What do we know about email marketing? It is commonly the use of emails for promoting our services and products. However, a better email marketing description is the use of email to improve relations with potential clients and customers. These type of marketing is one section of internet marketing, which consists of online marketing via websites, blogs, social media platforms, etc. It is quite the same as direct mail except that instead of sending mail within the postal service, we sent messages electronically via email. We all receive much of the spam email proclaiming deals on this. Actually, it is a good example at its worst-unreasonable email barrage.
Someone gets a list of email and sends hundreds of emails along the lines of ad slogans, sale announcements and something like these. All people in this list receive these emails and sometimes heaps of times. These actions disturb people, and that's why sometimes it creates a bad reputation.
In point of fact, email marketing lets businesses to keep their clients informed and fabricate the marketings messages to the customers.
Studies prove that the profits from ad blocker tools will continue increasing, and some predictions clarify that materials will not be useful in the following years. Putting it and the spreading doubt of social media, customers will require relevant connections with brands by contact that pursue clean and unlimited by pay-to-play methods. Predicting at the methods the digital marketing limits will extend in the following years, and the email marketing campaign will be one of the effective ways to continue the growing trends, targeting more revenue and better engagement for your business.
Among continually advent ways, email isn’t fascinating, and it is simple for experts to take tempted away to different platforms. However, platforms that once supposedly endangered the success of email marketing now see their fame fading.
How do the marketers understand it? Next years will get a revival of email marketing as customers seek important, real relations with contents they believe.
The spreading skepticism of social platforms
An occupation that gets enough attention and big budgeting are social media. However, studies emphasize that users’ belief in social media is decreasing. Customers are all too interested how many budget prominent users get from sharing posts about brands and products they never use and care nothing about; likewise, users realize why it is simple to made-up stories and news to increase through social media channels. Users view posts on social channels with a frequently critical eye. According to one thought leader, the equal viral network that spread Facebook into each corner of our planet is now gradually using the other methods towards its distinctness.
The more social media channels continue in the information for individual abuse and practices especially Facebook people start to look for content outside. Social media platforms will be attractive forever, but the audience will get social media data and involved with activities with different, significant methods.
Customers need to affect the brand straight, without the pay-to-play procedures that influence which information the clients' notice and interruption of algorithms.
We want to emphasize that email marketing will be more critical to your brands than ever for posting all your influence and what the business is due to authentically and truthfully.
More niche interest groups
The second reason why experts will return ongoing money to email marketing is due to its potential for segmentation. Email marketers understand how vital it is to place the subscription list, and as methods for database and artificial intelligence develop, email marketers will be able to break the email subscription list into the niche, particular segments. Whereas past periods have followed segmentation by location and gender, going forward, experts will have the capacity to divide their segments even further, into sections of one.
Users assume companies receive data, and those users suppose to get something in return for their unique information. This phrase states that your clients with you to get them and give them the data and especially data which is interesting and useful for them.
Excellent email marketing already intends to send the most appropriate content to users’ mailboxes, so getting new techniques to improve your efficiency at segmenting your list and assembling data makes sense. Along with, it will not take your business significant effort or much time, and you will still notice an enhancement in your transformation.
Back to longer-form content
It is easy with email marketing to send curated, long-form content, the sort of content your customers connect with higher-value. Moreover, the more value users credit to the product, the better. As much as we notice users criticize about tensioning caution measures, in fact, users, pay attention as users want to when their minds are engaged. For instance, some time ago Twitter raised the character limit, and marathon-viewing has become the method platforms shoot, write, and produce presentations.
The balance-wheel is turning back to like long-form content one more time, and email marketing is a direct way to send the content subscribers would like to receive.
Although the first commercial email was sent 30 years ago, the email doesn't lose its value. Email still a useful and vital method to reach our audience.
However, email has developed in the 2010s, and many businesses are attempting to reach their customers on this platform. It means that to get the attention of the audience is much harder than it was before and it will get more difficult in the following years.
Honestly, the email marketing techniques of ten years ago are not useful for today.
