Who would have thought?
40 years after the first promotional email went out, email marketing has become the number one driver of customer acquisition and retention. It has changed tremendously in these past four decades, and every year brings at least one new trend that businesses of all sizes follow. What are the top email marketing trends for 2019? Let’s take a look!
People-based marketing is the present (and the future)
Thousands of businesses worldwide use digital marketing – the landscape is more crowded than ever. However, not all of them have fully embraced people-based marketing, the strategy that focuses on offering individuals a consistent and relevant stream of content on all digital channels.
The 2018 Adobe Consumer Email Survey showed that the lack of personalization is at the top of people’s biggest email pet peeves. More precisely, 33% of the survey takers said they receive content that doesn’t respond to their needs and interests.
By its omnichannel nature, people-based marketing starts with email. It then cycles back to email in the form of customized content, highly targeted to specific individuals. We’ve seen this trend going strong in 2018, and next year this approach will make the difference between companies succeeding and just scraping by.
Email validation: where data quality starts
Great, targeted content needs a sure way to reach its destination, and in this respect, no tool helps more than an email bulk verifier. Designed to remove invalid email addresses from databases, email validation systems are true industry game-changers.
Even when following the golden rules of email marketing, risky email addresses can still end up on email lists. Spam traps, abuse and catch-all emails, misspelled, fake and dormant contacts –they can wreak havoc on your reports, where bounce rates can get painfully high.
In their 2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report, Return Path found that 21% of opt-in emails fail to reach the inbox. Poor email deliverability has been a serious struggle for marketers for years. However, in 2019, they can rely on email verification to ensure they keep a good sending reputation. That, in turn, will leverage their deliverability and help them reach more subscribers.
Customer retention: how to build a real community
As the organic social media reach is in full decline, marketers will keep focusing on growing their email list as part of their overall online marketing strategy in 2019. However, their greater interest is going to be in customer retention.
This year, we’ve seen mid-sized and large companies deploying significant efforts to build up their email databases. Live webinars, eBooks, white papers and other freebies are everywhere, enticing you to sign up on that mailing list. It seems like the question on everyone’s lips has been: “How do we get more subscribers and turn them into customers?”.
However, marketers have started to realize that the power of email is not in the numbers of addresses you have, but in
1. how genuine, thus valuable, they are (and email validation brings much-needed clarity here).
2. how your subscribers engage with your content.
The essential email marketing trends of 2019, in a nutshell:
1. there is going to be more fine-tuning when it comes to addressing the right prospect, on the right channels, at the right time. Email remains at the core of people-based marketing. Across all industries, it is the primary and most personal communication channel.
2 consistent data quality will be a main concern for marketers, as they understand that email hygiene determines their delivery rates and overall Email marketing outcomes. Using an email verification system to keep their lists clean will be a key part of their strategy.
3. there will be a shift towards using email to build real communities and nurturing them with unique, personalized content. We’re going to see even bigger investments in brand journalism, and email will be an efficient distribution medium. Companies will strive to produce video, audio and written content that responds to their audience’s preferences.
