Forget filling inboxes with endless promotions – today’s trends in email marketing prioritize personalization and value. Shoppers crave relevant messages that speak directly to them, not generic blasts. This shift has forced brands to ditch the “one-size-fits-all” approach and embrace automation to deliver the right message at the right time.
In this blog, we’ll explore the eight hottest trends in email marketing and guide you toward choosing the perfect automation platform to complement these email marketing trends and craft engaging experiences that resonate with your audience. Buckle up because we’re about to unlock the secrets to email marketing success in the age of the empowered shopper.
What Is Email Marketing Automation?
According to Neal Schaffer, from the prestigious Rutgers Business School, New York
“Email marketing automation takes all of the valuable data you have collected about your customers and organizes it so that when you send a message to your customer base, you target them based on this culled data. Simply, email marketing automation helps you to create highly personalized emails that reach the right audience with a targeted email message at the optimal time, without you having to put in extra time or effort to do it.”
It involves Email Service Providers (ESPs) analyzing customer data, such as purchase history and interactions. This data can also be used by marketers to tailor content meant to engage with individual shoppers across various touchpoints throughout their shopper’s journey.
Automated delivery ensures reaching the right customers at the right time, eliminating the need for manual one-time sends. In a nutshell, it’s like injecting consciousness into your emails. However, unlike your local postal carrier, it doesn’t take weekends off.
Picture this scenario: A visitor adds an item to their cart on your website but doesn’t follow through with the purchase. In this situation, automation kicks in, initiating an email sequence to remind them about their abandoned cart and encourage them to finalize their transaction. Moreover, by offering temporary enticing discounts on the same item, you can evoke a sense of urgency in the buyer, prompting them to purchase sooner rather than later.
A typical representation of a journey builder inside Netcore’s email automation
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Some of the benefits you can avail from automating your email marketing strategies are:
- Increased Revenue: Compared to manual campaigns, the ones with automation boast an uplift of up to 860% in interactions like click-through rates and open rates. This means a better chance of conversions, leading to a significant ROI boost—up to 400% in the case of Photobook.
- Decreased Spend/ TCO( Total Cost of Ownership): The email automation platform takes care of repetitive tasks in the background, allowing your team to focus on other essential tasks. It centralizes email management, eliminating the need for dedicated personnel for regular sends, resulting in significant cost savings.
- Improved experience: Email automation uses data analysis to segment lists based on purchase patterns, interests, and demographics. Brands can use this data to craft relevant, personalized communication across key touchpoints on a timely basis, resulting in an overall elevated experience.
How To Automate Your Email Workflow In 8 Simple Steps?
1. Choose The Ideal Marketing Automation Vendor
The market has several options, but not all suit your brand’s needs. Before finalizing the ideal email automation partner, determine features, ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability to align with current and future business objectives. It’s also crucial to assess the user experience and level of customer support, as intuitive interfaces and strong support can significantly simplify managing email workflows.
2. Define Your Campaign’s Goal
Define your “why” before hitting send. Establish clear, measurable goals that align with your business objectives. This clarity shapes your message, guiding prospects from their current stage toward becoming brand advocates. Ensure these goals are realistic and achievable to create focused and effective email marketing strategies. Plan for failures, too! At times, even after doing everything right, chances are you might not get the desired results.
3. Funnel Your Recipients Into Relevant Cohorts
Segmenting your target audience based on demographics, behavior, purchase history, and engagement levels is paramount for effective email marketing. Utilize data from your CRM, website analytics, and past email campaigns to gain insights into audience preferences and behaviors, ensuring your email workflows are personalized to meet the diverse needs of different segments.
4. Finalize Criteria For Enrollment
Consider enrollment criteria in automated emails like filters, letting the most interested customers get special perks. These criteria decide who joins your email journey. When a recipient subscribes to a newsletter or clicks on a product link, the system classifies them into the most engaging bucket list. This ensures that only the most engaged audience gets targeted messages, boosting engagement and sales.
