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Six
Key Email Marketing Trends You Cannot Ignore
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by Loren McDonald
Six Key Email Marketing Trends You Cannot Ignore
by Loren McDonald
ONE OF EMAIL'S STRENGTHS IS how well it continues to adapt to all the
shifts and changes that constantly reshape the marketing landscape.
However, those adaptations have implications that affect the way you
use email to market today and in the near future.
While as many as a dozen trends might affect email marketing today, I
find myself discussing the following six key trends most often in my
travels and speeches:
1.
Customer/subscriber control continues to grow.
Top-performing email marketers put more control into their subscribers'
hands. This empowers subscribers, who are more likely to embrace
messages from an email program they help to create.
Today, email subscribers expect to decide these things for themselves:
- Whether to opt in to your program in
the first place.
- When, where, how and even whether
they will read your email messages.
- If and when they want to change
preferences for content, format and frequency.
- Whether to report your email as spam.
- Whether to continue receiving your
messages in email or find another channel that
- serves them better.
- When to end the relationship and opt out.
While this can be scary to many, if you embrace this customer power and
realize how it leads to increased engagement, you will have a more
successful program.
2.
Demographics and emerging channels are creating shifts.
Marketers have a broad spectrum of communication channels in which to
deliver messages. While younger people generally prefer texting to
email, that doesn't mean email is doomed. After all, when did you last
ride your childhood skateboard to work?
Instead, email is shifting from one-to-many message broadcasts to a
personalized, event-triggered system of targeted messages. Preference
centers will help power this shift, allowing recipients to opt to
receive messages in several channels.
For example, airline customers might prefer promotional messages via
email, flight delay notifications via voice and their mileage updates
via text messages.
3. Most of
your prospects are long-term: the "unconverted majority."
In the B-to-B world, 70% of your leads are long-term opportunities. If
you deploy PPC programs such as Google AdWords, you are getting a 2%
conversion rate on your ads. In both the B-to-B and PPC examples, email
is still the best vehicle to increase your program's ROI.
Email lead-nurturing programs can help turn many cold and warm leads
into those that are sales-ready. A well-designed and promoted email
program will capture a good proportion of the 98% who don't convert to
your primary conversion goal -- many of whom will then become customers
because of your email messages.
4. Your email
list is shrinking and going inactive.
Bad news first: On average, about a third of your list (or more) turns
over every year due to bounces (2% to 3% each month), unsubscribes and
spam complaints. On top of this outright loss, about 25% to 50% of the
typical email list is actually inactive, meaning they haven't opened or
clicked on your messages in some defined timeframe, such as 12 or 18
months.
Now, the good news: You can reduce this list churn, and minimize and
reengage inactives by making various improvements to your email
program. These include enabling preferences and updates, managing
expectations at the start, creating welcome programs, deploying trigger
and behavior-based programs and implementing win-back campaigns.
5. Your
subscribers are reading your emails in many different environments.
Desktop email reading is flatlining today, while mobile email is taking
off. The downside: Many smartphones also turn your beautiful HTML
messages into an unreadable hodgepodge of URLs and code.
Plus, some consumers are also viewing your emails several times on
different devices. For example, they might scan your message during the
day on their Blackberry or iPhone and then again in the evening in
Outlook or in their Gmail or Yahoo account.
Designing emails to render well across multiple environments has become
a must.
6. If your
messages have value, your subscribers will share them with their social
networks.
Email has always been a social network, thanks to the "forward" button
and the "forward to a friend" link. Each one helps your readers share
your messages, but both are limited in their utility because they don't
connect directly to the reader's social networks, such as MySpace,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Digg.
To encourage readers to share messages, group all links for viral
activities together within the email body - mainly link-sharing and
forward to a friend - and tell them how these features work. Track
metrics to learn who your most avid sharers are and whether they
contribute a greater share of views or sales; then tailor your content
to encourage reposting.
What other trends and shifts are you seeing in the marketing landscape
that are affecting your email program? Please post them in the comments
box below.
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Loren McDonald is vice president of industry relations for Silverpop,
an email service provider that delivers an array of on-demand solutions
supporting both high volume/low involvement BtoC marketing initiatives
and, through its Vtrenz solution, low volume/high involvement BtoB
sales processes.
http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=737