Keeping available on email marketing tactics and techniques let us divide our marketing from that of our opponents that means conversions, click-through rates, and higher open rates. Now we are going to share essential email marketing best practice tricks, tips, and concepts which we think will help you in 2019 and the following years. This information includes:
Audience; Segmentation; Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In; Email Design and the Mobile Era; Interaction and Engagement; Delivery Volume; Timing and Frequency; Email Delivery Infrastructure.
Some of these are prominent but usually fall by the wayside. We can emphasize that a successful email marketing campaign is that it follows these easy and powerful email marketing methods.
Audience
The audience is the most precious thing in your email marketing. You can't do your business without it. Today, learning and engaging with the audience is more vital than anything else. We can say that it is the core of our success in marketing.
First and foremost, do not source the email address list from websites, friends or third-party data providers. It is not an effective strategy. It’s hurtful, with the potential to damage the brand, domain, and deliverability. Your delivery IP addresses and domains are likely to be blocked, causing harm to your name and reputation which is not easy to correct. An email address lists from a third-party source does not certainly include an audience for your product.
Additionally, sending abnormal emails to uninterested addresses will not bring much to your business. If you do not have a relevant audience, then it is essential to add a list of emails subscription form to your site. Prefer quality to quantity. Never forget that a highly active list of hundred subscribers is better than a passive, uninteresting list of 100,000. Now, it is more vital than ever to possess a highly engaged audience who opens every email, follows links and even responds to these emails. Hotmail, Gmail, Yandex, and other primary email services can observe interactions with the email receivers.
You can begin by putting a mail list subscription form on the website and giving inducements in exchange for the website users' email addresses. Launch Facebook campaigns to reach potential customers on social media. Don’t skip to collect additional details about your website users. You can organize customized services and lead to more successful marketing with more information about your audience. Consider about updating your mailing, if it is many years old. Check the email addresses frequently, because maybe they are not active currently.
In due course, abandoned accounts become deactivated, and passive email accounts eventually are spam traps. Do not forget that a small group of wrong email accounts or spam traps might cause harm to your reputation.
We can signify different email verification services available, like "Quick Email Verification" and Kickbox.
Segmentation
Segmentation contributes you to a practice of sectioning your audience. Also, it helps to run many email marketing campaign concurrently to the smaller groups to view which is most useful for your company. It is a highly targeted marketing, and it gets click-through rates, higher open rates, and conversion rates. From the technical point of view, it also improves the delivery reputation of both your IP address and sender domain.
Creating or sending an email marketing campaign to your subscriber list is easy and fast. However, is it an effective way? No, unfortunately, it doesn't work today. If you have managed Google or Facebook campaigns, then you probably aware of relevance scores. The reactions of your target audience to your ad campaigns influence these scores. Lowly relevance scores can improve the ad prices by up to 9-10 times or stop social media channels from displaying your ads certainly.
All things in email marketing work similarly. In the case of the infeasibility of the email to your target audience or your email can't bring about a click reaction then your campaign has troubles. If you continue to manage a poor email marketing campaign, it means your delivery IP address and sender domain reputation will descend. Therefore, it is so vital to possess prior knowledge about the audience demographics. Being aware of the audience demographics helps you to segment your audience quickly based on occupation, gender and so on.
Additionally, you can edit your campaign to reel send times based on professions such as sending an email at nights if the subscriber works a night job. On the other hand, segmentation lets you run easy A/B tests about your audience. We will discuss it below.
Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In
One of the most vital but underestimated topics in the email marketing world is the point of single and double opt-in. Maybe you have heard about the double opt-in, that it can decline your subscription rates. That's why you may suppose it is better to have a mail list subscription form on the site that allows new subscriber data without confirmation.
Both double opt-in and single methods are two opportunities for allowing users to subscribe to the mailing lists. Single opt-in enables a website visitor to subscribe via entering his or her email address without any further information. Alternatively, double opt-in needs a user to verify the email via a personal email link, after the system activates their subscription. The advantage of a double opt-in method is an extra layer of security. It ensures you that all users are real and interested people are not hacker or bot.
