Email Marketing Trends Businesses Should Follow
Over the years, email marketing has changed drastically - and for the better! Email features, tools, and even builders have advanced, helping companies achieve their sales goals and communication benchmarks. While these upgrades will improve your overall email marketing strategy, it's essential that you watch and incorporate new trends to grab the attention of your subscribers.
mail marketing trends come and go, catering to the needs and interests of the times, but there are a few that are here to stay. Below we list out the top email trends, tips, and how-to's to help improve your businesses' email marketing approach. All of our tips revolve around personalization, specifically loyalty programs, animated graphics, and content, which will help bring your business to the next level.
Need help implementing these trends into your email marketing efforts? Contact our email experts, today!
1. Loyalty Programs
One way to improve your email marketing strategy is to introduce or revamp your company's loyalty program. Loyalty programs, one of the most popular email marketing trends that have surfaced over the years, provides you with a fun and effortless way to reach your most loyal customers, bring in new subscribers, and incentivize disengaged clients all in one hit.
The data you collect from each campaign will help you better understand what your customers need, want, and react to, giving you the information you need to create more personal and useful emails. Take note to which emails result in the most sales or highest ROI and document what users are clicking on most
How Loyalty Programs Can Incentivize Your Entire Customer Base
Reach loyal customers
Whether you have a storefront or you only promote your products and services online, you know there's a group of customers that are always itching for the next deal. Boost your sales with a limited-time offer or customize a message that says thanks to your loyal customer base with member-only savings.
Costco shapes this trend in email marketing, providing member-only savings that are hard to ignore.
Bring in new subscribers
Customers waiting in line at the cash register or trying on clothes in your fitting rooms are bound to act on a member-only deal. Offer a discount incentive or highlight your member perks with signage around the store.
Bring back subscribers with a win-back series
Trying to excite a group of customers that haven't opened your email in weeks can be difficult. Showcasing member perks or pushing a win-back deal in the subject line might encourage them to take a peek at your email. If the incentive is attractive enough, you might see a new sale come through. For some businesses, win-back emails may seem annoying, but it's a commonly practiced email marketing trend.
Loyalty Program Types
Some companies already offer loyalty programs, such as providing discounts or exciting flash sales. For example, a travel company may offer a 15% discount that can be applied to a purchase made over a holiday weekend. Alternatively, customers are offered a first time discount of 15% when they join a loyalty program. While holiday and first-time customer discounts may work well with your customer base, understanding three basic things will help you find what resonates best for your members:
- When your customers want to receive or open your emails
- What your customers typically purchase (most popular purchases)
- What promotions work best with your subscriber base
Write out answers to these questions to determine and generate emails that will promote the most engagement and excitement with your subscribers. In general, loyalty programs offer recurring or special incentives that will encourage customers to stick with you.
If this sounds like a lot of work, don't sweat it! Organizing all of these email marketing trends into your strategy is easy with FireDrum Email Marketing. Our drag-and-drop builder is designed to host and feature your discount codes, making it easy to track sales and ROI.
2. Animated Gifs & Graphics
Millions of emails are sent every week, which can make it difficult to stand out from the crowd and interact with consumers. However, the use of animated GIFs and graphics can help make your email campaigns more enjoyable and easier to consume.
Animated gifs and graphics can be used to:
- Tell the story of what your company offers
- Showcase a specific product or service
- Draw attention to a specific message
- Give your customers a good laugh
These visual stories and graphics are becoming the future of email and should be an essential item on your checklist.
Magnolia Homes’ animated email GIFs are typically subtle in color, speed, and graphics, but catch the attention of nearly every reader.
While animated graphics and GIFs could seem silly as you're piecing together your next campaign, you can expect to see higher engagement and more click-throughs if you incorporate these into your email. Customers love visual elements that can explain your story in an easy-to-digest format.
Create your own GIFs with a GIF generator online or with Adobe Photoshop.
3. Personalized/Tailored Content
In today's demanding rketing place, companies are doing everything they can to increase customer engagement and make sales. One of the key tactics of a marketer's strategy is to personalize and tailor email content to make it relevant and useful for customers. This increases overall engagement with your brand and puts you in a favorable position with ROI. Personalizing email content may sound like a time-intensive task, but with FireDrum, you can save time on emails by adding dynamic content sections.
Before we talk about how you can do this, let’s cover some statistics first. Reports have stated that there is a 26% increase in open rates for emails that have personalized subject lines. Once the email has been opened, if the message is also personalized the click-through rate increases by 14% with a conversion rate of 10% higher than messages with standardized, impersonal content.
Those statistics prove that personalization is the key to improving email marketing strategies as we move forward in the digital marketplace. Now that you know these facts, let’s take a look at some ways to improve your email marketing game:
- Personalized subject lines with the customer’s name
- Personalize messages by including the customer’s name, such as “Dear John”
- Use automation to send more relevant emails to people based on what they view or purchase
- Have links take customer’s to personalized landing pages
- Segment your email list based on customer data to provide more relevant emails with dynamic content (featuring products, discounts, images, and copy that resonates better with their interests).
The easiest way to implement these strategies is to utilize data that your customers have already provided. Look into each subscriber's account to see which emails have been opened, what they clicked through to, and (if available), what website activity was recorded.
Email Marketing Trends & Your Strategy
With the marketplace rapidly changing, it's vital that your business is staying up-to-date with the trends in email marketing. The three trends we featured above are the future of email and are here to stay. Follow our questions and guides to set yourself apart from other local businesses and companies that live in the past of email marketing and catapult yourself into an updated and personalized era.
#1 - Loyalty programs give you a chance to build a loyal customer base and reward your most active subscribers. Whether this is through discounts, exclusive sales, or personal messages, building relationships are essential. That way, you can increase your loyal followers and even bring in new customers.
#2 - Animated graphics and GIFs help get the message across in a new and engaging way.
You only have a short amount of time to engage with customers in an email - animated graphics provide a way for you to say more in less time.
#3 - Content personalization shows your consumers that you care about their needs and interests. It helps build relationships and grow your open rates, click rates, and overall sales!
Email Strategies Guided By Experts
Leaving your email marketing to chance is a thing of the past. Work with our email experts and specialists to combine these email marketing trends with a plan that best fits your business and products and services. We'll help you better understand loyalty programs and content personalization, curating a strategy and animated graphics that are made just for your business.
