Online marketing can be a tricky proposition for the uninitiated. One of the areas that online marketing professionals should absolutely focus on this year is email marketing. While strategies and techniques change over time depending on customer response and trends, we continue to see a general rule in our position as a leading Vancouver SEO agency.
The general rule of thumb with regard to your marketing strategy is to first determine what avenues will be most effective in 2020. Once you’ve identified key areas of focus, you should apply as much effort as possible to them in order to reap the best possible results. If you follow our suggestions below, this will prove to be a surprisingly easy feat to accomplish.
As with previous years, in 2020 one of your most important tools will be effective email marketing. These days, customers prefer and appreciate services that are personalized and reach out to them specifically. It’s no wonder, then, that effective email marketing has proven itself to be an effective agent for lead conversion. The challenge, however, is to understand what trends currently work best before applying them to your current efforts in a meaningful way.
Email Online Marketing in 2020 – Forecasts From a Top Vancouver SEO Agency
Here are the most important things that you need to know when it comes to email marketing in 2020:
1. Personalization will be the most important thing
Social media marketing and improving SEO ought to be regular parts of your online marketing strategies. That being said, personalization via email marketing takes a bigger piece of the pie this year. Individualized experiences sent through email deliver staggering results that cannot be ignored.
To be good at this, you need to have a record of past events and actions that you can build on. This will help you to establish a better and more intimate connection with your clients. Some key examples include email reminders about items left in a cart or short suggestions of other items that a certain customer might like based on their preferences and purchase history.
2. Marketers will rely heavily on predictive marketing metrics
Predictive marketing metrics are easy to measure and take into account the lifetime value of groups of customers as well as that of individuals. When you pay attention to these metrics, you’ll effectively harness the power to predict which particular groups of subscribers are most profitable. Furthermore, this information will help you tailor your marketing efforts so you can concentrate on solidifying relationships. If you do so, you will generate more ROI based on those relationships. This includes improving your SEO and social media marketing.
3. Death of the linear marketing funnel model
Because there are newer and better digital marketing strategies and channels available these days, the “time-tested” model of the marketing funnel does not work like it used to. Nowadays, the name of the game is to focus on the entire customer lifecycle. Your focus here should rely on how well you maximize a loyal customer’s lifetime value with regard to repeat business.
This is infinitely more important than simply generating a certain number of one-off purchases. Your online marketing and social media marketing tactics should be about winning a customer many times over. Achieve this goal and you’ll easily put yourself well ahead of the competition.
4. Automated emails for email marketing will be your best friend
Utilizing automated emails puts the power of creating more meaningful email experiences in your hands. It also means that you’ll expend less effort in the long run. A very important consideration is to use modern advances in automation, which will help you recognize high-value emails. After doing this, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that these emails might account for as little as less than 10% of your entire subscriber base.
This may be off-putting at first, but that smaller piece of the pie will always generate the best profits for you, so your best bet is to invest most of your time and effort on improving and streamlining them. It takes a little bit of time to tackle this step, but a small amount of work ahead of time will lead to impressive gains in the future.
5. The emergence of a new email marketing automation hybrid
This year, CRM, marketing automation and email marketing will intersect in a powerful way. This coupling of technologies relies on visual workflows, user-friendly marketing tools, and more efficient content creation. What you’ll need to do is find the best tools for managing your email marketing and includes these three key areas.
Once you tackle this step you’ll enjoy the convenience of drag and drop campaign creations, along with simple yet effective email builders that are adept at handling dynamic content. These tools will also provide a simpler approach to pulling content from your database or website and inserting them in your email, complete with targeted and personalized messages as well as product recommendations.
In the past, these three tools used to require separate systems that all required a certain skill level or degree of familiarity. Now, however, you can expect to find more software that incorporates all three into one, spiffy package. Utilizing these tools will undoubtedly make your online marketing a much easier process.
6. Email and online marketing professionals will claim multi-channel experiences as their niche
In the past, marketers busied themselves with improving SEO and creating targeted social media marketing in order to attract new business. This year’s trends, however, will open your business up to many other profitable aspects of the entire customer lifecycle. Many of these are a genuine treat to learn and explore.
Today’s technologies and corresponding tools will allow marketers to effectively tap into this lifecycle in myriad ways. The main entry point for these technologies is, of course, email marketing. The width and breadth of responsibilities for email and online marketing professionals will certainly widen in 2020. Even so, the prospect of generating high-value customers over an extended period of time is simply too good to ignore.
7. User-generated content is poised to increase significantly
The importance of user-generated content is increasing by leaps and bounds these days and it will be amazingly useful in 2020. The most impressive way that it will help your business is in driving real-time engagement. If you properly motivate your customers to provide their own content with regard to your email marketing, you can significantly boost conversion rates. It’s also worth including effective calls to action in specific email marketing campaigns when it comes to asking your customers for all-important feedback.
User-generated content is perhaps most effective when it comes to including user reviews to show increase value for others. Incentivizing your users to share your email with their social networks will help you in so many ways. Social media is gaining momentum in a big way, so tapping into that space by harnessing the power of user-generated content will be one of your most powerful tools.