It is a fact that you can probably get more subscribers with the assistance of single opt-in approach. However, it doesn't mean that many subscribers have a direct impact on sales and conversions. Be attentive that the subscribers which you didn't confirm by a double opt-in method may cause severe problems for the system.
A single opt-in is not secure, and it keeps your website unprotected to opponents or hackers who can cover in your subscriber list with invalid email addresses and spam traps. It also gives your marketing campaign spammy trap hits and raised bounce rates.
Email Design in the Mobile Era
We must admit that email designs have turned to a hot topic thanks to the growth of smartphones. Today, more subscribers are checking their email on the mobile device than ever.
Firstly, make sure that your email is appropriate to your audience, then determine what extends it is mobile friendly. Let's assume a guy is checking his email with a mobile device on the train. He receives an email from a sender he recognizes, a lovely e-commerce website. The subject of the email says there is a sale on sportswear he likes. “If you haven't seen "ABCD 123 of the Subject line" article yet, strongly recommend.”
The first two steps are well done. The guy recognized the sender. Also, the subject line is good. Now, the third step is to read the email. However, it is not easy to see the information about the pricing and discount, and inconvenient to click on the links. The email needs zooming to view pictures and click appropriate buttons. In the analogy, the guy exits the email, and we lost him.
Skipping email content is a general mistake. An email must look nice, but it is not enough. Emails also have to be user-friendly, because it helps messages to become readable and interacting users. The rule is notably true for mobile-friendly contents. Do not neglect that each service and email application has its display standard. For example, Gmail's web browser renders very differently compared with its Android app or Gmail presents HTML email differently from Hotmail.
Your email marketing service must provide you with an easy-to-use email builder which helps you to make mobile-friendly contents. It is also possible to use a third-party testing tool to ensure that users will see your email across 40-50 email apps.
Which testing tools are useful: Nowadays people prefer to use Litmus, Email on Acid, Testiat. Additionally, there are other similar email marketing services which provide inbox tests.
Interaction and Engagement
Be sure that if you don't engage your audience in meaningful interactions with your email marketing campaign, they will probably leave you. It will help if you focus on relevant and interesting topics to your customer base. In other cases, your audience will give up your mailing list. However, your audience will follow links, and your business will get results if you can keep your marketing campaign contents pertinent to the users. We want to point out that each time you run a significant marketing campaign, your email deliverability, and reputation rate will step up.
Positive interactions contain actions like:
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Open the email
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Open and read the email
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Click an internal link
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Archive the email after reading
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Replying to email
Negative interactions contain actions like:
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Archiving the email without opening
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Deleting without opening the email
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Marking the email as spam
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Clicking the “unsubscribe” links
Your first goal should be to manage a campaign that takes the eye of recipients and prompts them to open emails.
Some factors can make your campaign more attractive:
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Name and address of the sender
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Subject line
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Preview text
These three components are the essential elements of the email marketing campaign, and it will find out if your receivers have positive interactions (for example, if they open the email) or adverse reactions (like deleting the email). We will talk about email content components later below.
Another point that we should mention is overlooking the email response. Some email marketers send their emails from addresses like sales@, info@, noreply@, @support and so on. Nevertheless, it is a big mistake. Your behaviors must express the feeling that you want to hear from your customers; you are ready to communicate them. We strongly recommend you to use your personal email addresses to motivate recipients to respond.
What is the meaning of response? Why do we insist on it? Replies mean that your potential customers have added the email address of your company to their contact list. It ensures you to land directly in these email addresses in the future.
Making a personal connection with your audience will benefit you against your rivals. We estimate this method as the fastest and easiest way to create an engaged and loyal customer base.
Delivery volume
Delivery Volume is another essential factor to obtain successful marketing. We can define Delivery Volume as a proportion of your kind email count.
Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or other email providers of your audience will inspect your delivery IP addresses, your email histories, and the relations between these two aspects. Why the providers check our accounts? Because if there is no history on your emails, providers will count them as suspicious and pick up in the spam folder. To avoid this bad luck, you have to begin gradually with low increase and volume by 50 percent every campaign. This sort of consistent delivery volume extension will guarantee your emails run away from triggering spam filters on users email accounts.
Maybe you will consider that this method will take longer to get a high delivery volume. Yes, you are right, but please, take into account that this approach will lead to long-term success. While your opponents cope with low delivery rates because of low engagement rates and volume spikes, your activities will reach your audience more consistently, supporting users interactions.
Timing and Frequency
Timing and frequency are the main details of your marketing campaign. It determines the success and the failure of your activity in today's marketing world. Sending plenty of emails will have you hailed as spam and make your users quit, but posting a few emails will result in lower conversions and open rates.
Actually, we cannot notify an exact formula for timing and frequency. It depends on different businesses and industries. Until you get the optimum conversion rate, it is important to run some tests to find or develop your baseline.
Honestly, it is not possible for a software company to send daily emails or for an e-commerce site to post only monthly newsletters. Analyze your business and create logical results. In the next step observe the corollaries. After five or six campaigns, the methods you want to adjust will become clean based on your customers' answers.
You can (and have to) present new ideas about sending email schedule. Neglect the thoughts of the people about specific times being good across the board. Why don't you select the other choices? If everybody else posts their emails on early Wednesday mornings, why not send yours on Tuesday, just before dinner? Alternatively on Saturday mornings? Do not hesitate to try out various time intervals for the marketing campaign. Being unique will improve your opportunities of reaching higher conversion rates instead of trying to get customer attention in a crowd. Strong marketing uses measures. Motivate yourself to test different ways on your audience segments.
Email Delivery Infrastructure
We must admit that sending mass emails was a more difficult process, in the early 2000s. In 2019, it is much more comfortable even though policies, guidelines and the method email accounts filter junk mail change frequently. However, nothing has changed for legitimate senders in terms of your purposes. You will be able to reach your audience easily if you follow key technical email delivery commands. It is important to follow the fundamentals of DKIM and SPF authorization, monitoring blacklists, IP warmup procedures, and DMARC policy.
If your goal is to improve your email marketing with strong planning or stunning marketing campaign, then you need to try new techniques. Remember that you cannot manage to stick with old methods.
You can compare your methods to your opponents and research trends in email marketing. Please, contact with other email marketers on the internet or social media. Do not forget that experimentation is a necessary point of email marketing. Making small tests and segmenting your audience will assist you in finding the best ways for your business.
Be ready for new trends
The email marketing landscape will proceed to concentrate on personalization with a focus on quality over quantity and expanding loyalty projects in the following years.
Many exciting developments and trends hit the system of email marketing in the last five years as email turned older and older - from the AMP's emergence for Gmail to mobile email receiving its long-awaited tipping case.
Remember that you may fail in an marketing campaign heaps of time. However, you can restart and refocus marketing efforts on innovation and speed to remain pace with the critical customers. Today we can assume customer expectations for quality content to extend - it occurs an annual tradition.
Email marketers will need to leverage new methods and disciplines to accomplish to push the boundaries. Email programs and apps will become even more specific and more interactive, and as a result, more effective at driving revenue and brand loyalty.
All marketers will need to develop new disciplines and technologies to maintain to push the boundary. Practices show that email programs will become even more interactive and more personalized and as a result, more efficient at brand loyalty and driving revenue.
To reach these marketing dreams and lofty goals, we tried to identify particular trends for the following period in email marketing. So keep going it will be useful.
Right content for right customer approach
Email marketing contents can and should be more calculated based on user’s behavior, and we believe in nowadays everyone will notice this get more widespread in marketing strategies. There is no excuse for marketers not to personalize email contents based on the datum they catch from browsing, purchase email preferences and histories.
The usage of this data is getting less “offensive” and using it deliberately can achieve success. You should make it a preference to use more and collect data for personalization in content execution if you haven’t done so already. Marketers should expand and fulfill their current priorities centers for following browse or content choices, purchase, click and open behavior to recognize the content that bothers subscriber's interest most.
