With all the marketing strategies businesses have adopted, email marketing has gained significant traction in recent years. It has become a mainstay of many marketing plans because firms have proven their advantages, including better connection with their target audience and nurturing leads. Let’s walk you through some email marketing trends you must know in 2022.
For small businesses, emails provide a convenient and cost-effective communication channel with their target audiences. But like other communication channels, email marketing has evolved. The strategies that worked months or years ago may or may not work in the current context. Similarly, customer behavior has changed significantly over time, necessitating firms to pivot to remain competitive.
To further reap the benefits of email marketing, small business owners must understand the trends in email marketing. Therefore, if you have plans to use email marketing in your small business, here are the top seven trends you need to be aware of:
1. Making Emails Interactive
The first email marketing trend that every small business owner must know about is making emails interactive. Sending interactive emails to your target audience also boosts engagement. Creating interactive email campaigns doesn’t have to be complicated.
Some simple strategies that companies can use to make their emails interactive include:
- Including clear call-to-action (CTAs) phrases in the emails
- Integrating interactive content like holiday cards and surveys or polls
- Incorporating gamification aspects like tests, quizzes, and prize draws
- Adopting different design modes like dark and light modes
- Using interactive carousels to showcase service or product offerings
- Adding hover-over and GIF images
Interactive email marketing works to give recipients positive experiences by engaging and entertaining them. Small businesses can also personalize emails by making them interactive. For instance, they can send users emails with exclusive holiday cards that suit the holiday season.
2. Maintaining Email Subscribe Lists
Small business owners that want to use email marketing to keep their target audiences engaged must be aware of the need to maintain a subscriber list. In addition, in email marketing, this trend focuses on quality and not quantity. Additionally, having an extensive list of subscribers and low email opening rates do not add value to your email marketing efforts.
Email marketing requires businesses to pay attention to their mailing lists, identify subscribers with the least engagement and delete them from the list. Doing this also ensures that marketing emails are only delivered to people who have an interest in their products or services.
Further, to ensure email recipients don’t label your emails as spam, send them at the appropriate time. You can determine the right time to send emails by checking buyer personas to see when your subscribers are likely to read emails.
3. Personalizing Emails
Your target audience does not want their email boxes clogged with emails that aren’t helpful to them. Businesses can use email automation to segment their audience and send emails that appeal to each segment.
To effectively personalize marketing emails, companies must understand their audiences. This requires them to study their customer’s demographics, lifestyle and shopping habits, favorite services or products, and opening rates, then create email content aligned to those behaviors.
For instance, if a company realizes that shoppers abandon carts just before completing the purchase, they need to target those buyers with email reminders that carry a solid call to action.
4. Email Automation
The other email marketing trend that every small business owner must know is email automation. This trend involves using email marketing software to help maintain subscriber data, market segmentation, email targeting, and email triggering.
Small businesses can manage their email marketing campaigns effectively and reach their target audiences in creative ways with email automation.
5. Providing Social Proof
Adding social proof in emails allows small businesses to build trust among their target audiences by sharing user-generated content through emails.
Naturally, readers are likely to trust your offers when they see the positive feedback from different customers. This makes user-generated content effective for generating organic traffic and converting readers into customers.
The good thing is that the cost of gathering user-generated content is meager. For example, you can request customers for testimonials or reviews and include them in email newsletters. Alternatively, you can run polls or surveys and share the results as part of your email content.
You may request your social media followers to share and tag your company photos showing themselves using your products or services. Adding such images and strong CTAs can go a long way in building customer trust in your business.
Still, small businesses can use emails to generate user content by including CTAs that direct leaders to polls or surveys. This enables them to collect data used in the next email campaign.
6. Optimizing Emails With Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Small business owners should also know about the growing trend of optimizing emails with AI. In fact, implementing AI in emails allows businesses to streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. AI works effectively in helping business owners to analyze customer efforts by performing various tasks. These include:
- Predicting outcomes using analytics
- Optimizing customer surveys
- Process vast volumes of customer data
- Using SEO optimizer to add keywords
Further, AI can make email marketing campaigns run smoothly by performing other essential tasks, including:
- Creating email subject lines
- Cleaning mailing lists
- Tracking email engagement rates
- Structuring email campaigns
- Optimizing email send times
7. Responsive Email Design
Another email marketing trend every small business owner should know is responsive or mobile-friendly email design. With most customers preferring to read emails via handheld devices, emails must also be accessible on smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
The design and format of email materials should be well-structured and clutter-free to make them objective and improve readability.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy that has stood the test of time. For instance, with emails, small businesses can place their products or services in front of prospects, keep subscribers engaged, and nurture leads at a reasonable cost.
But by itself, email marketing cannot generate marketing results. Small businesses must align their marketing efforts to current trends to make email marketing work. Thus, if you own a business and have plans to integrate this technique into your existing marketing strategy, you may refer to these trends discussed above to boost your chances of success.