5. Build A Robust Trigger Workflow
Trigger events in email automation are user actions that kickstart automated workflows, such as newsletter sign-ups, purchases, or cart abandonment. Customize these triggers to match the actions and behaviors of your audience for more effective engagement, as the relevance of the trigger correlates with the effectiveness of the automated response. Map out a subsequent cadence. Tell the platform what to do- – send emails, schedule follow-ups, or personalize based on actions. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure for recipients, keeping your CRM in sync.
6. Create Content That Converts
Design your email assets—the building blocks of your automated journeys—by harnessing the sophisticated capabilities of AI and ML in platforms like Netcore Gen AI. Crafting compelling content (subject lines, personalization, clear CTAs) and strategically planning the sequence and timing (number and interval of emails) are crucial for successful email workflows. They should feel natural, informative, and aligned with campaign goals to avoid overwhelming your audience.
7. Run A/B Tests With Your Automation Setup
Ever wondered which subject line or offer resonates best with your audience? A/B testing is your secret weapon! This built-in feature within automation platforms allows you to send variations of your email to a small segment of your list. Track which version gets the most opens, clicks, or conversions, then implements the winner across your campaign. This pre-launch data-driven check ensures your emails land in the right inboxes and gives the desired results.
8. Optimize & Refine with Feedback
Continuous optimization is pivotal for refining your automated email workflow and maximizing its effectiveness. Regularly analyze key performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to gain insights into engagement and campaign performance. Solicit feedback from your audience through surveys or direct communication via other channels to understand their preferences and improve the relevance of your email content. This iterative approach ensures that automated email workflows remain dynamic and effective in achieving marketing goals.
Email marketing is like a fashion runway—trends in email marketing change fast. Don’t get stuck with obsolete practices or risk losing potential business opportunities to your competitors. With automation woes in the back, stay tuned as we unveil eight hot trends in email marketing for 2024, from AI personalization to interactive content that’ll keep your audience hooked. Get ready to infuse your automated emails with these fresh ideas and watch your engagement soar!
Beyond The Basics: 8 Trends In Email Marketing They Won’t Tell You About (But You Need to Know)
Trend-1: Human Augmented Gen AI Is The BuzzWord
After the AI revolution, Generative AI has taken center stage in driving accelerated growth, prompting marketers to adjust their strategies to this advanced co-marketer. Transforming every aspect of marketing, from workflow optimization to real-time analysis, Generative AI enables a future centered on individualized experiences.
While human expertise remains crucial in strategic planning, creative direction, and emotional intelligence, pairing it with GenAI’s capabilities has become one of the newly found trends in email marketing that allows marketers to craft exceptional customer experiences, propelling brands toward unmatched growth and engagement.
Trend 2: Hyper-Personalization Is The Key
Almost 40% of shoppers swiftly disengage from campaigns due to irrelevant messaging, threatening campaign success. This is one of those recent trends in email marketing that underscores the critical need to deliver pertinent, valuable content. Neglecting to personalize email marketing campaigns risks the deterioration of email lists, resulting in substantial costs.
To capitalize on this trend in email marketing, businesses should tailor messages and promotions by audience segment, recommend products or content accordingly, and send triggered emails based on visitor behavior, preferences, and desires.
Trend 3: Shoppers will trade personal data for quality experiences
In a win-win for marketers and shoppers, 63% of consumers are willing to share personal data for a more convenient and personalized shopping experience. As more of your competitors adapt to such revolutionary trends in email marketing, you have a powerful opportunity to leverage customer data responsibly to tailor email campaigns to individual preferences, recommend relevant products, offer targeted discounts, and provide exclusive deals. This data-driven approach fosters stronger customer relationships, boosts engagement, and drives sales.
Trend 4: Increased Focus On Email Authentication
In late 2023, Gmail and Yahoo introduced significant changes to email regulations, aiming to enhance users’ inbox experiences through new requirements for bulk email senders. Scheduled to take effect in early 2024, these changes emphasize the importance of email authentication, particularly DMARC, which has seen slower adoption than DKIM and SPF.
