Alon Ghelber is CMO at Revuze, an AI StartUp analyzing customer reviews & delivering product insights to optimize decision-making.
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Over the past year, the email senders increased their email volume by over 50% since more people online shopped and spent more time staying at home sitting in front of their laptops during the pandemic. Businesses had to shift their email marketing strategy during the pandemic so as to accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs.
Now with vaccination available, many people are beginning to go back to their normal lives — for the most part. So, what are the email marketing trends that businesses should keep up with in order to thrive in 2021?
Let’s dive into the five email marketing tips that fit the 2021 trends.
1. Personalize your emails.
Since people were forced to separate from each other during Covid, they crave personal connection even more than before the pandemic. Consumers want to feel valued and don’t want to get robotic responses from the company that they spend money on.
Therefore, the usual email automation, which looks too robotic, has to change. Show not just what you know, but demonstrate your personality and what you care about in the emails. Make customers who read your emails feel connected with you. This will help them build trust in you as well as your brand.
You can also try to leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. For instance, gather data from your customers and analyze their interests and preferences so as to deliver more personalized emails that speak to their wants and needs.
2. Make emails more interactive.
By making your emails interactive, you can better engage your customers. While customers feel that they’re being given options to “choose their own adventure and journey,” businesses can make use of the customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. The customized journey will likely convert more sales too.
The interactive elements in an email don’t need to be complicated. They can be clear, clickable CTA buttons, polls and surveys, quick quizzes and carousels to showcase products or services. So, think about the usual welcome email and the transaction confirmation emails you send to users. Are there any ways you can make them less robotic and boring?
3. Consider implementing AI to optimize email strategy.
As mentioned briefly in tip No. 1, implementing AI in your email strategy can help you analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline your email marketing effort.
Remember, if your customers have made the effort to open your email, the email content needs to be worth their time, otherwise, they will simply delete your email, not open the next one and may even unsubscribe from your list. This is why knowing what your customers need is so important before you shoot them another email. To make this process easier, you may want to delegate it to a CRM system.
For example, by analyzing consumer’s purchase habits and interests, tools like Ongage can optimize the email sending time, identify a more suitable angle for your emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.
4. Incorporate user-generated content into emails.
User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content created by the users of the goods and services. For most people, when they shop online, they don’t really get to see or experience the products in person before they make the purchase. This is why other customers’ feedback is so impactful on their purchase decision. In fact, about 93% of consumers are influenced by other users’ reviews.
If you can incorporate user-generated content into your emails, you can increase consumer’s trust in your product and brand. And the best thing about this type of content? It’s free. So, consider including customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product or service in your emails from now on.
In addition, cross-promote your product or service on your social media platforms to gather more user reviews or photos. Lots of users would be happy to see their reviews being shared by a brand publicly.
5. Be privacy-friendly.
Customers these days are more aware of their privacy and how their data is being used. Therefore, focusing on data privacy is essential for all businesses.
You should constantly review legislation regarding data privacy and ensure your email campaigns are in compliance with it. You can also inform customers of any changes in data privacy and let them know how you will protect their information. This can definitely increase your customers’ trust in your company.
Bottom Line
So here they are, the five email marketing tips that fit the 2021 trends. Be sure to take all these tip-based trends into consideration when you’re planning your next email campaigns. Email marketing after the pandemic doesn’t have to be difficult if you can leverage the effort you already put into it over the past year.
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