The process will get even more evident as marketers force vendors for the result. Marketers will continue to test AI platforms and push vendors to automate at a larger scale and handle their AI needs in 2019. This change in technology should allow marketers to classify content combinations that work better, more effective faster.
The mobile average order value is growing
Historically, the mobile average order value (AOV) has delayed behind its desktop match because users are less likely to make big-ticket buying (e.g., costly, large items) on-the-go. We will observe this gap close in 2019. Yes, Marketing data from Q3 presents significant extension in the mobile average order value (AOV) for the first time in an extended period. Q3 in 2018, AOV was $66, just $20 less than the $86 desktop the mobile average order value AOV – and this is only the start.
Day by day the subscribers will buy a larger order on the mobile device because of user experience getting better. Of course, every brand wants to take advantage of this trend. That's why they must gain subscriber's trust by suggesting particular brand content, more videos and photos or user testimonials encourage subscribers over the edge.
The continued growth of interactive content
As in the last years, we are a firm believer in interactive content, and we are predicting it will continue to grow in 2019. A marketing campaign that includes quizzes, games, image carousels or short videos let users interact with the product without leaving the email itself. Today, more brands enable their user to engage with emails in new styles. Whether it is a personality quiz or the facility to book hotels without leaving an email – the more engaged and waiting to buy users will be with the brand.
The use of interactive contents can assist boost educate, entertain and sales. Funny games are a great idea to get followers in the habit of opening the emails. The ability to make buying within email makes the purchasing process even quicker and will increase sales for the brand that include interactivity.
Quality vs. quantity. Deliverability plus greater spend in the targeted digital asset
If we ask marketers, they will say that deliverability is a severe concern for them. Due to inadequate data management and expanded standards from major ISPs like Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL, emails can instantly land in the SPAM folder, executing all that laborious process in creative useless. It is essential to reach the inbox each time and maximize income from the marketing campaign. So, marketers have to assure they are sending appropriate contents to high-quality value users and stop focusing on the whole quantity of emails transmitted. Today, it means containing best practices even more, such as data hygiene, segmentation, email verification, as well as preference centers.
Furthermore reaching current subscribers, smart marketers will use datum to make better target new subscribers and their digital recovery efforts. Repeatedly, quality over quantity in acquiring new customers will spend dividends for the email plans down the road. Model out the digital acquisition by adding the proper types of data and searching look-a-like variants of your best subscribers instead of just paying the standard cost per point. Actually, this method may and most likely will take more to acquire quality users successfully. However, the lifetime value of higher quality customers is deserving of the additional purchase in the end. Remember that smarter acquisition equal to greater ROI.
Loyalty programs will extra develop to collect user data
Many marketers already encompass loyalty programs, and now these programs will become much more complicated. The loyalty programs will be used to gather user data and thoroughly get customer behavior, letting them acquire new customers with similar characteristics and reach loyal clients with better personalization.
How can we imagine it? Email marketers can follow the behavior of their most true users (e.g., those who respond with loyalty emails most often) and better get their wants when it comes to email. What time of day does the subscriber want to receive an email? What types of products does he or she usually purchase and browse? What campaigns work best for the subscriber? Then, marketers can take these details to encourage customers with similar behavior to attend the loyalty program. Moreover, popular brands are already leveraging loyalty scores as an incentive to get data from their subscribers. This mixture will lead to great engagement in the inbox and more interest for brands who accomplish perfectly.
Over the last years, it has been enjoyable viewing email marketing turn 40. While some marketers in the past have alleged marketing is dead and waiting for substitution by a bright new channel, but we have yet to see a real successor. Therefore we are challenging all marketers to carry on the steady work today to execute it even better.
Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
Each time new methods show up on the digital marketing sphere, followers are quick to comment, “This will technology kill email marketing.” Artificial intelligence is no reverse. And similar with other implementations, Artificial intelligence will finally get your email marketing more successful in the nearest time, not less.
