated and requires very little of your time.
The writing has been on the wall for quite a while with this one but in 2023 all major email marketing software suppliers have blocked the use of purchased lists from their networks. Unsolicited email is something that none of us wants to receive and email marketing software companies don’t want their platforms used to send this kind of traffic.
Over recent years, spam filters have also updated their algorithms to become much more adept at looking for the typical characteristics of a purchased list. In 2023 they will continue to become more adept at blocking lists of this nature.
This means that using email marketing broadcasts to send out to purchased email lists in 2023 will be something that will be even harder to do. The results achieved will make it untenable as a marketing medium.
Following on from the growth in the use of mobile devices to view emails, the direct effect of this is that in 2023 the amount of copy text used in email marketing be much less than it had been in previous years.
Email marketers have seen much better conversion rates when using less text and more direct succinct copy. As well as the frustrations of reading lots of text on smaller screens, we are also spending less time on each email. As the volume of emails continues to increase, we are all spending less time skim reading each email.
2023 is set to see this trend for less copy continue, successful email marketers, are getting better and better and getting their point across with fewer words.As the amount of online purchases that we all make has dramatically increased in recent years, we have all become very accustomed to researching our next potential purchase by looking for user reviews.
Digital marketers have seen this trend develop and are incorporating it into their email marketing. The objective is to give your viewer everything that they need inside your email broadcast to make a purchase. If your viewer receives your digital marketing and then visits the search engines to look for user-generated reviews then this means that they could then easily become drawn to competitor offerings instead of yours.
In 2023 this trend will continue to increase as more and more savvy email marketers learn to incorporate user-generated content into their email marketing campaigns.