A preview of key email marketing trends for 2021 by the top 29 marketers in the business from across the world!
The year that 2020 was, saw huge spikes in email success rates with all kinds of customers being glued to their screens for hours at an end. But things are slowly changing in 2021.
Your customer preferences as well as purchasing patterns have seen drastic changes in the past year. In view of this transformation, marketing strategy has changed too. Marketers are taking a customer-centric approach and using more user-generated content rather than blowing the trumpet on their own. The same applies to email marketing too.
The world’s top email marketing experts have also spent a good amount of time analyzing brand new email marketing trends, and each one has a unique perspective to offer. You absolutely must have a look at these email marketing trends for 2021, curated by 29 email marketing experts and influencers from across the globe.
29 on 21
Out of the 29 mentioned experts, quite a few were overlapping in their opinions and choices of trends. We have put together wisdom from 5 of these influencers in detail, followed by a summary of trends and suggestions from the rest of them. Read on to get your email marketing mojo on!
- 2021 is all about automation
Email automation works like a passive income for you. This strategy becomes all the more important for the eCommerce industry. Gregory Zakowicz from Omnisend has also revealed that automated welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, and product and browse abandonment emails bring in a higher conversion rate when compared to other promotional emails.
Natalie Rockall, Email Marketing Consultant at Eleven11 Digital Limited also adds a new view by saying that email templates are going to become simpler simply because of the rates at which brands have now been producing emails. This again is another impetus to automating emails as much as possible.
- AMP, the new face of innovation
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) have begun changing the game for emails already, and are receiving a greater push in 2021. Both Yahoo! and Gmail have started supporting it, leading to higher adoption rate prospects.
AMP marketing is a Google-pioneered open-source technology that improves the speed and performance of websites and pages on mobile devices. With AMP, images, videos, and other content will load automatically and not just before a user experiences it.
There are real security concerns with AMP, but Jenna Tiffany, Founder and Strategy Director at Let’s Talk Strategy, is of the opinion that the history of pathbreaking tech developments has something else to say. Remember when online banking and online transactions first emerged? With time, both innovation and the trust factor grew, making it normal for almost everyone to use this tech marvel. The same would happen with AMP and e-commerce brands, as per Tiffany.
Mark Robbins, Software Engineering LMTS, Salesforce, opines, “I’m also expecting to see more people using AMP for Email alongside Interactive HTML email for a wider interactive strategy, leading to a much wider reach, better user experience for the email recipients, and better results for the senders.”
- Empathy is the best policy
Magan Lee, Content Marketing Manager at Litmus, has an intriguing take on automation. She believes that brands should revise their email marketing strategy for the tone, especially for automated emails that haven’t been updated in a while.
This should come from a place of concern for the hardships that people have been through in 2020, and continue to go through in 2021. These are situations that have made the best of us sensitive and vulnerable. This sensitivity must reflect in personalized communication from brands in order to build a genuine connection.
According to Kath Pay, CEO, Founder, and Author, Holistic Email Marketing, a brand-focused POV in your email messaging would also mean that you lose out in the new digital race with every other brand coming online and trying to build relationships with customers. Helpful, customer-centric, and empathetic messaging is the key to success this year, too.
Here’s an example to inspire you.
Source
- Futuristic tech for the email of the future
Imagine virtual trial rooms for outfits right in your mailbox. Now, that is what you call convenient shopping. Some brands have already begun using AR (augmented reality) for this purpose. As per Alyssa Nahatis, Global Deliverability Practice Leader, Adobe, smart email programs would be the ones following these trials up with emails displaying the options considered by the customer.
With AMP and AR put together, you can move on from the static email and add some interaction and dynamism. This essentially means that even after an email has landed in a customer’s inbox, the content of the email can transform. You can add elements like carousels and forms right into your email.
According to Liz Willits, Email Marketing + Content Strategy Consultant for SaaS and Creators, such dynamic emails can increase click-through rates and interactions. They can also bring down friction by decreasing the number of steps taken by customers.
Final thoughts
One thing is evident. Email marketers across the globe, regardless of brand, need to pull up their socks and conduct more research, cull out more data, rehaul strategies, and essentially rework entire campaigns. You have done it last year, albeit on the fly. This year, times have evolved and so must you.
This is just a summarized form of the extensive output from our conversations with 29 brilliant minds in email marketing. There have been discussions about further trends such as omnichannel marketing, agile working, accessible emails, and much more. You ought to check out the long version of this to fully assimilate all the wisdom you need for your email marketing campaigns in 2021. You can read it here!
Source: 29 Email Experts on Email Marketing Trends to watch for in 2021
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
Email marketing stock photo by Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock