It’s time for email marketing trends that will change the way we do email marketing in 2020!
While we see many changes in email marketing industry every year, not all these changes become trends.
So, stop experimenting on all such changes and start focusing on utilizing these email marketing trends in 2020 to keep your audience hooked, engaged, and loyal towards your brand.
Top email marketing trends for 2020
1. Dynamic segmentation
Being an email marketer, you need to shift your focus from static to dynamic customer segmentation in 2020.
The static segmentation of your audience is based on their age, gender, income, and more. But dynamic segmentation is the real-time segmentation that takes place based on your audience’s behavior and actions on your emails, websites, and apps. It creates a separate profile for each of your customers, and updates them in real-time based on their latest interactions.
Based on these separate segments, you need to plan some unique and relevant email marketing campaigns. When your email subscribers receive relevant emails, the email open rates and click-through rates increase dramatically, which ultimately leads to higher ROI.
Here is an example of how dynamic customer segmentation can be, from Ernst & Young
Make sure you use dynamic customer segmentation to make the most out of your email marketing investments in 2020.
2. Mobile optimization
As per the statistics by Litmus “The 2019 Email Client Market Share” (July 2019), 42% of emails are now opened on a mobile device.
Also, as per eMailMonday, the mobile email open rates are higher compared to desktop ones.
Hence in 2020, you would need to be extra careful while designing your email templates.
A research says that emails that display inappropriately on mobiles will get deleted in three seconds.
So, make sure you optimize your emails for mobile-first (just like SEO marketers now optimize for mobile-first indexing)-
- Never place oversized or incorrectly placed images
- Avoid too much text with little to no breaks
- Prevent overlapping of text and graphics
- Make sure you have clearly visible CTAs
- Choose mobile-optimized templates
- Don’t forget to add ALT text for images to be used in the emails
- Test and test your emails across multiple devices to ensure responsiveness
Mobile-optimized emails are going to rule in 2020. Get your email designs set right away.
3. AI-powered automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) have entered in most sections of the organizations such as marketing, sales, and customer service.
Yes, artificial intelligence is shaping the new way of planning and executing email marketing campaigns.
We discussed that it would be essential for brands to focus on dynamic customer segmentation, and artificial intelligence (AI) helps in doing it without the need for human interaction.
Looking at the impact and increased use of AI in the organizations, email marketing is something where you can utilize it to see the results flooding in.
And, that something which will remain in 2020 trends, is AI-powered email automation.
Email marketing automation is nothing new, but enhancing it with the power of AI will speed up the automation process.
The AI-powered automation tools simplify the email crafting and copy-writing, allow you to create unique email marketing journeys, and validate if everything is perfect in your email before sending it to the right customers.
Salesforce combined artificial intelligence and creativity to transform its email marketing automation suite with enhanced and interactive features for its customers. You can leverage such platforms.
1. Simplifying email copy-writing – Salesforce uses AI to simplify the entire process of creating email copies for each campaign.
2. Creating and sharing ‘Journey Templates’ – Marketers can create and share contextual journey templates with each other within an organization. Such journey templates have the recommended content, text or journey paths based on each campaign that speeds up creating and deploying campaigns
3. Testing and validating campaigns – Each email can be tested for a poorly formatted text, the wrong name in the greeting line or a terribly irrelevant offer, which can save marketers from losing customers
More and more email marketing tools will upgrade their suite with AI-powered automation, and utilizing the same would help you generate greater results in 2020.
4. Video email marketing
Graphics are yet not old-school, but videos in email marketing are super-cool.
As per ‘The State of Video Marketing 2018’ from Demand Metric, more than 80% of marketers have said that video has become more important as a form of marketing content.
Hence, marketers are now focusing more on how to integrate videos on different platforms such as social media, emails, webinars, and more.
Most marketers have already started using videos in email marketing and here are a few video email marketing statistics to prove; you must start focusing on it in 2020-
- The email open rates increase by 19% if you include only a word, ‘video’ in the email subject line (HighQ)
- Using video in email increased the email click-through rates by 300% for Wistia
- Oasis experienced an increase of 175% in revenue and 20% in customer engagement from emails featuring responsive embedded video
So, get ready to use video email marketing in 2020 in the following ways-
- Welcome video emails
- Customer story videos in emails
- GIF-based video emails
- Personalized videos to reduce the cart abandonment ratios
To utilize these ways, make sure you embed videos that will start playing on opening the email. Such embedded videos in emails enhance personalization and customer engagement to a great extent.
Here is an example of a video email received from Ryan Deiss
Pin it for 2020 now.
5. Accessible & interactive designs
Another email marketing prediction for 2020 is the increasing use of an interactive design that will also be accessible to the specially-abled ones. Accessible and interactive designs make it easy for all kind of email subscribers, including disabled ones, to read, perceive, and engage with the email.
The year 2020 that will have more smart displays, speakers, and voice assistants reading out the emails for your customers.
The reason behind this prediction is that in the third quarter of 2019, around 30 million smart speakers/displays were shipped from Amazon, Google, and more.
If you compare the numbers with 2018, it’s quite high.
