It’s 2017, and the time of “Dear Sir or Madam” and other eloquent phrases you can comprehend only from the third reading has passed. Phew – now all the people who have at least some connection to marketing and sending letters to their customers and subscribers can breathe freely.
As we’re halfway through 2017, marketing gurus start predicting new email marketing trends, and I start monitoring their predictions. Here is a list of trends I encountered the most often and, let’s be honest, personally I find the most relevant. I have warned you about the bias, so now it’s time to get to the business.
Email Marketing: Upcoming Trends
1) Be a human being.
Personally, I love this one, and I am glad to the point of squealing joyously that marketing is becoming more and more humane. Now, you are no longer referred to as “sir” or “madam,” and companies make an effort to address you by name. Not only that, the whole formal style of writing is deemed to be redundant in modern marketing. It may be suitable in law and business, but when you are addressing your customers directly, forget about the plastic, formal marketing style.
What to do:
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adopt an amicable style of writing
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use your wit and sense of humor
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add a moderate amount of emojis
In general, be sincere about your business – for example, if you need to raise the fee for the service, say so without beating around the bush and dressing the news in vague phrases.
2) Use interactive emails.
In the constant pursuit for reducing the barrier for engagement, marketers tend to make everything interactive, and now’s the time for interactive emails to shine. They are already becoming more and more clickable, with order and register buttons, but marketing visionaries suggest to make them even more so. They believe this will help engage your subscribers more easily. The only problem is with the actual implementation, as there are a lot of technical challenges and limitations.
What to do:
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find a good coder to do the job
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focus on the design and engaging texts
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Add image sliders, carousels and “add to cart” functions
3) Watch the language.
It is true that you no longer need the rusty language of faceless marketing emails that used to exist fifteen years ago, but you still need to watch what you are sending to your subscribers for obvious reasons. I believe you know the importance of proofreading and editing, so I’d like to focus on improving your overall writing skills.
What to do:
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check writing blogs (my personal favorite is https://gpalabs.com/)
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get friendly but honest criticism on a regular basis
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check engagement regularly and how it changes with changes in the text
4) Mind the attention span.
I bet you have noticed that our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter, so that’s bad news for your 2,000 word email with no funny pictures. Research has shown that most online users have an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish, which is quite insulting, but you can’t argue with science. Keep in mind that you have less than nine seconds to capture the attention of your readers, not to mention the brisk moments in which decisions of opening an email or skipping it are made.
What to do:
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make the topic and the whole format of your email visually appealing
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rely on the engagement within the email from the previous point
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deliver maximum information with minimum text
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follow the current pop culture trends
You may dislike the current trends of gravitating from text to pictures and videos, but you definitely can’t disregard them, or your readers will just disregard what you send to them. This doesn’t mean, however, that the era of meaningful text has passed forever – all in all, after binge-reading an entire Facebook group filled with memes, we will be thirsty for a meaningful and witty read. You know what, I’m going to be deadly trivial and advise you to write about email and what you would like to read and receive to your inbox. Let’s change the email marketing culture together!
