Email Marketing Strategy: 2020 Guide

Marketing has undergone considerable changes in recent years. A modern email marketing strategy is also not left behind in this process.

The paradigm shift to the entire email marketing approach, where the latest technologies are being adopted, is bringing a complete transformation in the way customers have to be approached.

The number of email users will grow to almost 3 billion in 2020. Because of this, marketers will have a huge opportunity in targeting a larger number of prospects.

The need of the hour is to develop a strategy which could help to connect with the right prospect and convert them into loyal customers.

Email Marketing in 2020

There are some top predictions by the high-level executives of organizations. One of them being from Paul Farnell, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Litmus:

“I BELIEVE EMAIL VOLUME IS GOING TO INCREASE DRAMATICALLY BY 2020, BUT IT WON’T FEEL LIKE IT. INBOXES WILL PRIORITIZE MESSAGES, MANY EMAIL INTERACTIONS WILL BE BRIEF, AND MANY EMAILS WON’T FEEL LIKE EMAILS AT ALL.”

The above graph shows how email is one of the important customer communication channels along with the phone. 

Here, one can clearly see that 65% of the respondents stated that they used email for communicating with organizations. Because of this, email marketing remains way ahead of other channels.

Some of the trendy email elements in the near future:

• Interactive images in the email
• CTAs and animated buttons
• Accordion features designed for making long-form emails compact
• The rollover effects for showcasing product offerings

1. Integrating User-generated Content and an Email Marketing Strategy

User-generated content is content which is created by a brand’s customers, fans, or social media followers. Such content can come in the form of audio, text, images, and visuals.

Because the content is created by the end-user, it can help to drive real engagement. Popular user-generated content include Instagram photos and video, Facebook and Twitter posts, and articles written for a blog.

UGC has become the new confidence currency.

As a marketer, you would have gone through a phase where, after sending too many emails, you seem to run out of new ideas. In such a scenario, when you integrate your email marketing with the user-generated content, it helps to boost the entire process for making the right connection with the customer. 

There are two statistical reports which support the above statements:

As per a report, consumers are known to trust the images from other consumers, i.e., the UGC content, a 7x more than trusting the advertising content. 

Another research even found that there is a 5.6% conversion rate for the consumers who viewed the user-generated content before making the purchase.

Are you familiar with this brand?

Yes, the same Chobani product, which many of you would love relishing!!!!

Now, we will understand the case in detail. 

Chobani, the top-selling Greek yogurt in America, found a way to reach out to the American population by combining the UGC with the contest. The brand asked the people to submit the reasons they loved the yogurt.

In the process, the participant’s friends could vote on their content. The winner receives free yogurt. The campaign spread fast as the consumers were interested in sharing in the exchange of a reward.

Finally, the contest hugely became popular and even saw an increase of 225.9% in sales.

2. Optimized Content for Mobile and Service Provider

2020 could be the year where most of the emails will be opened on mobile devices than on personal laptops or desktops. As a marketer, you have to check whether the email content is optimized for mobile devices or not and if not have to fix it at the earliest.

This could make life easier for the user as he could check the email easily on the mobile.  

As per SendGrid, the first step to optimize the email for mobile is understanding on which phone users are viewing the email. It was even found that the majority of the email content in the US is getting views through Gmail around 42.1% and on iPhones.

When you know about the device and the service provider which your recipients have been using to view the email, it helps you to develop the best-suited version for the email.

The above image shows how different is the Apple Mail app and the Gmail app. It displays the same email in different ways to customers using a different app.

As per a study, it is found that 66% of mobile users will delete the emails which are not optimized for the mobile.

3. Creating High-value Customer Journey

Customer journey is important for any business. The better the journey, the more refined the customer experience becomes. 

Let’s go in-depth:

Find out the destination first, so you can then execute your research and plan the trip. Planning here means strategizing the email marketing campaign for targeting potential customers.

Your product or service is a destination for your customers. You have to provide an enticing journey to your customers. Email marketing is considered as a trustworthy and valuable communication channel for nurturing a customer and creating a high-value journey.

It is the backbone of the interaction with a customer. When done correctly, it helps in reaching out to the existing ones and gaining new customers.

So, how are you going to map the customer journey?

It’s simple just follow some basic steps:

• Just create a map of all possible touchpoints
• Try involving the entire organization
• Use as much data you have
• Make the first impression
• Create the personas
• Create the recommendations
• Plan the email marketing makeover

After following these procedures, you can start developing the following:

• Refined welcome emails
• Customer appreciation mails
• Shopping cart recovery emails
• Trigger-based transaction emails
• Reengagement emails

4. Authenticity Will Be High Priority

Authenticity is always given high priority while drafting emails for the marketing campaign. The email should not be only about pitching, offers, and selling. This can irritate any customer at some point in time. It’s crucial that you make it something creative like story-telling to make the customer wanting for more.

Similarly, making customers aware of how the company got started, what are the entire range of services or products, can be one of the tactics in winning the trust of the customer. Because of this, one can engage with the customer and increase the conversion rate.

