Top 7 Email Marketing Trends for 2023 and Beyond
Over the past 20 years, email marketing has gone through massive changes. From simple formatted bulk email sends to personalized, segmented and highly targeted sends, keeping up with the email marketing trends-of-the-day can mean the difference between failure and success.
Nobody wants to receive unprofessional marketing or content messages that look like they could have been sent in 1996, or 2016 for that matter. Bad presentation of your materials is immediately noticed by subscribers. They know high quality formatting, messaging and imagery when they see it, and they equate the quality of the email to the quality of your content and products. Ignore email marketing trends and continue to send your emails like it’s 1996 and your subscribers will punish you for it.
But…
If you keep up with email marketing trends, your subscribers will reward you for it with increased engagement and sales.
Here’s 7 email marketing trends the top email marketers are focusing on and how you can piggyback off their success.
1) Incorporating user generated content
A quick way to increase subscriber engagement is to utilize their content. From poll results to customer reviews and testimonials, subscribers love to see other subscribers involved in the messaging. And the only thing they love more than other subscriber input is this… seeing their own content being used. You can increase the trust of your subscribers by incorporating pictures they send, subscriber reviews of the products you’re selling and more. But before you go and incorporate subscriber feedback, images and testimonials, be sure you have their permission.
2) Making messages more interactive
Subscribers are more likely to engage in your messages if they have an interactive tool to “play” with. Add some gamification elements, polls, surveys and quizzes, and share the results. If you’re showcasing products, incorporate an interactive carousel, where the subscriber can clearly see and interact with the product’s images. Interactive messages will increase your engagement rate and your sales. The biggest trend in interactive elements is gamification. So even if you don’t incorporate any game-like elements in your emails, you should consider linking to a “game” on your website.
3) Cross-Platform Optimization
Obviously, you want your emails formatted so every subscriber enjoys the same experience. Optimizing for both desktop and mobile is a must. Almost half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices. If you’re not optimizing for mobile, half of your subscribers may receive a mal-formatted or unreadable message. Be sure you’re optimizing for both by sending and checking test emails (on both) to ensure optimization is working correctly. In the coming years, a majority of emails will be opened on mobile devices. So be sure your cross-platform optimization is perfected now. But even as the majority goes mobile, never forget your desktop users. Proper optimization and formatting should work for everyone, now and in the future.
4) The Privacy Trend Should be Embraced
Cybercrime is one of the fastest growing threats to consumers. Because of this, your subscribers may be wary of clicking on links, filling forms or placing orders. It’s important that you embrace their fears and show them that you’re not only operating a secure network, but you’re on top of all possible threats. Let them know their privacy is important to you. Not by simply linking to a privacy policy and showing a security badge on your order forms, but my mentioning how important security is to you with a few words in every email and on landing page. Make it a point to be on their side. Subscribers will reward you with more engagement and more sales.
5) Using Customer Appreciation Emails
Let your subscribers and customers know you appreciate them, and they’ll appreciate you back with more sales. A simple thank you message after a purchase is not enough. Be sincere in your “thank you” emails and share with them just how much their purchase means to you. If you have enough data on your subscribers, you should send them birthday wishes and early access invitations to product launches, webcasts and podcasts. To obtain this data, you can use EmailOversight’s Data Enrichment tools. Here, you can get enough granular data on your subscribers to really say thank you.
6) Jazzing it up
One of the biggest email marketing trends for 2023 is design and the incorporation of imagery and gifs. Don’t be afraid to get bold. Recent studies show that email openers engage more with messages that are vibrant but match the company’s overall brand. Use gifs that are fun, funny or thought provoking and, importantly, match the content and branding of your emails and company. You want to use colors, images and gifs that evoke an emotional response and tell the story of the content. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. But choose that imagery carefully, just as you choose your words carefully and you’ll see more engagement and sales.
7) Single Biggest Trend: Hyper-personalization
Marketers already know, hyper-targeting results in much higher ROI. With this in mind, you should be utilizing hyper-personalization. It’s a form of hyper-targeting that’s boiled down to the individual subscriber. When an email “feels” like it’s been sent only to and for you, you give it much more credence. But to incorporate hyper-personalization, you need very granular data like full name, age, hobbies, purchase history, geography, home address, habits and more. Simply using a subscribers first name in an email is not hyper-personalization.
Now, this may seem difficult to do, but EmailOversight can actually fill-in these missing hyper-personalization blanks for the email lists you already own (and new incoming leads as well), giving you just the granular data you need for success. EmailOversight has the tools that boost your revenue.
Now, hyper-personalization is the top email marketing trend for 2023 and will be the single most important element in your marketing campaigns for years to come. With EmailOversight, you’ll be able to hyper-personalize your emails, keep current with email marketing trends and increase the revenues on every email you send.
