Email marketing has changed drastically over the years – and for the better! Companies have more easily achieved their sales goals and communication benchmarks by using advanced email features, tools and builders. These upgrades won’t only improve your overall email marketing strategy, they’ll also help your company grab the attention of your subscribers.
Mail marketing trends wax and wane, catering to the specific needs and interests of the times, but there are a few that are here to stay. Below we list the top email trends, tips and how-to steps to help improve your approach to small business email marketing. All of our tips revolve around personalization, loyalty programs, animated graphics, and content, which could bring your business to the next level. Need help implementing these trends into your email marketing plan? Contact our email experts today!
Loyalty Programs
Introducing or revamping your company’s loyalty program is one way to improve your email marketing strategy. One of the most popular email marketing trends that have surfaced over the years is loyalty programs. This type of program provides you with a fun and easy way to reach your most loyal customers, bring in new subscribers, and incentivize disengaged clients all in one fell swoop.
You’ll gain the information you need to create more personal and useful emails by collecting the data from each campaign. Take note to which emails result in the most sales or highest ROI and keep track of what items users are clicking on most frequently.
Pull in new subscribers
Offering a discount incentive or highlighting member perks with signage around your store is one great way to bring in new folks. Customers waiting in line at the cash register or trying on clothes in your fitting rooms will likely jump on a member-only deal.
Try a win-back series to bring back past subscribers
It might be difficult to excite a group of customers that haven’t opened your email in weeks. Showcasing member perks or promoting 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. Even if a win-back email might seem annoying, it’s a commonly practiced email marketing trend that actually tends to work.
Types of Loyalty Programs
Some companies already offer loyalty programs, such as flash sales or periodic discounts. For example, a travel company may use a holiday weekend to offer a 15% discount during that timeframe. Alternatively, first-time customers are offered a 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 key points will help you find what works best for your members:
- When your customers receive or open your emails
- What promotions work best with your subscribers
- What your customers typically purchase (most popular purchases)
Determine answers to these questions to generate emails that will promote the most engagement and excitement with your client base. Overall, loyalty programs offer recurring or special incentives that will encourage customers to keep coming back.
Animation - Gifs & Graphics
It’s difficult to stand out from the crowd and interact with consumers when millions of emails are sent every week. However, the use of animated GIFs and graphics might help make your email campaigns easier to read and more enjoyable for customers.
Animated gifs and graphics can be used to:
- Tell the story of what your company offers
- Showcase specific products or services
- Draw attention to a specific messages
- Give customers a good laugh
These visual graphics and stories are becoming the future of email and should be on your checklist, as well.
While animated graphics and GIFs could seem silly as you’re putting together your next campaign, many businesses see higher engagement and more click-throughs when they are incorporated into their emails. For example, Magnolia Homes’ animated email GIFs are typically subtle in color, speed, and graphics, but catch the attention of nearly every reader.
Customers love elements that can easily explain your story in a visual format.
You might even try to create your own GIFs with a GIF generator online or with Adobe Photoshop.
Tailored & Personalized Content
A demanding marketing place means that companies are doing everything they can to make sales and increase customer engagement. One of the key tactics of a marketer’s strategy is to personalize and tailor email content. This will help make your business information relevant and useful for customers. This also increases overall engagement with your brand and puts you in a great position with ROI. Personalizing email content may sound like a time-intensive task, but with GreenMail, Inc., you can save time on emails by adding dynamic content sections.
Before we talk about how you can do this, let’s cover some interesting statistics first. Did you know that reports have stated that there is a 26% increase in open rates for emails that have personalized subject lines? Once an 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 our digital marketplace moves forward into the future. Here are some ways to improve your email marketing game:
- Personalize subject lines with the customer’s name
- Personalize messages with customer’s name, such as “Dear Jane”
- Use automation to send more relevant emails to people based on what they view or purchase
- Have links to take customers to personalized landing pages
- Segment your email list based on customer data to provide relevant emails with dynamic content (featuring products, discounts, images, and copy that matches their interests).
The easiest way to implement these strategies is to use data that your customers provide to you. Look into each subscriber’s account to see which emails have been opened, what they clicked through to, and what website activity was recorded.
Your Strategy for Email Marketing Trends
With the marketplace rapidly changing, it’s vital that your small business is staying current with the trends in email marketing. The three trends we featured above are the future of email. Follow our questions and guides to add vitality to your business and set yourself apart from other local companies that live in the past of email marketing.
To Recap:
Loyalty programs give you a chance to build a larger customer base and reward your most active subscribers. Whether this is through discounts, exclusive sales, or personal messages, building relationships is essential. That way, you can bring in new customers and make loyal followers.
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 – animation provides a way for you to say more in less time.
Content personalization helps build relationships and grow your open rates, click rates, and overall sales. It shows your consumers that you care about their interests and needs.