8. Interactive elements will help to increase user engagement
Interactivity is a hot topic when it comes to marketing in 2020. This includes adding animated buttons and effective calls to action. Rollover effects, surveys, polls, and interactive images in the form of carousels are also key considerations. You can also use accordion features to help minimize the initial size of your marketing emails, allowing your users to selectively pick what pieces of information are most relevant to them. This is infinitely preferable to bombarding them with too much information all at once.
9. Accessibility considerations will become much more important in 2020
Accessibility for all of your customers should never be overlooked. Voice assistants, for example, help users with visual impairments by reading their emails. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that add extra functionality for your email marketing in order to maximize accessibility considerations on your end. Assistive technologies are fast becoming more and more prevalent and you should definitely take advantage of as many of them as possible.
You can also improve accessibility by using shorter sentences and limiting your use of difficult words, lessening the strain that many users feel when reading through wordy emails. Localization is another useful trick that you have at your disposal, especially in areas where more than one language is spoken. This will open you up to a whole new customer base and boost engagement even further.
Furthermore, accessible design can boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Using real text HTML, including alternative text for all included images, optimizing line spacing and font sizes, and paying close attention to text justification issues will similarly help you in the long run. Another useful trick is using high contrasting colours to differentiate between standard and important information.
10. Email online marketing will continue to thrive, despite the rise of messaging apps
A lot of people use messaging apps to communicate these days, leading many people to think that email marketing is less useful than it used to be. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Email marketing is one of the most dominant forms of marketing and is still highly useful, despite some people claiming that it’s on its way out.
You can improve the effectiveness of your email marketing by sending your emails at the right times. Checking metrics and paying attention to response times can really work wonders in driving engagement and replies. Additionally, you should focus on making your titles catchy and attention-grabbing to help persuade your customers to read them as they arrive.
11. Cross-channel marketing should be utilized effectively
While cross-channel marketing is similar to multi-channel marketing, they’re decidedly not the same thing. You can improve your cross-channel marketing easily by knowing all the different ways you can reach your email subscribers, along with all the tools to help you do so. Services like Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match can be used in tandem to really increase the impact of your email lists, along with streamlining them to focus on specific subsets of subscribers.
12. Mobile devices need to be kept in mind at all times
This ties in with accessibility considerations, but is important enough that it deserves its own space. Mobile devices are being used more and more nowadays, with many customers relying on them to read emails, as opposed to just reading them on their desktop computers. Optimizing emails to reflect this trend and make them more mobile-friendly is a huge step that should never be overlooked.
Some emails – especially long-form emails – may be formatted perfectly for desktop users, but end up looking awkward on mobile devices. This is a problem that can lead to users simply passing them by without paying them any mind. When your emails take this issue into consideration, you will definitely reach more people. You can also use location services to gather increased data from mobile users, giving you a better sense of how to reach them in a more meaningful way.
13. Use AI and other technological improvements to boost your online email marketing
Artificial Intelligence is wildly important these days and can be harnessed to help simplify the way you engage with your users. Using AI to provide them with contextual messages that relate specifically to them is one way to increase engagement. Additionally, it can be used to make your emails more interactive, letting them browse services and products directly from their email messages, negating the need for them to use a browser at all. This has been proven to have a positive effect on ROI, which is always a good thing for your business.
14. A streamlined and effective use of email marketing will be more important than providing constant updates
People are used to being bombarded with nonstop emails and messages, but that doesn’t mean that they have to like it. In fact, limiting your emails to avoid overwhelming your users will always make them more apt to engage with – or feel a connection to – your email marketing campaigns.
Selectively sending thoughtful emails instead of barraging users with nonstop messages will go a long way and they will ultimately appreciate your consideration. Furthermore, spam filters may accidentally send your messages to a user’s spam folder if you get too trigger-happy with your email marketing.
15. Your users will respond more positively to community-driven email online marketing tactics
People inherently want to feel a sense of community in everything they do; it’s just basic human nature. You can use this to your advantage by making your users feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. Building a sense of camaraderie and community will help you relate to your users and make them feel more comfortable engaging with your business.
When you tap into this basic human need by humanizing yourself and relating your business directly to your users’ preferences, they will definitely be more likely to respond positively. You can easily do this by including personal anecdotes or allowing them to get a sense of who you are. This can be achieved by letting them in on your work routine or being a little less professional and more relatable with regard to your email marketing.
Wrapping Up
These predictions of the email online marketing space for 2020 will help you grow your business and customer base like never before. They certainly paint a more exciting picture of what lies ahead in the coming months. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how they change the world of marketing for the better.
All that’s left for you to do from here on out is to learn more about the specific tools and techniques your business needs in order to make the necessary improvements with regard to your current email marketing strategy. Once you’ve nailed them down, you’ll immediately start reaping the rewards! It doesn’t take much effort on your part and the benefits will undoubtedly more than make up for the time you’ll spend on research and implementation.