Some of the story-telling content to improve emails:

• Be a premium value provider for your reader
• Build up a relationship with the brand and consumer
• Offering meaningful and powerful stories focused on the pain points of the consumer

A conversational tone can help in adding the humor and personality to the email content. Because of this, you will be able to develop a closer connection with the audience.

5. Email Automation

Automation has become an essential part of the marketing process. With each passing year, it has become an integral part of the organization. Not only has it helped to save time but also to frame the tactic effectively. 

In the current market, there are a lot of email automation tools like Engagebay for making the process faster and smoother. Because of this, we have to choose the right one after executing in-depth research. You can use some of the email automation tools as per your requirement:

• RafflePress
• Hatchbuck
• Act-On
• Marketo
• Campaign Monitor
• GetNotify

6. Personalized Email Marketing

Personalization is not going anywhere. This is due to the fact that people want to see more personalization.

Some useful tips for personalizing emails include:

• Gather the relevant information
• Segmenting the list
• Creating quality over quantity content
• Focusing on the behavior of the recipient.

Personalized email marketing is very beneficial, with a generation of median ROI of 122%.

Personalized email marketing does not always need to be your recipient’s service or product. It can also be the personalization of your brand. As you can see in the below example:

Here the company HubSpot has personalized the content for its product, which is a landing page eBook. Because of this, they managed to address the pain point of the customer by mentioning that landing pages are crucial to generate leads for the website. 

The results are interesting. the click-through rate of the email sent from the company was 0.73%. However, when emails were sent from the marketing team, it jumped to 0.96%. 

A good place to start when creating personalized emails is to define your email list. If you split your email list into prospects and customers, then you will be able to send emails tailored to these groups of people.

The video above has more tips on getting started with your email list.

7. Personalizing Emails with Landing Pages

This tactic can be very helpful in targeting the right customer. Both the email and landing page should have consistent content so that it can make the same personalized CTA to a specific customer. When the customer has a unified experience, it increases the chances of conversion.

Take the example of Nuffield Health. The organization was facing the challenge of optimizing the online campaign and turning visitors into leads.

Due to this challenge, they jointly worked with a media planning agency for engaging visitors and channeling them to the landing pages. These landing pages are designed to meet the requirements and expectations of the visitors from the traffic source.

They had a strategy of higher email click-through rates with optimized messaging and a powerful call-to-action.

The consistent experience between the landing pages and the traffic sources made them achieve a +928% increase in the conversion rate of the lead. Furthermore, they optimized the online campaign conversion rates by customizing emails for each of the traffic segment.

8. Voice Assistants to Read the Emails

The screen where emails are being accessed gets smaller with each passing day. However, in the near future, it is quite possible that voice assistants would be introduced to reading the emails.

9. More Visual Content

Visual content appeals more to the customer than other forms. 

A study by Vero found that emails with images had a 42% higher click-through rate than the emails that do not have the images. 

In the coming year, one would see the use of more visual content in the emails.

First impressions are 94% design-related. Marketers must push their limits to develop content that can motivate the customer for CTA.

10. Interactive Content

Interactive content is always the key to success. You can generate more revenue and sales when the customer feels comfortable to interact. One is bound to see the inclusion of more interactive content in emails in the upcoming year.

Interactive content can be as simple as surprising your subscribers with unique offers. Promoting interactive campaigns paves the path for delivering what the subscribers want.

“Is it better to rent or buy,” – This statement allows people to better understand the best options available in regards to housing. This information facilitated the subscriber in going through a personalized experience, as per the image above. 

A study done by Martech Advisor claims that interactive email content helps in increasing the click to open rate by 73%. The study also found that adding videos to the email content can boost click rates up to 300%.

As email marketing expands, most of the brands have started experimenting with this tactic; this is going to increase in the next year.

TL;DR

Email marketing will never be outdated, at least in the near future. It is known to be the third most influential source of information after colleague recommendations and industry thought leaders.

Email marketing is also regarded as one of the main marketing channels in business development. The channel can convert 40x more leads into customers than the combined Facebook and Twitter.

Technology will soon begin to revolutionize email campaigns in a way unlike before. Subscribers will be able to make a purchase right inside the marketing campaign without actually leaving their inbox.

This is a big deal, so as a marketer, you just have to prioritize your strategy with the latest tactics to make the best use of the technology and connect to the prospect.

The future of email holds very strong as it evolves into the shifting landscape of the technological world. Rapid advancements will help to breakthrough into every aspect of the channel, thus allowing the marketers to have more impact on the consumers by 2020.

Do you currently have an email marketing strategy in place? Do you make use of new technology and software to complete your tasks? Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author

Robert Jordan, a seasoned marketing professional with over 10 years of experience. He currently works as Media Relations Manager at InfoClutch Inc, a leading supplier of most sought after technology database including SAP ERP customers list, Salesforce CRM customers list & many more technologies. Robert is an expert in setting up the lead flow for budding startups and takes it to the next level. Robert also has a deep interest in SEO, SEM & Social Media related discussions.