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Three Predictions For Email Marketing In 2019

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Antoine Bonicalzi

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Email marketing -- it’s dead, right? Well, of course, it’s not. But the days of casting one email to your whole database and hoping that the money trickles in are dying. And for your business’s 2019 New Year’s resolution, you should put that all-too-common tactic in your rearview mirror as you drive your business to new destinations. In other words, provide value to your customers’ lives and not just sales or spam to their inbox.

As the director of marketing at a leading email marketing provider, it is my duty to watch the trends and shifts of the email marketing trade -- as well as the feedback that we get from our clients and users -- and to share some of my predictions for the most critical trends in email marketing.

1. Building personal connections will become more important.

If you’re ethically growing your email list, then your database will be filled with fans of your organization. In many ways, they’ve already bought into your business, and they want to hear from you because you have, at least at one point, offered them something of value.

In 2019, you should continue to build on that personal connection through segmentation. With the emphasis on big data, companies can easily (and should be) segmenting their list by the interest of their customer base and the types of content they have historically interacted with.

Take, for instance, American Express’ hyper-personalization strategy. At the Direct Marketing Association’s 2018 &Then conference, David Knapp, the company’s director of digital marketing, discussed how this strategy has resulted in a compound annual growth rate of 150% in engagement for the company’s email marketing efforts -- as well as a slew of awards for the best email marketing campaign. This forward-thinking approach was driven by looking at customers’ data to understand their spending habits as well as what incentivizes them.

2. Video -- and the use of interactivity -- will continue to grow.

In 2019, I believe embedded video will continue to grow for email marketers -- a sentiment that is echoed in François Daoust’s research paper, “Toward Video on the Web with HTML5.” As we have seen across social media and many other channels, users love to consume video content. Up until now, email clients have been lagging behind as far as allowing video to be embedded into emails seamlessly.

But, come 2019, I believe businesses can expect to see more email clients providing the tools needed by the market now as they continue to push for future innovations. The benefit for marketers with these options is that they allow them to provide a wider variety of content while also providing another outlet to further amplify their campaigns with their fans. On top of this, businesses that focus on interactivity and gamifying their email campaigns may see large-scale increases in their numbers.

For those wanting to implement video or gamification, you should first consider your audience. Dive deeply into the user data of your emails and website, looking for what is important to your fans. From there, leverage the skills of your team, or search for creators who can help build top-tier content for your business. Then, implement, adapt and learn. As with all marketing initiatives, you might not get it right 100% of the time, but you should take the lessons learned and apply them quickly.

3. It’s more important than ever to understand that not all automation is created equally.

Although automated emails are a fantastic way to onboard a client and allow you to take advantage of providing a welcoming message tailored to how that subscriber signed on, marketers must remember that not all automation is created equally. Worse still, if done incorrectly, automated emails can quickly come across as spammy, causing a negative reaction toward your company.

For example, automated sales emails that are made to look like genuine emails might be useful once or twice, but as a regular occurrence, they will likely be seen as cheap and inauthentic. Moreover, these types of emails are borderline illegal in Canada due to Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), which states that it is a violation to send an email (or other electronic communications) to a person unless they have consented to receive it. And automated sales emails may potentially be in violation, as the person who sent an email and the person it was sent on behalf of must be disclosed. Furthermore, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted its own standards in 2018 that impact email marketing.

Instead of resorting to spam-like tactics, invest in your content strategy to attract an audience of prospects who are interested in the value that you provide. With time, build that relationship to the point where they don’t just know your business; they look forward to your emails and trust your opinion.

Whatever you do in 2019, don’t forget that there’s another person who is on the receiving end of your emails. After all, focusing on making a genuine human connection is the foundation of any great marketing campaign.

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