Email Marketing Trends in 2017

At Alchemy Interactive we do anything digital, whether it’s web development, brand awareness, SEO (we’re really good at this), Email Marketing or Social Media and Content Marketing.

We know it’s all change all the time and we know that most of our clients haven’t the time to keep up with this. They also want to spend their pounds efficiently so we create briefing documents to help them keep up to speed. Email marketing is still huge and the technology is moving rapidly.

Email Marketing

We think there are about 14 things to go through..

1. 
   Chatbots
   Expect Chatbots to run e-commerce email marketing - Customer behaviour can already trigger automated emails. Expect chatbots to start doing the same. They’ll run automated workflows; send confirmation emails, abandoned cart emails, create newsletter sign ups, all personalized with data from the chat session.
2. Email will shrink - Mobile phones are now the most common devices to access emails. According to 2016 research, the sweet spot for email length was between 50-125 words for optimal effect. With less space and minimal attention spans, expect email content to get shorter.
3. 
   Eye-tracking.
   (Image by Laitr Keiows, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.)
   Eye-tracking is back! Eye-tracking was mainly used for websites, but is now being used for testing email creative. It uses focus groups with real end users. Thanks to more affordable hardware, it’s now possible to run fast and inexpensive email eye tracking tests.
4. Context makes real-time email – There will be a lot more emails using contextual data, in real-time. Content will be based on different sources including for instance geo-location, device, weather, time, (twitter) trends and stock levels. Based on real-time variables the emails will be generated at moment-of-open (not send).
5. 
   Predictive lead scoring
   Predictive lead scoring is picking up - More businesses choose to have integrated models that are employing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to generate lead scores automatically. This is called predictive lead scoring.
6. Email will have a more conversational tone – Keep it real, be honest, don’t take yourself too seriously, write like you talk, ask questions that encourage your customers to respond. A casual conversational tone will help your customers better relate to you and by extension to your brand, thus, creating a personal connection.
7. 
   Content is King
   Machines will match subscribers with content – Segmentation and personalisation produce better-targeted emails but are often too time-consuming. We crave a way for content to be matched with our customers automatically. With so much data and content, marketers will look to machines for content matching.
8. Cross-channel data will fuel the customer view – Channel data silos are going to be less prevalent. We’ll see behavioural, demographic, contextual and transactional data used across campaigns to give us a single customer view. Push emails with the right content with right timing to always-on devices.
9. Automated emails - Triggered emails, like welcome emails and cart abandonment emails, already generate the majority of email marketing revenue at some brands, even though triggered email volume typically comprises about 5% of overall email volume – this will grow.
10. Big Data personalization in emails - Translating the Big Data trend into actionable signals for email marketers starts with breaking down silos and integrating data across channels, which many large brands have been focused on in recent years – making the data work is the key.
11. 
    Email encryption
    Email encryption - Gmail already highlights which emails are encrypted, using a little lock icon to flag which were sent using transport layer security (TLS). If another major inbox provider follows Gmail’s lead, then encryption will gain serious momentum toward becoming a best practice.
12. HTML5 video in email - with the launch of iOS 10, HTML5 video support is back! As of November, more than 53% of emails were opened in Apple email apps, which is more than enough to justify trying it. But you need to take into account those using email clients that don’t support HTML5 video.
13. Interactive emails brings some of the interactions that would normally take place on the landing page and pulls them into the email. By allowing more to happen inside an email, it reduces barriers to engagement and makes the recipient have even higher intent.
14. Omnichannel email experiences - Being able to quickly send the right messages to each consumer via the individually appropriate channel will require major integration. It will also require a lot of machine intelligence.

Email marketing

Alchemy Interactive can ‘do’ your email marketing for you. Our team is extremely experienced in setting up the personalised email campaigns that are ‘opened’ and acted upon. You will get up to the minute statistics on open rates and click throughs which will give you perfect insight on the performance of your campaign.