E-mail marketing trends in 2020

Through the article we will discuss E-mail marketing step by step and 2020 trends.

E-mail marketing in the digital world of constant change, carries the prestige of the most stable and perhaps even the most important marketing channel in 2020 as well.

As with other channels, it is necessary to be aware that the way we read e-mails is changing, and more and more detailed research allows us to be as successful as possible in the preparation and implementation of email marketing campaigns. We have selected the four most important trends that you will need to pay the most attention to in 2020.

Email marketing remains the king of efficiency

E-mail is still number 1 activity online and as many as 94% of users use the web to check their emails. Despite many predictions that e-mail marketing is dead (the most famous statement came from Sharyl Sandberg in 2010, who is the operations manager at Facebook), reading and sending e-mails does not stop. If in 2010, about 250 billion e-mails were sent per day, 300 billion are sent daily today.

While e-mail cannot boost of the kind of growth that social networks can, we can feel the special stability that e-mail marketing brings.

Email marketing – the most stable and perhaps even the most important marketing channel

Email marketing highlights in 2020

Email marketing has basically remained the same for a decade. However, trends and sending methods are changing dramatically. The four areas that need special emphasis in e-mail marketing in 2020 are:

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Customization of content for each user

We began to learn about the tailoring of content to the end user when advertising on social networks. We gained the best opportunities to present information tailored to the different groups we identified through their interests.

The trend has also covered e-mail marketing, with the difference that here in the first place the group includes only people who have already had some contact with us, and we need to understand them through the campaigns they have carried out. Content customization is important primarily because the most commonly used e-mail account hosts (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc.) are increasingly behaving like a sieve – emails are separated by importance.

Important e-mails are those to which there is the best response and which are most relevant to our interests. Only the most important emails will be received in the main folder, the lower rated ones will go to the promotion folder, the even lower rated ones will go to the spam folder. Thus, it is important that e-mails are not sent to all contacts, because logically, the same content cannot satisfy everyone.

Hosts of e-mail accounts distinguish e-mails by importance – main, promotions, spam …

By adapting the content of emails to the interests of specific groups, you will achieve a higher level of response to e-mails, thus building loyalty and authority with e-mail providers, which will come in handy when e-mails are sent to recipients’ mailboxes.

Segmentation and automation of email marketing

In 2020, it is necessary to segment the entire database of e-mail addresses according to demographics and the interests they show towards certain content. In doing so, some special tools can be of help to you, with which you can Tag on the basis of which action or content someone has subscribed to the individual database of e-mail recipients.

E.g. you will tag differently the users who came to the site for the first time and bought something, and those who came to the site and added the product to the cart but did not make a purchase. Another tag will also be for the ones who came to the site for the first time and did not add the product to the cart. And another also for someone who has visited your site multiple times over a period of time, completed a specific form, and similar. This way of segmenting contacts is nothing new, but it is an area that will be even more emphasized in 2020.

In order for the entire process to run smoothly and without additional workloads, it is necessary to automate such e-mail marketing. For this, it is best to use tools that allow you to create automated email marketing sequences. One of the most famous ones is the Active Campaign tool.

ActiveCampaign – tool for e-mail marketing automatisation

Mobile responsive e-mails, adaptation to all devices

2020 is likely to be the first year that more emails will be opened on mobile devices than desktops or laptops. If we take into account that 2/3 of users will ignore your e-mail, if it is not optimized for an individual mobile device, it is the mobile responsive email, which you will have to implement immediately in 2020 e-mail marketing.

The most important interactive components of an e-mail in 2020 are:

Be sure to create interactive content in your emails – the most important ones are listed above!

How to get the best responsive email

The biggest breakthrough came from mobile responsive email back in 2016, when Gmail enabled CSS elements in messaging. While we already knew two ways to improve responsiveness on different devices, which are also used today.

The first is called “Scalable”. It is usually a single-column e-mail, in which we adjust the text size for different devices.

The second is called “Fluid”, which uses percentage ratios and integrates better into the new dimension of the screen, in a way that centers the content, leaving empty space at the edges.

Of course, we will recommend the use of CSS-supported e-mail for use in 2020, in which we will basically prepare various templates for mobile and desktop devices, and have the greatest possible customization. So make sure that your program, which you use to send e-mails, offers the option “Responsive” or CSS.

Tool BeeFree – one of the (free) tools for creating mobile-responsive e-mail templates

Accessibility, assistant for automatic reading of emails through speakers

In 2020, the growth of the assistant for automatic reading of e-mails via speakers will continue. With about 250 million smart readers installed in 2020, marketing departments are already seriously dealing with optimization.

We should also not forget that according to the World Health Organization, there are about 1.3 billion visually impaired people among us, of whom 36 million are blind, which only predicts the growth in the use of increasingly advanced e-mail reading assistants.

We follow the accessibility rule in our e-mail campaigns for the best possible user experience.

How to create material that will be suitable for assisted reading of texts

Keep your material concise and clear. Research suggests that the average attention we pay to email is 13.4 seconds. Taking into account the fact that the average reader reads around 250 words per minute, we find that an ideal email has a total of around 50 words. Or at least the introductory, content-rich part with a link to the website.

For effective email marketing I recommend

Even if you don’t specifically optimize your email for a reading assistant, this definition more than applies to all cases. When you want to make sure that the recipients understand you, the texts usually needs to be shortened rather than expanded. Also, do not use professional words. Legality applies to all texts, and even more so to email marketing, where you want to deliver a striking message in just a few seconds.

Europe is a place where every few hours of driving you change the country and usually your language.

E.g. Mailchimp can read the language settings of the browser of the person who submitted their e-mail address on your website via their form. Then prepare the e-mail in several language variants, and the recipient will receive it in the language in which his browser was set up when he filled out the form. The option of manual language selection will also be offered.

Avoid a fairly common mistake when companies design email content e.g. in Photoshop, and then export both photos and text as an image. The text in the email must be text. Use as few photos as possible (and never use them at the top).

If the image cannot be uploaded or the user is using a reading assistant, it is important to fill in the alt texts for the images in the e-mail to describe them.

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Email marketing automation

At first glance, automation gives the impression of an impersonal approach to email marketing, but in reality it contributes a lot to the personalization of email marketing. It means we spend less time on technical things and more on content. It also means that the user gets the email when he needs it.

Automation also allows us better conversion. We can guide a potential customer through an ever-improving process from subscribing to an e-newsletter to making a purchase. We measure this process, learn from it, better understand our customer and optimize the process.

How to tackle email marketing automation?

First, you need a comprehensive plan for how you will tackle each segment of your e-mail subscribers. Next, I recommend intensive testing and measuring results. No one can predict better how people will respond to your emails than research findings.

With the rise of visual e-mail campaign builders, you can easily test different approaches, setting up individual emails that follow a specific campaign or non-campaign. I recommend using Active Campaign Monitor to create email marketing sequence plans and implement them.

I invite you to read another one of our articles on the topic of digital advertising. And for step-by-step video tutorials, check out our hands-on e-courses.

Find out more about them at https://www.martin-orange.com/e-courses/