Lisa Matherly is a vice president of Content Marketing at McAfee. She says that “ Every marketer should investigate to how he (she) can use Artificial Intelligence as a method to catch what materials a possible client is consuming if it is business preferred content, technical documents or support or user-generated, which will provide for high customer satisfaction and more personalized customer experience.”
Generate content combinations
It can assist you swiftly generate a collection of content based on what will do the best, increasing the KPIs.
Do your followers' click-through after reading user stories and does it convert them? Maybe your views turn when you worth ethos and review the planning statement. Alternatively, Artificial Intelligence can check your contents and evaluate which one is performing better. It can even show you new keys.
For example, after estimating the conversion data and click-through, Artificial Intelligence might recommend you combine user stories and the work ethos to build a unique post. It will describe how your mission statement and the customer connected or what brought about them fall in love with your business.
Discover highest-performing promotions
Artificial Intelligence can also view your users’ past action and resolve what recommendations and promotions work best for all of your target groups. For instance, Artificial Intelligence can decide which of your customers are most likely to profit on a short term promotion and which users fancy on free transferring. Though this ability is already open to marketers to some degree, Artificial Intelligence will let companies give suggestions and segments in a much more efficient style. It is not enough to recommend more caps for clients who recently purchased caps. Not to mention, promoting toilet seats to a consumer who already got it like this tweet posted at Amazon.
Sending emails to clients recommending things they don’t need such as an example above mentioned somebody who recently purchased a toilet seat—merely because they have purchased these products in the past is not a relevant utilize of the sources. Your users will skip and remove the emails, or if you are not lucky, get a tweet poking fun at the business that gets viral.
Artificial Intelligence can check what behaviors your users have done before and present you what action the subscribers are likely to carry out next, enabling you to address any matters they might have or to disturb them along in your funnel.
Artificial Intelligence is a way of giving worth to your client in a more specific method.
Determine new segments
Moreover, Artificial Intelligence can make segments based on behavior models that human experts may have skipped. Sifting through billions of data objects is stable for most businesses, and usually, you will lose a segment that Artificial Intelligence will take like clients who transform when indicated with free shipping and a short term suggest. It leads to new and different targets for your business that will get a more significant award for you in the long term. The email below belongs to Canopy Group. It might be difficult to detect this specific and distinct segment without the assistance of Artificial Intelligence:
Chatbots in Email Marketing
Chatbots are other email marketing techniques that will become universal day after day. When executing chatbots, do not ignore they have a position within the current plan. It is not difficult to get cleaned up in the hype, however, you will possess much more benefit when including chatbots into your past marketing campaign as contrary to focusing mainly on the significant method. For sure, email marketing goes step by step with chatbots.
Email subscription chatbots
Adding a chatbot that asks users to your website if they would like to sign up for the email list not only promotes people to register, but it may also get the chance to find more data about clients.
An email subscription chatbot may ask new followers what kind of content they would like to get from you and when providing them to self-segment. The subscribers will be more likely to prefer the content you send them and continue engaging with your business when they have information into what content they get.
Chatbot reminders
You can use a chatbot to remind the subscribers of the advantage your emails sent to their inboxes. For example, a chatbot can remember users you have emailed them a special promotion or coupon or more features about an expected event.
Link to chatbots
Emails are an essential resource to incorporate links to the chatbots of the website. For this reason, if the user has any client service questions or issues about your brands, a chatbot can reply to their needs immediately, enhancing your relations with subscribers. Adding a prompt button to a chatbot to determine standard errors or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) also frees up the business to work on other, more interesting things, such as creating worthy content or updating your brand. Chatbots can make a better answer rate and motivate clients to send repeat business without any extra action for you. Also, they are going to be every place in the following times, so go on and think how you can realize your chatbots work profitable and you will be attentive for when the trend in email marketing splits into the following periods. Though the email displayed below from Netflix doesn’t possess a button to a chatbot, it would be simple to enter that choice as another way for subscribers to get in touch.
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