Email Marketing Trends in 2019

Email Marketing has become one of the best digital marketing strategies that have recorded massive success over the years. With the rise of technology, many business owners think email marketing is outdated. With the rave on videos, artificial intelligence, chatbots and more, email marketing seems to be less relevant.  But it’s not true. Email marketing is one of the oldest methods of marketing. It also plays a key role that cannot be neglected in digital marketing. If you want more leads, then you need to focus on email marketing. You cannot afford to leave out email marketing from your business, especially for startup and small-scale businesses.

Email marketing provides a reliable form of communication between your brand and your customers. It’s a cost-effective solution to reach customers where they visit every day — their inbox.

If you need a more directive way to connect with your leads on a personal level. If you’re passionate about following up on your leads, email is the way to go and I will say you’re missing on a whole lot of benefits if you abandon email marketing for other digital marketing strategies. Social media marketing has a lot of hype but email marketing drives more engagements.

Find out the other benefits that make email marketing a smart solution for communicating with your audience, finding new customers, and growing your business.

Why email marketing works

Unlike some other marketing channels, email marketing allows you to keep in touch with your customers on a consistent basis. Be it a simple, “Thank you for subscribing,” a cheery, “Welcome on board,” or a sincere “Happy Birthday,” email is the easiest and most effective way to let your customers know you value them. Customers love it when a business treats them as an individual, not just like everyone else.

That value should show in the emails you send, and the more value you provide to your target audience, the more they’ll look forward to hearing from you. When that happens, it’s easier to get them to engage with your call-to-action.

If you have any business online, you have to keep up with the trend. That’s the only way to stay relevant. Before we state these email marketing trends, let’s look at what email marketing is.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the digital marketing strategies. It’s basically the use of electronic mail as a means of promoting your business/brand/product by sending direct messages to a list of e-mails. Emails are really effective in the promotion of business and marketing of products and services but it still depends on how you approach it. According to research, most of your customers are created from the e-mail audience. That shows how effective email marketing is. If you want to build your customer base, email marketing is your best bet.

Take your marketing to the next level with email

Email continues to be one of the best ways to reach out to your customers and potential leads alike. There are several benefits to planning out the perfect email marketing strategy for your business. With everything that has been said, have you thought of how email marketing will benefit your business/brand? Well, this post will help you out

Benefits of Email Marketing

The benefits and impacts of email marketing in your business cannot be overemphasized. It’s a valuable tool for all types of marketing you might intend to use. We have carefully selected lots of ways email marketing can benefit your business/brand. Have a look at them.

• 1. Targeted and personalized contentEmail marketing allows you to segment your customers into different lists based on their preferences to send highly personalized content. From crafting the perfect subject line to images that resonate with your customer, and valuable content that helps your audience, email is the perfect channel to drive engagement.

     Adjust your messaging for different audiences so your emails are always engaging. Ignore the impulse to push for a hard sell too early in the process. Cultivate a strong foundation of trust between your brand and the recipient first, and create a bond with your customer than can grow over time.

  2. Build Brand CredibilityEmails from an unknown sender or with a shady subject line can feel like spam. It just feels off, and customers often just delete these emails. For some customers, an emoji will make them click and be happy. For others, the same subject line might make them go hunting for the unsubscribe link. You need to tailor your content according to what your readers want. Knowing your readers’ interests and needs get your email into the inbox, instead of the spam folder.

     Creating a permission-based email list that includes a checkbox for users to opt-in to your mailing list ensures that a customer knows which emails they’re signing up for, and how often they’ll be receiving emails from you.

  3. Better Brand RecognitionSome of the most recognizable brands in the world today are so well-known that they are synonymous with the industry in which they operate. Spotify is a great example. All of their emails are relevant and brilliantly curated.

     Email marketing is a great way to develop your brand identity because it gives you a direct line to the email inboxes of your customers or potential customers. Once you begin creating valuable content for the customer, you’ll have an edge over your competitors. You can even use your emails to get useful feedback. Are customers happy with the content you’re providing? Would they like to learn something different?

