Do you keep up with email marketing trends?Small business owners can make a decent ROI from email marketing as it remains a highly effective, low-cost channel to get your message out. Like most technology, email has evolved and continues to grow and change.
It’s essential to keep up with these changes to be as effective as possible with your email marketing. If you’re still doing what you did a few years ago, there’s a good chance that the impact of your efforts has decreased.
With that in mind, you should always ask yourself: What’s new in the world of email? Here are some of the top email marketing trends for 2023.
Pay Attention to These Email Marketing Trends
Email continues thriving as a marketing channel. 37% of brands are increasing their email marketing budgets, keen to cash in on an ROI of around $36 for every $1 spent. In more good news, 77% of marketers say they’ve seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
Consequently, there are some vital email marketing trends you should keep in mind going forward.
#1. Owning Your Own Audience is Extra Important
Marketing experts have warned for years that businesses need to hold their audiences. What does this mean? It means that you can connect with your audience any time you’d like to because you hold the key to getting in contact.
Email marketing is an example of this, as you own your customer contact list and can email those lists anytime. While you need to operate within the rules of your chosen email platform, you won’t find that you can no longer contact people on your list due to changes made by the email provider.
Experts have also stressed the importance of brands owning their audiences so they’re not beholden to algorithm changes on social media platforms or other rule changes that restrict your ability to contact people. So, why is owning your audience now more crucial than ever?
More changes will inhibit your ability to reach an audience via other means. Third-party cookies, which allow advertisers to track an audience across the internet and remarket to them, are experiencing a slow death. Targeted advertising has become much more difficult, and having the means to gather and build an email list is even more critical.
Organic reach on social media is declining on all major platforms. Reach on Instagram decreased by 29% over the last year, while Facebook’s reach decreased by 9%. It’s hard for businesses to reach an audience without considerable advertising costs, which is another point in favor of building your email list.
#2. Refining of Personalization
For the last few years, marketers have realized that personalizing their email approach improves results. With strategies such as segmentation, email marketers aim to send only the most relevant emails to people, increasing the chances that those emails will be effective.
As we head into 2023, email personalization is becoming more refined. Firstly, there’s an expectation among consumers that brands will serve up better, more relevant experiences. 88% say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Personalization can improve email open rates by as much as 42% and click-through rates by 14%.
“Better” personalization means going beyond just “Hi [Name]” in an email and looking for more ways to create a targeted, relevant experience. For example, you can tailor email content to a specific segment or recommend products or content based on the behaviors or preferences of the individual.
With data privacy laws such as GDPR in play, compliance is a must for email marketers. It’s a best practice to allow subscribers to refine their preferences for how and why they hear from you (along with giving them clear instructions for unsubscribing). A suggestion that will help you to hyper-personalize your messaging is to use a brief questionnaire to get subscribers to specify their preferences for content and email frequency. Allow them to have control over those preferences at any time.
#3. Email Open Rate is No Longer a Reliable KPI
Email open rate has been a “bread and butter” KPI for years. It measures the number of people who opened an email, expressed as a percentage of the total sent. The news for email marketers is that the open rate is no longer a reliable indicator of email engagement heading into 2023.
The reason behind this is Apple’s release of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. This release adds a new feature to protect Apple users’ data from being gathered by third-party apps. It includes MPP (Mail Privacy Protection), which prevents email senders from using pixels to collect information (such as whether or not they opened the email) from the user. It also masks their IP address so that marketers can’t use it to form a link with their other online activities or their location. Instead, Apple preloads email content so that it will always show up as “opened.”
In the US alone, 55.45% of smartphone users have an iPhone, so there’s a good chance you have several Apple users on your list. This statistic implies a large margin of error for the open rate metric and that you must find other, more reliable ways to measure engagement.
Note that MPP prevents you from getting accurate data on open rates, where your users are when they open your email, the activity on the device used to open the email, and what device the audience used to open the email.
#4. Email Marketing Automation is Key
In their research, Hubspot highlighted this function. “The most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).”
Multiple sources have shown email automation to generate more revenue than non-automated emails. CampaignMonitor found automated emails generated up to 320% more revenue.
Consistency and a cohesive approach are critical if you want successful email marketing campaigns. Automation is a strategy for ensuring consistency and providing subscribers with relevant messages. Check out our top seven most profitable email automations to get started.
#5. User-generated Content Prompts Conversions
You might be familiar with user-generated content already. It has been a strategy for social media channels for years, involving posting unsponsored content that users have created. For example, you can share anything from comments, images, videos, posts, or reviews with your broader audience.
A growing trend of user-generated content in email marketing over the last year or so is expected to continue into 2023. The primary reason for this growth is that it is effective. People find user-generated content interesting, trustworthy, and reassuring. Consumers are 2.4x more likely to believe user-generated content is authentic when compared to brand-created content.
Another advantage of user-generated content is that it’s cost-effective. Marketers don’t have to spend time creating the content; they just have to sort through the existing content to determine what to use.
How can you include user-generated content in your email campaigns? A straightforward solution is to use the pictures taken by your customers, such as them using your product or service. It’s much more impactful than stock imagery and helps people connect with your business.
You could also grab reviews or testimonials and share those in your emails. These add an extra layer of credibility with your subscribers.
Conclusion
The five email marketing trends we discussed are essential to consider and potentially incorporate into your email strategy. Factors such as owning your own audience and understanding the impacts of changes such as Apple’s OS are critical for optimizing the effect of email for your business.
Finally, we know implementation is a challenge for several companies. Here at SmartMail, we handle email strategy for ecommerce businesses, from list growth to automations, to writing and setting up campaigns. Click here to book your free consultation.
