Email marketing continues to be the most effective way to acquire customers: nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. Since 91 percent of US consumers still use email daily, and email triggers purchases three times faster than social media, as well as yields a 17 percent higher average order value, email is still a major driver of purchases.
Statista’s research department estimated the global email marketing market to reach $17.9 billion by 2027, up from $8.49 billion in 2021. There is a forecast for a 13.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2020 to 2027.
Do these numbers tempt you to spam-bomb your prospects and customers? Well, don’t.
Traditional email marketing is becoming less effective because it lacks a strategic approach. Content market recipients’ inboxes are flooded with emails, auto-populating forms, and all other irrelevant forms of communication that are highly annoying.
You may get someone’s initial attention by invading their inbox, but it is no guarantee they’ll engage with your content or purchase your products or services.
Email marketing will be reinventing itself in 2023. Brands are realizing they need to go beyond throwing a bunch of emails at people and craft engaging messages that people actually want to read. In 2023, email marketing needs to be more dynamic, innovative, and data-driven in order to achieve results.
We are at the base of this new wave, and we must learn to ride it to prepare our businesses for future changes.
Take a look at the trends.
The death of non-personalized email marketing
Most email campaigns are not personalized for the recipient, which renders your message and offers irrelevant. Why should anyone read an email that does not address their needs? Impersonal emails adversely affect 94 percent of customers’ decisions, and as a result, they take one of the following actions:
- 68% delete emails automatically.
- 54% unsubscribe from email.
- 45% consider emails spam or junk.
- 29% lose their willingness to buy products.
- 13% do not visit the website as often as they used to.
- 10% never revisit the website.
Lack of email marketing campaign personalization can result in anything from mailing list degradation to an overall failure of the email marketing campaign. What is the moral of the story? Personalize your emails.
Personalization is key
Personalization is key to relevance, relevance grabs attention and evokes interest, and interest leads to engagement, which leads to conversions, and conversions help to achieve an increase in email-marketing ROI.
The foundation of personalization is real-time or near-real-time data on customer behavior. An email is relevant to a recipient when it is sent based on the customer’s behavior monitored by real-time or near real-time data. Data enables an organization to send thousands of variations of emails to its customers, each tailored to their immediate needs. Definitely, building customization and targeting abilities is a transformative process for any organization. It requires specific capabilities and supporting infrastructure.
Please read my article, How to create personalized content at scale. It will help you find the answers to the best methodology to create customized content, the capabilities to be embraced, and how to scale up.
A single view of each customer
Customer information in the form of data is stored in silos by different departments of an organization. It must aggregate this data to create a composite view of each customer. It helps trigger the right message to the right person.
Every department in an organization must embrace change and collaborate. Crafting and sending 10,000 personalized emails daily differs from sending a mass email blast of 10,000. Although it takes a lot of work, it drives actual returns. Companies adopting personalized email content based on users’ on-site behavior make a tenfold improvement in their email campaign response rates.
Personalizing in whole and not just parts of campaigns
This trend is hot, and the importance of personalization strengthens it. That’s why the business world is expected to focus on email marketing hyper-personalization in 2023 instead of just personalizing parts of campaigns.
Personalized content grabs attention because it doesn’t look like many other messages a person might receive through their inbox on a regular basis. You must produce consistent messages that feel like they belong together so people feel comfortable clicking through to the next one.
Subject lines are one of the most important ways to separate your messages from others’ content and are a fantastic opportunity to grab people’s attention before they even scroll past it. They’re also a great way not to make your email feel like an advertisement.
Getting the right fit will increase customer engagement and loyalty and make a meaningful and measurable difference to your company’s bottom line.
Put the journey first, not the click
Marketers often obsess over every detail of an email, from the subject line to the graphics to the copy. It’s OK to do it, given the email is the customer’s first contact point, but they need to look beyond it. They should also be obsessed with where the emails direct users. Investing time in an email to send the user to a generic homepage is pointless. The conversion rate of customized landing pages – which take the user directly to the item or offer featured in the email – can rise by more than 25 percent.
Share the lessons
Marketing organizations with a solid commitment to their consumers view every email as an opportunity to learn more about them. Every campaign must be designed with clear learning objectives; data should be captured and shared within the marketing group and the organization. I remember reading a 2014 McKinsey report about a company that conducted a monthly review of its email campaigns in which marketers shared three hits and three misses. These reviews were attended by marketing, merchants, and brand teams, with the top lessons broadcast on closed-circuit TV screens throughout the company. This learning process helped the company double its e-commerce revenue without increasing email campaigns.