     Use a survey or start a discussion on social media. Once you get them involved in the process, you’ll know exactly how to provide valuable content in your emails.

  4. Boost sales

     Promoting your business through emails that you send to your audience gives them access to purchase the products/services directly. Most business owners don’t know they can make sales with emails. When you send emails that promote your products/services, your customers get a deeper insight into what you’re offering.

     Email marketing provides a great opportunity for impulse buying. You can entice a customer to make another purchase in a few ways:

     • Feature items that are often purchased alongside the products the customer bought.
     • List similar items to the customer’s past purchases.
     • Create a special offer or discount for future purchases.

     Customers often act on impulse when they get an email letting them know about a relevant product that is related to their previous purchase. This is especially true if there is a relevant promotion.

  5. Build Stronger Customer Relationships

     Emails make communication more personal. If you want to build a good relationship with your customers, sending emails is the best way. Your customers appreciate a good email. The time and effort it takes to craft the perfect email don’t go unnoticed. They want to know what’s happening with your business, and how they can get involved.

     It’s nearly impossible to reach out to all your customers in person or by phone. Email marketing campaigns bridge that gap. You could even set up a drip marketing campaign to help you smooth out the process.

     Drip campaigns are ongoing and drive the user down the buyer’s journey to a final conversion point. They’re often used to provide constant value to subscribers while helping keep your brand top-of-mind. Often times, these emails slowly “drip” helpful information, products, or tips, over days, weeks, or months.

     For example, the emails you receive when you browse Amazon but don’t buy anything, are a drip email marketing automation at work. Providing information directly in their inbox consistently builds the customer’s relationship. When they get to know about giveaways or promos before others, the trust increases. This, therefore, increases sales.

  6. Optimize your time and budgetWith any business, but especially within a small business, there are always time and budget constraints. While big businesses can afford to go all out and buy advertising space during the Super Bowl, small businesses don’t have that luxury.

     Even targeted direct mail campaigns that deliver flyers to nearby mailboxes can be costly. Between designing, printing, and mailing costs, you could spend several nairas per flyer delivery.

     All this time spent not focusing on your business is lost revenue, and a lost opportunity to connect with your customers on a personal level. One of the most significant advantages of email marketing for small businesses is the efficient use of time and budget. Designing a professional email marketing campaign is not complicated, or time-consuming. Sending emails to many subscribers is also still cost-effective.

  7. Metrics to learn what worksThere is a quick window of opportunity when it comes to customers opening your emails. They see your email in their inbox, and depending on how well the “From name” and subject line resonate, they decide whether to open the email or ignore it. A good open rate means that your customers know your brand well enough to want to hear from you, no matter the time of the day.

     Next up is your click-through-rate (CTR) which generally gives you a good idea of how many customers took the time to go through your email content to click on the links within. The average click-through rate across all industries is around 7%.

     After a customer has clicked through your email, ideally the next goal is to get them to convert – in other words, to follow through on the action your email has asked them to take. Your email conversion rates are an important metric to track, for they tell you how well the call-to-action in your email has performed.

  8. Increased traffic to your websiteEmails are a great way to get customers to visit your website. You can include relevant links to your site within your email content. You can also use your email campaigns to get customers to engage with other great pieces of content available on your website or blog.

     For example, a local design school could send out emails to let them know about their new design class that has a limited number of seats. Many of their customers and potential leads may have missed out on this opportunity to attend the class, had they not revisited the website in time. The design school then can fill all the seats more quickly, instead of waiting for reservations to trickle in.

     Include social sharing buttons in your emails to encourage your customers to promote your content across their own social channels.

  9. Establish authorityWhen you run your own business, your goal is to be seen as an expert in your industry. Establish that to position yourself and your business as the authority in the eyes of your customers.

     Your customers have signed up for your marketing newsletters because they want to hear from you. They like the content you send and keeping them engaged is one of the biggest wins for any email marketer. Your content is one of your most valuable marketing tools and you can use it to build other areas of your marketing strategy. If people love what you do, then they will sign up to see more great content.

