Some say that email marketing is dead and that social media has taken over. No, it is not dead. Big companies like Vulkan Vegas still actively use this kind of promotion. Social media is merely an addition, not a replacement.
What is the Future of Email Marketing?
Will companies move away from it? How will corporations keep up with the changing times, and are there current and future trends we can expect? Let us do a deep dive and find out!
Floating Products
Emails will eventually have floating products in them. Right now, Yahoo! has these cards at the top of emails. These cards show updates about a person’s purchase, mostly from either Amazon or AliExpress.
Here are some common uses of floating cards:
- Remind a consumer to sign up for a survey
- Tell a consumer to register (mostly used as a follow-through for a marketing strategy)
- Normal advertisement for a product.
A floating card is like a thumbnail, which is above the subject line of the electronic mail. These cards are not permanent, as the user has the option to close the thumbnail. To some degree, some of these floating cards are great because they remind the user of their previous commitments or things they must do.
Artificial Intelligence
There are many use cases for AI for email marketing. For one, the company can automatically segregate email addresses based on demographics. Right now, electronic address segmentation is still manual, and it takes a lot of time and effort to group them.
Here are other future uses of AI for email marketing:
- The AI will write email ad copy;
- Predictive analytics;
- Use of “lookalike” audiences and “also bought” upsells.
For predictive analytics, companies no longer have to waste money sending emails to unresponsive users. Right now, the process of removing these addresses from an e-mail database is manual.
An AI can find out the likelihood of a user opening an email. If a user is not likely to open it, then the AI will decide to remove that electronic address from the list of recipients.
Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization simply means that the ad has something to do with the user’s activity. This concept and marketing practice is not new Google uses this approach aggressively.
So, how can email marketing benefit from it? For one, the email ad platform can now show ads based on a user’s activities. For example, if a consumer browsed for red rubber shoes on Google, an email ad on Yahoo! ads for red rubber shoes.
Another example is if a person watches a video about power tools, like an angle grinder, the e-mail ad shows products for angle grinders.
This degree of personalization is impactful, considering that the user already has the intent to buy. With a little nudge from an email advertisement, the companies that pay for the ads can make money.
Dynamic Content
Dynamic content has something to do with AI. It simply means that the content changes according to the user. Think of a YouTube feed — the content changes based on user activity.
With dynamic advertising, the content on the user’s electronic address will change according to the time, activity, and location. The best thing this application can do is to surprise the customer because they would see something relevant.
Too many times, email users get bombarded with ads they do not like. In addition to the dynamic content of the ad, marketers can also create hundreds of different email messages to be sent to specific users who are more likely to respond.
Dynamic content is great for media companies. For example, let us say that you have an online magazine. You have content for comic books, movies, and politics. With dynamic content, your email marketing system can send new blog posts about politics only to people who are interested in politics.
The ultimate benefit of this is that the recipient is more likely to open the letter because they are interested in politics. As such, it is easier to get direct traffic from this email marketing strategy than just randomly sending emails to everybody.
Email marketing works because letters are not always cluttered with social junk. It is not like social media, where the user can see thousands upon thousands of posts.
With email marketing, a user has the intent to read their emails. The only downside is that people hate spam. If a user sees an ad and decides that it is spam, they will block that domain.
In Summary…
The future of email marketing is bright. As long as people have emails, companies can personalize their marketing strategies. Social media and in-feed ads are great, but they come nowhere close to what emails can do.
No one can stop email marketing except the recipient. Social media marketing is not as targeted as email marketing. This is why many companies still prefer to do emails. As such, email marketing will be here to stay.