The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 34: Dec/Jan 2017/18 | Page 30

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF EMAIL MARKETING HOLD FOR MARKETEERS? With 2018 almost here, we’re preparing for both Christmas and the next year in digital marketing. As such, it’s that time again where we look forward into the future and predict what’s going to happen with the trends we’ve seen during 2017. The first in our series of predictions is around email marketing, so read on for what’s going to happen in 2018 with this ubiquitous marketing channel. Al Keck, founder of Infinity Nation Predictive content will become more prominent Deeper integration of email marketing & social media Thanks to the rise in automation as well as general technological improvements, it’s now possible to insert predictive content into your email so that recipients get a message tailored exactly to them. This is mainly due to data being gathered around email opens, cart abandonments, link clicks and public purchases as well as other data sources across a range of channels to help improve the content of the message. As a general calculation, we predict that using predictive content will increase conversions by 25%, thanks to showing the end user exactly what they want to see. Considering the growth in Social Media in 2017 in general and what is expected for 2018, these two channels are ready to integrate better and better next year. Social Media will serve as a channel for retrieving more email addresses, thus further building your customer database. On top of customer data acquisition, it’ll also help when it comes to sending targeted emails to individual targets, as this will help complement Social Media personalisation strategies for customers. Fingertip ID payment directly from your inbox And finally, we should be seeing a whole new Outlook client in 2018. Currently Litmus, one of the biggest email marketing companies, are working alongside Outlook to improve the support and general development side of the Outlook client, and have had 54+ bugs reported by developers across the world already. Within the last few weeks as well, media queries for both iOS and Android Outlook apps have been restored after being removed, so now developers can restart using them to ensure that emails always look great and perform admirably in Outlook. With this being in place already for a lot of websites and apps, it’s only a short step to implement fingertip ID payment in emails, which is one of our predictions for 2018. As such, you’ll be able to purchase directly from sales emails, which drastically cuts down the user’s journey from 4-5 clicks to purchase, to just 1 touch. As we already see a huge number of emails being sent every day (269 million, in case anyone was wondering), adding in fingertip ID payment functionality to emails makes sense for a lot of e-commerce businesses to increase their revenue. Increase in interactivity in emails We’re starting to see an increase in the number of interactive emails being sent. Whilst some email clients, such as Outlook, don’t currently support CSS animation, this can be remedied by using the ‘View in Browser’ link at the top of the email. This in turn engages the user more with the information that you’re sending them, as well as allowing further gamification such as asking users to “scratch” an image to find a discount code. Studies have shown that using an interactive email will increase your click-through rate by 26% (source: Econsultancy), so businesses should really be using more interactive emails. Getting inside your digital landscape A new outlook client So there you have it. Our top five predictions for email marketing in 2018 cover a wide range of all aspects of email marketing, from the design of emails through to converting customers in the inbox, to even the development of email clients. If you’ve got any questions on how to get ahead of the curve and implement what we’ve predicted will happen in 2018, or if you’d like to work out how to include these points into your marketing strategy, then we’d love to hear from you. Drop us an email at [email protected] or call01793 238 697 @Infin_Nation www.infinitynation.com 01793 238 697 30 THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2017