Keep privacy in mind
The issue of privacy is a legal obligation than a trend, and email marketing in 2023 focuses heavily on data privacy and data protection.
Today, only eight percent of consumers trust brands with their personal information. Providing subscribers with the option to unsubscribe or change their email preferences will improve data privacy. Give recipients the option to choose what content they receive from you and when they receive it.
Think about it: You could ask leads to fill out a quick questionnaire (either on a landing page or in a welcome email) to learn what content they would like to receive and how frequently they would like it. However, don’t force them to decide right away. Instead, send them a link to the preference control center so they can change their preferences anytime.
By doing so, you will be able to segment your subscriber database more efficiently, maintain a clean mailing list in which uninterested subscribers can easily unsubscribe, and improve email marketing performance.
Use Artificial Intelligence
Email personalization is easier with Artificial Intelligence since it allows you to pull more information about your customers quickly, but do not use AI writers to craft your messages as it would defeat your purpose.
Marketers still consider AI a controversial topic because they don’t understand how it can benefit them. It makes them feel threatened; however, the goal of AI is not to replace you but to optimize your workload and scale your email marketing. Using AI helps you in the following ways:
- Clean up email lists.
- Build better mailing lists.
- Automate email marketing.
You can send a personalized email to each prospect with AI and restructure your email campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
By automating email marketing, brands ensure consistent and cohesive communication with subscribers. Further, it provides customers with a sense of control over their inboxes. A person doesn’t want to receive yet another useless email in today’s world of content overload.
In general, drip email campaigns perform better than regular emails as activation of the sequence is triggered by specific actions taken by users. Emails sent in drip campaigns are more responsive, leading to more friendly communication between the parties and saving the reader from wading through copious copy.
The benefits of user-generated content
Using user-generated content in email marketing campaigns is another trend expected to reach its full potential in 2023. User-generated content (UGC) is any content created by end users of products or services (text, videos, images, audio).
Please read my article, How to build your brand community flywheel in 2023, to find answers to generating valuable UGC, why user-generated content enhances trust and builds confidence and how that trust boosts conversions.
Several studies have shown that user-generated content positively affects conversion rates. Eighty-two percent of consumers say user-generated reviews and other forms of content are extremely valuable. Roughly 70 percent of consumers base their purchasing decision on what buyers and customers are talking about your brand, its products, or its services.
Spice up your emails by using user-generated content from your customers and brand evangelists to increase trust and confidence in your brand.
Develop interactive emails
This fad will gain momentum in 2023. Going ahead, interactive, responsive emails will revolutionize the email marketing industry. Increased customer engagement and email interaction are vital benefits. Here are examples of interactive email elements expected to be popular in 2023:
- Using animated call-to-action buttons.
- Showcasing product offerings with rollover effects.
- Producing user-controlled images and product carousels.
- Compacting long-form emails with accordion features.
- Creating user-generated interactive content through surveys and polls.
- Gamification of email marketing.
Email redesign trends in 2023
The following are the top email design trends to watch in 2023:
- Animated collaging. Use dynamic gifs to your advantage.
- Dark mode and neon. After Apple introduced Dark Mode to adjust the brightness and look at the screen without having to squint from how bright it is, use this to your advantage.
- Minimalism. The upcoming year will be dominated by well-structured, uncluttered emails with a single objective and few irrelevant details.
- Illustrated iconography. It is predicted that brands will strengthen their identity by using graphics-based, visually appealing icons on plain backgrounds in 2023.
It is already clear that 2023 will be a challenging but exciting year. The trend landscape is constantly changing, with new ones emerging and old ones still at play. If you want to slay the competition, you must take advantage of these opportunities.
Don't shift budgets; sharpen them
People spend more time on social networks, instant messaging, and mobile-messaging apps now than during the pre-pandemic era, but it does not mean they are not checking their emails. This communication channel is alive and thriving, and the marketing industry should not shift budgets away from it. All businesses need is to rethink their strategy and invest in email personalization. It’s the shortest route to a customer’s decision-making sweet spot.
We can help you develop a brand story, message, storytelling, and buyer personas, build personalized marketing strategies and create strategic content including emails.