While DKIM and SPF have become essential for bulk senders, with nearly universal adoption, the focus is shifting towards broader implementation of DMARC throughout 2024, marking a crucial step in improving email deliverability and security.
Refer to the blog below for a more comprehensive picture.
Also read: A guide to Google and Yahoo updates on email sending policies.
Trend 5: Adoption Of BIMI Protocol Is Taking Place At Large
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an email authentication protocol that allows brands to display their logo next to their email in the inbox, enhancing brand visibility and trust. While it’s still relatively new, this trend in email marketing has been increasingly implemented by a handful of well-known brands implementing in their inbox.
With the new authentication standards in place, most senders will already be well on their way toward BIMI implementation simply by following the sender guidelines. This will encourage more users to go all the way and finally complete the BIMI requirements.
Download Ebook: What is BIMI? How will it Affect Email Authentication and Deliverability?
Trend 6: Smart segmentation of audience for intelligent targeting
This trend in email marketing involves sorting your audience into groups with similar interests. This lets you send targeted emails instead of one-size-fits-all blasts. Imagine sending discount offers to frequent buyers or new product recommendations to those intrigued by a specific category.
With the aid of AI and machine learning, segmentation becomes more sophisticated, considering factors like demographics, purchase history, and preferences to create highly targeted groups. This trend in email marketing facilitates personalized emails, enhances engagement, and optimizes the return on your email marketing endeavors.
Trend 7: Interactive AMP emails with auto-updating content
The transition from static emails to Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for emails provides an interactive experience with features like carousels, accordions, abandoned cart reminders, feedback forms, and games to you shoppers. They can seamlessly search, discover, add to cart, and make purchases within their inbox, transforming emails into digital storefronts.
The dynamic nature of AMP emails ensures content updates with the latest promotions and offers automatically. Additionally, with 55% of shoppers embracing in-channel purchases, this trend in email marketing of adopting AMP emails presents a treasure trove of opportunities for marketers hoping to shorten the conversion funnel and provide a user-friendly interface like instant messaging apps within the shopper’s inboxes.
Trend 8: Low Tolerance To Reapted Follow-Ups
Interestingly, a recent study reveals that even loyal shoppers have a limited tolerance for excessive notifications, regardless of their relevance. With purchasing decisions influenced by various factors, shoppers prefer brands to anticipate the right time to reach out.
This is one of those unnecessary trends in email marketing, where brands continuously bombard customers with follow-up emails, risking their unsubscribing from the purchasing journey altogether. It’s simple: if someone isn’t ready to buy, no amount of personalization will sway them unless they feel the need themselves. Understanding these thresholds is vital for retaining shoppers’ interest.
Future of Email Marketing Automation
The future of email marketing automation is promising, as new technologies and AI innovations are constantly emerging. Automation can also track email marketing performance in real time, quickly identifying opportunities for improvement. Campaign Monitor’s findings conclude that automated emails create 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
AI-powered personalization, interactive emails, self-driven workflows, predictive analytics, mobile optimization, and chatbots are just some of the key automation trends that will take center stage in transforming email marketing.
Recent predictions project email marketing automation to become a $5.5 billion industry by 2025. The increasing demand for better customer experience and personalized emails will largely fuel this growth.
Conclusion
Chasing conversions with impersonal messaging may have been influential in the past. However, going by the aforementioned trends in email marketing, shopper’s priorities have evolved where more than focusing solely on dollar-driven incentives is needed. Today’s shoppers prioritize experiences over monetary benefits. They seek personalized interactions in their inboxes—communications that strike a chord with their affinities and needs. This shift calls for a more innovative approach to email strategy. It’s about moving away from overwhelming barrages of cumbersome, unintuitive emails.
With Netcore, adopt a shopper-centricity outlook where you stop chasing acquisitions and foster brand advocacy. Our 95% inbox placement rate guarantee and blaze-fast deliverability with unparalleled end-to-end support will help you unlock unprecedented growth with loyalty and resilience.