  10. Build excitementEveryone likes to belong to a special group, especially email consumers who like exclusive perks.

      Your customers aren’t all the same, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Use your email campaigns to drive home the message that your customers are unique and important to your business.

      Whether you’re giving a section of customers a sneak peek into an upcoming product launch, or simply rewarding them for being loyal customers, they all love a sweet deal. Volkswagen offers email subscribers free movie tickets several times a year. Starbucks gives their gold members free drinks around the holidays.

      As a small business, you might not be able to go around giving free stuff to your customers, but a little something extra can go a long way. Rewarding your customers is a nice gesture, and from your side, it’s a great way to accelerate your marketing goals. Everybody wins.

Email Marketing Trends For Business Growth

Email marketing evolves with time and if you can’t keep up, its impact on your business will be lost. As effective as email marketing is, you need to make some effort to enjoy its effectiveness. By adopting these trends, you’ll be able to connect with your customers all the time. Here are the email marketing trends in 2019.

1. Personalized ContentEmail marketing content should be based on your customer’s behaviour. Personalized contents increase engagements, customer satisfaction, and retention. Customers connect to emails that speak to them directly. It builds your customer loyalty strength. It also encourages a good relationship between your brand and its customers.

   For you to achieve this, then you have to know your audience. When the research is done, you’ll know how to personalize the contents sent to them. To stay on top of your email marketing game, you need to start putting out personalized contents.

2. Interactive ContentIf you want to run an email marketing campaign, you need interactive content. This has been a trend for some time. Studies have shown that interactive contents bring more result. It’s very important to make your content responsive. The interactive content can come in the form of quizzes, live social media feeds, forms, clickable hotspots, etc. All these examples allow your audience to interact with the content of your email.

   The more engaged the subscribers are, the more likely they purchase your products/services.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, email marketing will become more interesting. Artificial intelligence will help you develop effective content (topics, subject lines, etc), optimize the timing for sending the emails and predict audience actions. It would help you identify trends and understand how to use them for your marketing strategy. It ends up boosting the conversions rate on your website. When it comes to email marketing, AI is very important.
4. VideosAccording to research, videos drive more than 60% of traffic to your website. Most people want video content from email marketers. We can categorically tell you that they would save these videos. If you want to step up your email marketing efforts, add related videos. It also boosts sales. All you need to do is combine all the facts in a video and send it. You’ll be shocked at the level of response you’ll receive from that email.
5. Mobile OptimizationWith the widespread of mobile devices, you’ll be missing out on a whole lot if you haven’t optimized your email to mobile. Most people view their emails from their mobile devices so it’s advisable to optimize for mobile. About 62% of people open their emails on their mobile devices, you can’t afford to miss out on these numbers because you’re yet to optimize for mobile. Start designing your emails for mobile.
6. Attractive DesignsMost people believe emails are all about text only. Brands have started focusing on design elements like illustrations, icons, graphics and many more to spice up their email marketing content. Your design can speak a lot to your audience without saying much. Get a good graphic designer to communicate what you want your audience to see in design elements. You’ll notice a more positive response from them. This trend is working for business owners, you shouldn’t be left behind.

Start communicating with your customers through email

It’s easy to get caught up in the intricacies of building out an email marketing campaign that works for your customers and your business. There’s a lot of learning involved, but there’s also a lot of opportunity to communicate with your customers, rather than just sending emails all the time.

With email marketing, you can build your brand, out-do your marketing goals, and set yourself up as an expert, all without breaking your budget. No matter your level of experience, you can create professional email marketing campaigns quickly. That means less time spent worrying about marketing details and more time spent working on making your business successful.

At MIST Digital Agency Limited, we offer affordable email marketing services. You don’t need to break the bank for us to help you achieve that goal. Just contact us by visiting our website, https://www.mist.com.ng today. We’ll take it from there.