Email Marketing in 2017: Predictions, Trends, Tips and Advice

By Dmytro Spilka

Dec 23, 2016

Email Marketing in 2017

“Email has the ability many other channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale” – David Newman

There is a countless number of marketing options available to a digital professional or a webmaster. But, sometimes, you can only choose a couple of them for an individual campaign. Your reasons may be due to the available resources, the target audience, type of campaign or specific business needs.

On such occasions, you may be faced with a huge dilemma as to which channels to implement. E-mail marketing can be very helpful in such situation.

Email marketing isn’t new to the digital media world and has undergone its own share of evolution just like every other aspect of the digital marketing sphere. One undeniable truth, specifically, about e-mail marketing is its massive ROI (Return on Investment) & tailored approach when compared to other digital marketing triggers.

According to data from Campaign Monitor, e-mail marketing is highly effective and is said to have a return of 38 dollars on every dollar invested. Obviously, if and only if it is designed, optimised and managed effectively. That sounds like a gold-mine. Not too many marketing tools could afford such depth.

For instance, Radicati Report said that 205 billion emails were sent and received on a daily basis in 2015. You can imagine the number that is produced in each of the months in the year.

The same report is projecting that in 2019, we will be generating over 246 billion emails on a daily basis. It is even possible that these figures are hugely understated considering the current trend. The data below depicts this information more clearly.

Email Marketing Growth

Also, there are many reasons that drove these massive email engagements in the past, and it doesn’t seem that this is going to change any time soon. The next infographic illustrates why email marketing mattered in 2015 to professional marketers.

Why marketers value email marketing

Source

The Battle for Attention

As a digital marketing professional, you don’t need to be told that the figures given above for 2015 will be nothing in 2017. It isn’t a guess any longer that 2017 is going to present revolutionary tactics and strategies driven at outsmarting competitors. There will be a lot of novel and mind-blowing strategies to reach the digital audience in more efficient and incisive ways than have been previously known.

If email marketing is efficient as stated earlier, how do you use it to maximise your campaign for 2017? What are the leading tips and trends that will propel your email marketing strategies for the coming year? More precisely, as a marketing pro who wants the best return on his/her investment, how do you maximise your email marketing campaign?

The following discourse should give answers to these questions. But first, let’s consider the current trends in email marketing.

Current Trends in Email Marketing

Already, digital marketing strategy is getting peaked at email marketing. There are a number of innovations currently getting built around it to bring about better results on digital campaigns.

Some of these reigning trends are:

Increased email marketing usage

2016 has experienced a huge surge in the number of people using email marketing. And, this increase is expected to continue in coming years. Check the data above again if you aren’t sure.

Improved privacy and security

As at 2015, over 200 million internet users have installed ad-blocks and many more have robust and functional spam filters. Needless to say, they never have to check these emails before they get deleted automatically.

Added to that are a number of legislations already in place and those coming in to empower internet users and enable them to take legal actions against the senders of such junk emails. More unsolicited emails are getting dumped to where they belong, the trash.

Thanks to improved measures put in place to secure the privacy of the internet user.

Improved designs and layouts

The creativity and unique designs that went into email marketing recently have been remarkable. The need to attract and sustain attention has greatly driven the innovations with which this marketing tool is designed.

The layout of the tool and the contents are designed to give visitors the kind of attraction and offer they cannot reject. You need to know this: this will only get better.

Automation Services

Already, several of the email management software are designed to locate more personal information about internet users. This information is only meant to be used to design tailored messages that will reach them more precisely and individually than the usual and previously known mass messages.

Some of this information includes demography, age, location, interests and other surface data that will aid marketers in producing better-tailored messages.

Personalised content

This trend has been growing over the years, but 2016 has brought it to the extent that a large number of digital marketers are abandoning the traditional mass emails for more individual and personal emails.

So many of them will address the recipients by their first or full name and discuss issues related to their enquiries and/or activities. Have you ever tried an online software, and after 2-3 weeks of inactivity received an email reminding you about their existence? That’s a huge drive away from the mass, impersonal style of the past.

As a marketer, all of these trends are important, but they will profit only a little if you do not have the knowledge of what to do with them and translate the drive in your favour.

That takes us to the crux of this article.

Predictions and Tips on Email Marketing for 2017

Email marketing will become a preeminent digital marketing tool

Strategic email marketing can become the undisputed king of digital marketing. As marketing professionals, bloggers and social influencers begin to realise the immense power of email marketing in terms of ROI and traffic – they begin to build email lists that retain customers for a long period of time.

This is only projected to grow in 2017.

Integrated Approach and Optimisation

Email marketing will be integrated into several other marketing and promotional mixes, and strategies.

Many of them will be deployed to work underneath, getting consumers’ details so they can be carefully re-targeted after visiting a website or after trying a software. Even more, email marketing will be deployed & combined with larger campaigns and channels like social media and SEO to supplement the efforts.

The most effective digital channels

Source

So, it’s time for you to start designing the way to incorporate and optimise it for all of your campaign strategies and ensure it is virtually visible on all of the channels you use, whether it’s social media or traditional advertising.

Specific and Personalised Messages

Digital marketing is experiencing the transformation power of personalised marketing through strategic and specific email marketing.

That won’t change in 2017. Indeed, more efforts and investments will be deployed to ensure that the content of an email is more personal, more relevant and holistic.

Captivating Design and Layout

There will be even more captivating, and enchanting designs developed for email marketing. According to Mathew Smith of Really Good Emails, there will be a huge and revolutionary change in email designs.

The millennial will be mainly targeted with highly creative graphics, illustrations, animations and videos.

If you are planning to thrive in this coming year, you need to start planning how to give it to your clients and visitors their way. If I am to sum up all of this in three words, I will say – Understanding, Creativity and Flexibility.

Advanced email marketing software with human support

This will be about the peak of email marketing strategies and evolutions in 2017. Many innovative software will be deployed to sieve audience’s information and automatically select content and services that are most appropriate to them.

Even more, human support will also be deployed more than ever to ensure scrutiny, and undertake visitors and followers’ segmentation. Automation will reach a new height as the number of individual consumers to be reached increases.

According to Chad White of Litmus – “2017 will be the year that marketers focus on the care and feeding of their data-driven marketing. They’ll zero in on the data points and behaviours that lead to truly valuable insights.”

Compatibility

Email content will be designed to become more optimised across a variety of platforms. Content will also become a lot more mobile and tablet friendly and will become compatible with new, emerging technologies, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Check out the growing popularity of smartphone usage in the diagram below. You can be assured that no serious marketer wants to be left out.

Internet Users by Devices

Source

Privacy and User Protection

We have seen this coming for close to a decade. There have been a lot of discourse and suggestions, but more actions are being taken to ensure the privacy of Internet users.

In 2017, the private right of action of Canada’s anti-spam law will become effective. The USA and the larger EU’s General Data Protections Regulations will enjoy more compliance as more people prepare for the age of the death of spam and blast emails.

At this time, the more innovative and strategic marketing professionals would have devised a secured and prominent email marketing strategies that will continue to push their campaigns and break through the barriers.

Conclusively, these many changes coming in 2017 shouldn’t be considered as a radical or magical leap. Instead, these changes have been happening in phases over the years.

So, if you haven’t already developed a vibrant email marketing strategy that will keep you afloat of the coming marketing blocks, you should start now. You need a tool that will break through the walls and help sell your products and services across the globe.

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