With more such devices coming up, you would need to focus on creating accessible email content, design, and code to make reading email easier even for people having visual impairments.
Here is how you can make your email design, content, and code accessible:
- Make sure you frame it in a better logical reading order
- User better color combinations
- Keep the email content simple
- Avoid using flashing content
- Use enough spaces between text and graphics
- Keep a balanced use of images and text
- Use larger fonts
- Choose the right font style
- Include a text-only option
- Make clickable links differentiated
- Use responsive email design
- Use HTML semantic tags including ALT text for images
- Have an effective subject line
EmailMonks shared an example of accessible email:
Get your email design team ready for accessible and interactive emails in 2020.
6. User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is grabbing the eye for a few years now.
Businesses use UGC on their social media marketing campaigns to help customers with their buying decisions. But, it’s time you would also need to use it in your emails.
Here are a few statistics on the impact of using user-generated content in emails by Stackla-
- 79% of buyers say UGC highly impacts their buying decisions
- Consumers find UGC 9.8x times impactful compared to the influencer-created content while making a buying decision
- An increase of 8% in email click-through rates when UGC is featured in the email marketing campaigns
When your customers are at the stage where they would require social proof before buying your products or services, sending an email with UGC works wonders.
Here is an example of the user-generated content in email
What kind of user-generated content can you include in your emails?
- Customer Photos
- Customer Reviews
- Customer Videos
In which email marketing campaigns can you use UGC?
- Welcome emails
- Seasonal campaigns
- Triggered email series
- Connect-via-social campaign
- Cart abandonment campaign
Such UGC-based email marketing campaigns would increase engagement and reduce cart abandonment ratios to a great extent.
Make sure you make it happen in 2020.
7. Use of storytelling – to ensure more open and click rates
Storytelling has been among the top content marketing attributes for a long time now.
Storytelling helps in,
- Connecting your audience with your brand
- Creating a long-lasting impression on your potential customers
- Inspiring customers to remain loyal towards your brand
- Enhancing your brand reputation
- Boosting your ROI as it invokes more sales
Hence, marketers use it in their blogs, videos, social media posts, and more. Now, it’s time you need to involve in email marketing as well.
How to use storytelling in your emails? Here is a step-by-step guide-
- Write a curiosity led subject line to increase the open rates
- Begin your email’s first line in a way to maintain the curiosity and capture the attention
- Add characters, drama, and conclusion to build up a story
- Connect the story with your products/services
- Inspire users to click on your CTA
- Don’t forget to add some visual graphics into it to make it more interactive
Storytelling in email marketing helps in increasing email open rates, engagement, and click-through rates.
Hence, use the guide mentioned above to create a persuasive story-based email to being grabbing conversions in 2020.
Here is an example of a storytelling-based email by Aaron Orendorff
This example can be an inspiration for you to start storytelling in your email marketing campaigns for 2020.
8. Email list validation
Another email marketing trend you will see in 2020 is the marketers (even from small to mid-scale enterprises) focusing more on verifying and validating email addresses to protect their sender reputation in front of the ISPs.
With the increasing number of promotional emails people are receiving, the attention span has decreased to a great extent.
If your email doesn’t sound relevant to your audience, they are more likely to click on the spam button to stop receiving emails from our end. Also, there are chances of hard bounces, where email addresses are invalid, and you still send them emails regularly. If this happens often, the email service providers (ESPs) will suspend your account forever.
To continue sending emails to the right audience without a similar kind of situations, you would need to ensure you validate all the email addresses. Also, you need to identify the email addresses that haven’t opened your emails even once.
Such email addresses need to be removed from your list to prevent your sender reputation from getting spoilt.
From hundreds to millions of email addresses, validating emails manually is impossible. For that, you would need to use an email validation tool.
In 2020, send your emails to the valid addresses and see higher open rates and click-through rates with the right email verification tool.
9. Shorter emails
Two things we discussed above-
- More and more emails are opened on mobile now.
- The attention span is decreasing day by day.
Now, looking at both of these situations, it feels that your audience is living a busy life, and they read their emails on-the-go. They won’t entertain your emails if they’re of less value or irrelevant.
Apart from relevancy, you’ll have to be careful with the length of emails you finalize to send. Earlier, longer emails were working equally fine, but now with increasing competition, you would need to attract your readers in a fraction of seconds.
Check out how Convince and Convert founder and author Jay Baer writes short emails:
This email marketing trend has been already started in 2019 and will continue to grow in 2020, as well.
Concluding remarks: Email is set to grow in 2020
Holiday shoppers in Canada and the US highly prefer emails for receiving marketing messages from the retailers, as per the August 2019 report by eMarketer.
Everyday a new business, a new campaign is launched. New email users are joined, and email marketers have to be on their toes to ensure conversion rates don’t drop.
So 2020 will still be the year of email marketing to grab more conversions.
Hence, follow the above-mentioned email marketing trends to stay competitive and improve the ROI in 2020.
Do you think anything else that would be in great demand for email marketing trends 2020? Share them with us, and we would add it to our list. Come on; we want to know from you.
