The Top 10 Trends in Email Marketing: A Reflection

At the start of what promises to be yet another exciting year for the digital marketing industry, we thought we would look back at some of the most important trends and revolutions in email marketing to kick start our strategies for 2012. 

1. Segmentation and Personalisation

Over the past few years, one of the strongest and most enduring trends in email marketing are segmentation and personalisation.  Due to the increase in spam emails, companies have moved from mass emailing to addressing each customer personally and only email marketers who put this into practice will reap the full benefits from their campaigns, appealing to each recipient with highly individual information and offers. Due to this shift in behaviour, communication via email has become more and more authentic and conversational.

2. User Generated Content

User generated content has become more and more important in ecommerce over the last year or two, resulting in a new challenge for marketers: reaching out to customers who trust each other more than any commercial advertisement. This obviously isn’t a new trend – people were chatting with friends and discussing products they bought way before the internet was invented. But detailed online evaluation of the products and the targeted usage of company websites is quite a new trend, which has already become a vitally important way for brands to improve their products and services. More and more customers who buy online look at the feedback given by other customers before making a decision, and positive online reviews can dramatically increase the probability that the product will be bought. Email campaigns will help to manage and push the reviews and user generated content will make the click through rate and ROI shoot up.

3. Integration

Good email marketing should be used in conjunction with other channels. Changes over the last year mean it is even more important than ever for marketers to seamlessly integrate CRM and ecommerce systems, but the good news is that standard interfaces make sophisticated conversation marketing really easy. Once implemented, using email sending solutions offers the possibility to automate the messaging, to enrich the recipients’ profiles with substantial information from CRM or directly from the online shop platform for exact selection or to integrate relevant content automatically into the message.

4. Triggered Emails

Triggered emails are personal emails that are automatically sent on a special occasion or event. The occasion (trigger) for the emails can be certain dates (birthday, anniversary and so on) or actions of the recipient (purchase, registration etc).  Expectant mothers can, for example, receive individual information according to the month of pregnancy. The manufacturer of consumer goods can remind their customers about the products they ordered in the past and may need again according to the approximate product lifecycle.

This allows recipients to get individual information, tailored specifically to them, and thanks to great opening and click rates, these email campaigns generate higher recipient loyalty compared to usual newsletters.

5. Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are automatically sent using a trigger by a particular action from the recipient.   Typical examples of transactional emails are registration or purchase confirmations, delivery confirmations or status messages. These are highly relevant for the recipients (because they are anticipated) which is why the open rates are unsurprisingly high: almost 80% of emails are opened. It makes sense, therefore, to use transactional emails for advertising purposes. However this option is not used properly by many companies, according to the results of the Email Marketing Benchmark Study conducted by eCircle. One-to-one marketing in 2011 means integrating highly relevant adverts, customer loyalty and cross and up-selling activities into highly individual service emails.

6. Behavioural Emails

According to recent surveys almost 90% of consumers cut their online order short. Only anonymous tracking information and some mixed user data are left. Such information can be integrated very quickly and easily with the help of behavioural email marketing. Tracking and targeting information makes the automated delivery of customised emails possible.  For example, for those who abandoned their booking or shopping basket, personalised offers can automatically be generated and sent according to the user’s activities.  Thanks to quick and precise delivery, with the help of behavioural email marketing, money and time can be saved and higher conversion rates can be reached.

7. Social Media

Social media has generated the biggest hype over the past year or so.  As a result, it looks like many established marketing methods are forgotten. But why shouldn’t we integrate social media with “traditional” online channels?  Social media marketing is a perfect addition to email marketing. The combination offers a variety of possibilities.  Email newsletters can be posted on Facebook, the ‘like’ button can be integrated into the email campaigns, or the latest company tweets can be included within the newsletter.  With all these marketing channels at our fingertips, new markets and target groups can be reached with the help of social media and you can essentially extend the campaign outreach.

8. Video Mail

An important change has occurred recently: Videos in emails are delivered properly once again and without the previously required confirmation prompt. As soon as the recipient opens the newsletter the video starts automatically and the quality is of a high standard.  With this latest development, it will be possible to integrate moving images into newsletters and to address target groups more emotionally.

9. Mobile

More and more internet users are surfing when out and about, or checking their emails on smartphones.  The more people that use smartphones, the bigger is the challenge for email marketing. For correct delivery and display of newsletters and emails on mobile devices some technicalities need to be addressed but this leads to new opportunities opening up. For example campaigns with coupon and voucher codes have huge potential in email marketing. After all, mobile phones are taken everywhere and can be used as an advertising medium. In the United States 42% of all smartphone or tablet PC users have already used their device as a coupon. Coupon or discount codes received via email can be cashed immediately at the POS. On the other hand, newsletter subscribers or potential customers can be generated with the help of mobile devices immediately at the point of sale.

10. Cloud Computing

The whole world is talking about cloud computing and this is certainly the case for eCircle with its own cloud storage solution (more information on this to follow next week – watch this space!) and this newest trend has caused a revolution.

Cloud computing makes it possible to save information in large datasets and to connect these to the user profiles in the email marketing software. The advantages of it are high flexibility and fast set up time. The created data pool can save unlimited data about user behaviour including (but not limited to): which topics make recipients open emails and click links; social interactions on Facebook or Twitter; browsing and platform behaviour; shopping history; geo-targeting. The huge amount of gathered and saved user data can be applied to targeted emails, mobile and social programs. Customers are being addressed more individually and so the circle is complete and we have reached our first trend – personalised emails.

These 10 innovations are just a small selection from many successful trends that have significant meaning for us and the email marketing sector.

Do you share our point of view? Which of these 10 trends were the most useful for you?  Or maybe you could add other top innovations of the last ten years?

(This blog has been adapted from the recent blog from Martin Czermin found here.)